How We Test and Score

Who we are

Wear & Tear Review is a two person desk in Portland, Maine that publishes reviews of joint and mobility supplements. The publication is owned by Wear & Tear Media, LLC and has been running since 2019. We are not a laboratory, we do not run clinical trials, and we are not anyone's clinic. We are consumers who take the product, keep a log, read a lot of other people's reviews, and write down what we found.

Rosalind Pike, DPT, lead reviewer

Rosalind spent twelve years in outpatient orthopaedic physical therapy before moving to writing full time, which means she has spent more hours than she would like watching people try to get off a treatment table. She runs the trials, keeps the logs and writes the scores. Her clinical background informs how we read the research; it does not make anything on this site medical advice, and she will be the first to tell you to ask your own clinician.

What we actually do

1. We buy it. Always at the normal public price, always with our own money. We do not accept free samples, review units or payment from a manufacturer, and no brand sees a draft before it goes live.
2. We take it as directed. Full label dose, minimum eight weeks, usually ten. Shorter trials tell you nothing in a category where most ingredients take a month to do anything.
3. We log three things weekly. A stiffness measure, a task based comfort score, and free notes. The numbers you see in a review come out of that log rather than out of memory.
4. We read the label against the research. Every named ingredient gets checked against the sources we cite at the bottom of the review, and a missing dose is treated as missing information rather than an average dose.
5. We collect reader reviews. Reviews are gathered from public sources and from the form on our own site, deduplicated, and cleaned of anything that reads like marketing copy or a competitor attack.
6. We score eight criteria. The average of those eight, rounded to one decimal, is the number at the top of the review.
7. We say what we could not check. If a company will not publish something, that goes in the review as a gap and it costs points.

The eight things we score

All eight carry equal weight. We considered weighting effectiveness higher and decided against it, because in a category where every product claims the same effect, the differences that actually help a reader choose are usually the other seven.

A note on how we score transparency, because readers ask: we score what a buyer can find out before paying. Ingredient identity, allergen warnings, dosing instructions and refund terms carry most of the weight, because those are the things that decide whether a product is safe and usable for a given person. Milligram amounts and standardisation percentages carry the rest. A brand that hides its ingredient list, buries an allergen or leaves its refund terms vague loses whole points. A brand that discloses all of that but stops short of printing the amounts, which is where JointBrex sits, loses a few tenths.

How reader reviews are handled

Reader ratings shown on this site are collected by us and presented as a sample, not as a census. We remove duplicates, reviews with no substance, anything that names a competing product in a promotional way, and anything that reads like it was written by someone with a commercial interest. We keep the negative ones. A page of five star reviews tells a reader nothing.

Reviews submitted through the form on our site are held for a read through before publication. We do not publish email addresses, we do not sell them, and a submitted review is not added to the aggregate figures.

Editorial independence and how we are paid

This site carries affiliate links. When a reader buys through one, the seller pays us a commission, and that commission is the only revenue this publication has. We take no advertising from supplement companies, no sponsored posts and no payment for placement.

The wall we keep is simple: the score is written from the log and the label before anyone looks at commission rates, and no product is reviewed because it pays better. JointBrex scored 4.76 out of 5 on a page that earns us money when people buy it, and that same page prints the one and two star reviews in full, tells readers with a shellfish allergy to stay away, and says plainly that the maker will not publish its milligram amounts. A score we could sell would not come with those paragraphs attached.

Full detail is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

If a price changes, a label is updated or we get something wrong, we fix the page and change the "last updated" date at the top. Significant corrections get a line at the bottom of the review saying what changed. If you have spotted an error, write to [email protected] and we will check it.