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Comment by egypturnash | Hacker News Reader

Basically Yelp for transgender surgeons.

I've been working on making the decision as to who I'll get to sculpt new genitals for me, and researching this on the web is a mess - every site comparing them is out of date, triggers my mental sketchy spam site detectors, or both.

It'd be great to be able to go to a nice-looking site and say "all I'm interested in right now is MtF genital surgery", then see doctors who do that, and crowd-sourced reviews if their work. (Other people may be interested in FtM genital surgery, breast augumentation/removal, orichectomy, you get the idea - various manipulations of genitals and secondary gender cues.)

I think there's probably less than a hundred people who offer these kinds of services in the world, so it's not exactly a huge database to worry about.

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I feel like this is a symptom of a far larger problem, the need for yelp for medical care in general. Its kind of shitty that there is absolutely no way to quality and price compare medical providers.

Also, good luck with the transition, I have a friend going through something similar, its definitely not an easy thing.

Disclaimer: I work at Yelp.

Yelp started out as finding a referral for doctors, and recently Yelp has added public data to their respective hospital pages:

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2013/03/study-yelp-ratings-work...

There is a problem in that in the US at least pricing isn't very transparent, and changes depending on any number of variables. I remember an article a few weeks ago about the problems with doctor reviews online, and especially the inability of doctors to respond because of privacy concerns. I tried to find it but found an older but good article explaining the issue:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/your-money/why-the-web-lac...

ZocDoc?

Its a start. I feel like zocdoc is good for looking up doctors who take your insurance but because the healthcare system itself is so massively broken, they can't tell you how much a procedure would cost and success rates. I may be wrong though and hope I am.

Assuming you probably want to make a decision before this service exists I wonder if you can't find an advocate. Someone who has been through the process of research, interviews and chose a surgeon themselves and completed the process. I saw a Huffington Post article about Justin Jedlica a while back and he mentioned that he had spent so much time having plastic surgery that he started a business around being a consultant for other people. http://justinjedlica.com/consulting.html. He probably wouldn't be the best resource for you, but I wonder if there is someone else with more relevant experience?

In all honesty, I think you need to spend more time talking with people that have undergone similar decisions in the past than worrying about building a website. Other people will directly tell you about their doctors and help you choose from there.

Consider going to Thailand for this. They've probably got the most experienced MtF genital surgeons in the world.

Why is this comment downvoted? Is it because of the <i> in probably? I've never researched this personally but have heard evidence supporting this from people who have.

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