How to Check a Surgeon's Credentials

A surgeon's name on a clinic website is a claim. In most countries you can check that claim yourself in a few minutes, for free, in a public register maintained by the medical regulator. It is worth doing.

Start with the licence, not the awards

What you want to confirm is narrow and factual: that a doctor with that name is registered to practise medicine in that country, that the registration is current, and that there are no restrictions on it. Certificates, awards and society logos on a website are not that.

Where the public registers are

These are the official registers, not directories that resell the same data. We checked each address in November 2026; regulators do move pages, so if a link has gone, search for the body's name rather than trusting a third-party copy.

• United Kingdom — the General Medical Council's List of Registered Medical Practitioners gives every licensed doctor, their reference number, their registration status and any conditions on their practice, plus publicly available fitness-to-practise history since October 2005. Free: gmc-uk.org.
• United States — licensure is by state, so the authoritative source is the medical board of the state the clinic is in, and that is the one to use for anything that matters. The Federation of State Medical Boards also runs a free national search called DocInfo, which shows where a physician holds or has held a licence and carries disciplinary history; it is an aggregator rather than the record. We have left it unlinked because the search would not load for us when we checked, which is a reason to go to the state board rather than a reason to distrust it. Board certification is a separate thing again, searchable through the relevant certifying board.
• Australia — Ahpra's Register of practitioners covers every registered health practitioner and shows current conditions. Cancelled practitioners are kept on separate lists, so an absent name is worth a second search.
• Ireland — the Medical Council's register, reachable from the government's own service page, gov.ie. There is a General Register and a separate Register of Medical Specialists; which division a doctor sits in tells you something.
• Netherlands — the BIG-register, run by the health ministry's CIBG. Searchable by surname or BIG number, and it shows disciplinary measures such as a suspension.
• Mexico — the Registro Nacional de Profesionistas, where a cédula profesional can be checked by name or number: gob.mx/cedulaprofesional.
• India — the National Medical Commission's Indian Medical Register at nmc.org.in, searchable by name, registration number or state council. A newer National Medical Register portal is being populated alongside it, and not all of its data is public.
• Canada — regulation is provincial. Each province's College of Physicians and Surgeons publishes its own register; search for the College of the province the clinic is in.
• Germany — there is no single national register. The regional medical chambers, the Landesärztekammern, hold the registers, and the Kassenärztliche Vereinigungen publish searchable directories of doctors in their area.
• Spain, Italy, Poland, Brazil — the professional body holds the roll: the Colegios Oficiales de Médicos in Spain, the provincial Ordini under FNOMCeO in Italy, the Naczelna Izba Lekarska's Centralny Rejestr Lekarzy in Poland, and the Conselho Federal de Medicina with its regional CRMs in Brazil. All four publish a public search on their own site; in Italy and Brazil the regional body's own page is often faster than the national one.
• Turkey — there is no public online register in which a patient can look up an individual surgeon. You have to ask the clinic directly for the doctor's licence and, for a clinic treating patients from abroad, its health tourism authorisation. Given that Turkey holds more of the clinics in this directory than any country except the United States, this gap matters: it means the verification burden falls entirely on what the clinic is willing to send you in writing.

Where no public register exists, the absence of one is not evidence against a clinic. It does mean the burden shifts to asking the clinic for documentation and to checking what you can verify.

What a register will and will not settle

A register answers three questions and no more: does this person exist as a licensed doctor, is the licence current, and are there restrictions on it. It does not say whether they are any good at hair restoration, how many procedures they have done, or whether they will be the one holding the instrument on your day.

It is also worth knowing what a clean record means. Most regulators publish only sanctions that reached a formal decision, and most publish them for a limited period. A blank fitness-to-practise history is the normal state of affairs for the overwhelming majority of doctors, so it is a floor to clear rather than a distinction.

What professional societies do and do not tell you

The International Society of Hair Restoration Surgery publishes its members, and where we could match a member to a clinic in this directory we say so on the listing. Read that narrowly. It means a named individual appears in that society's own public member list. It is a voluntary, paid affiliation. It is not a licence, not a specialist qualification, and not an endorsement by the society or by us of any clinic. Many experienced surgeons are not members, so its absence proves nothing at all.

The scale is worth stating, because it shows how weak a filter this is in either direction. The society's public register holds 565 surgeons across 70 countries. We could match one of them to just 119 of the 4,657 clinics we list — 2.6 per cent. Requiring society membership would therefore rule out almost the entire market, including clinics with thousands of patients and surgeons with decades of practice. It is a small positive signal where it exists, and nothing at all where it does not.

Specialty matters

Hair restoration is not a recognised medical specialty in most countries, so there is often no specialist qualification to check. Surgeons come to it from dermatology, plastic surgery and general practice. What you can reasonably ask is what their base qualification is, how long they have been doing hair restoration specifically, and roughly how many procedures they have performed.

The practical consequence is that the register check tells you someone is a doctor, and nothing about hair. The two questions that close that gap are what their base specialty is and what proportion of their work is hair restoration — a dermatologist who does this every day and one who does it twice a year hold the same licence.

Checks worth doing at the same time

• Does the name on the register match the name on the clinic website exactly?
• Is the doctor registered in the country where your surgery will take place?
• Are there conditions or restrictions noted on the registration?
• Is the facility itself licensed to perform surgery, separately from the doctor?
• Is the doctor you verified the one who will operate, in writing?

That last one does most of the work. A register entry for a named medical director is not an answer to who will make your incisions, and the two are not always the same person.

If a clinic will not tell you the name of the doctor who will operate, none of these checks are possible. That, in itself, is an answer.

Folliculis is a directory and information resource. This guide explains process and terminology so you can ask better questions. It is not medical advice, it is not a substitute for a consultation with a qualified doctor, and nothing here should be used to decide on treatment.