Atlas / Method
How this is built
Enough to let you argue with it. A score you cannot interrogate is worse than no score.
The six axes
Every country is scored 0–5 on the same six questions, and 5 is always better for a direct-to-consumer operator. That last point matters most on the cash-pay axis, where a market with no reimbursement scores high, reimbursed patients are not your customers, they are the state’s.
| Axis | The question it answers | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership | Can a non-pharmacist own or control a pharmacy here? | 1 |
| Remote prescribing | Can a doctor prescribe to a brand-new patient remotely? | 1.5 |
| Rx mail order | Can prescription medicines legally be posted to the patient? | 1.5 |
| Advertising room | How much can you legally say, and how hard is it enforced? | 1 |
| Cash-pay market | Is the market private? No reimbursement scores high, reimbursed patients are not your customers. | 1 |
| Market size | How big and how mature is the private GLP-1 market? | 1.5 |
Confidence tags
- verified, a regulator, court, statute, official register or company filing, read directly rather than summarised.
- secondary, reputable trade press, a law firm’s analysis, or an official body’s interpretive note rather than the underlying statute.
- unverified, a single commercial or SEO source, a company’s own marketing claim, or a headline that could not be opened. Useful as a lead, not as a basis for a decision.
Where sources contradict each other, that is recorded on the evidence register rather than resolved by picking a favourite. There are currently two such contradictions and both are material.
Coverage status
- researched, multiple primary sources, prices, named operators, dated enforcement, and open questions that are genuinely residual.
- partial, the structural questions are answered but pricing, players or enforcement history is thin.
- thin, an honest stub. What is here is sourced; there is just not much of it yet.
The status is on every card deliberately, so a thin page is never mistaken for a complete one.
Adding a country
Content lives in typed data files under src/content/, one per country, company and topic. Adding a market means adding one file that exports a Country and registering it in countries/index.ts. The comparison matrix, the evidence register, the region grouping and the cross-links all derive from that automatically, so nothing has to be updated in two places.
The schema is deliberately strict. If a new page cannot answer the same six questions the others answer, it does not belong in the comparison, and that is usually a signal that the research is not finished rather than that the country is unusual.
npm run dev to work on it, npm run build to produce a static site in out/.
What this is not
Not legal advice, and not a substitute for counsel in any of these jurisdictions. Several conclusions here turn on case law that is still moving, on ministerial policy that can be withdrawn without legislation, and on commercial terms that no operator publishes. The scores are a way of ordering attention, not a verdict.