I'm Annette Thompson. I'm a medical technologist, and I've been building things on the internet since 1994, back when the first graphical browser was the news.
I started this because I went looking for a straight answer about a med spa in Boulder and couldn't find one. Every list was sponsored, every review site was thin, and nothing anywhere told me the thing I actually wanted to know: who's holding the syringe, and who's supervising them.
Why a lab background matters here
Medical technologists run the tests that clinicians make decisions from. The job trains you to care about sample quality, controls, and whether a result actually means what someone claims it means. It's a useful reflex to bring to an industry where "medical grade" appears on a lot of marketing and much less often on a chart.
It also means I read the credential question the way a clinical person does. Botox is a prescription drug. A laser is a medical device that burns tissue on purpose. Whether a physician is genuinely involved, or is a name on a wall somewhere in another county, is the most important thing on any of these websites, and it's the thing least often stated plainly.
What I actually do here
I built the dataset behind this site from the ground up: 235 providers within about an hour of Boulder, identified by reading what their own websites say they offer rather than trusting a category label. That's why dermatologists and plastic surgeons appear alongside med spas. If they inject, they compete.
Then I collected over 7,400 Google reviews, pulled each provider's own photos and credentials, and scored all of it on a published rubric. Now I'm working through them in person, and every visit gets dated on the profile.
What I won't do
I won't sell a ranking. I've been offered the equivalent before in other businesses, and the answer doesn't change. I won't run an affiliate link without saying so. And I won't pretend a treatment worked on me if it didn't, which is the part I suspect will cost me the most goodwill locally.
The rest of it
I'm 57. I live in Boulder County. I've adopted seven children, built and sold businesses, spent years running adoption.com, and helped start orphanages in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Haiti. I read primary research for fun, mostly about menopause, hormones, and Alzheimer's, because I carry two copies of APOE4 and my mother had it.
Which is a long way of saying I'm exactly the customer this industry markets to, and I'd like better information than it currently offers.