Practitioners · Vetting virtual care
Vetting a virtual menopause clinic, before you pay.
DTC menopause clinics are everywhere now. Some are excellent. Some are prescription mills with a wellness aesthetic. Here's how to tell the difference, in eleven questions you can answer from their website before you hand over a card.
Why this page exists.
Telehealth has cracked open menopause care for women who'd otherwise wait nine months for a specialist or live nowhere near one. That's a genuinely good thing. The catch: a wave of venture-backed clinics has noticed, and not all of them are practising the same medicine. Some are careful, evidence-based shops staffed by MSCP-credentialed doctors or specialists. Some are form-fill-and-prescribe operations dressed up in soft fonts.
We don't name names, the landscape moves too fast and a clinic that's great this year may be cutting corners next year after a funding round. What we can do is hand you the checklist a careful older sister would walk through with you. If you're still unsure how to read a doctor or specialist's letters after the name, start with the credential decoder on the practitioners page.
Tap a question to open
One honest sentence about all of this.
A virtual clinic that gets nine of these eleven right is probably better than the in-person GP who tells you to "push through it" or hands you an selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) without asking about hot flashes. The point isn't perfection; it's pattern-spotting. If something feels like a sales funnel, it usually is.
If you've found a clinic worth recommending, or one worth warning others about, tell us through the contact form. We won't publish individual reviews, but the patterns shape what goes here.
If the practice you're weighing charges a monthly fee for access rather than a price per visit, direct primary care, concierge or a subscription hormone clinic, the questions change. That's the membership-care checklist.
See also: the Menopause Foundation of Canada published its own assessment tool for virtual and private menopause care in 2026. Different format, same instinct, worth a read alongside this checklist.
In Canada?
Check whether your province covers MHT before you go private.
BC and Manitoba cover it publicly; everywhere else is private, employer plan, or out-of-pocket. The province-by-province coverage map tells you what to ask for first.