I'm Ed. I have keloids. So do my brother, my mom, and my grandfather.
Three generations in my family have dealt with keloids. I've been through the cycle myself. A new scar, a flurry of online research, conflicting advice from forums, expensive treatments with uncertain evidence, sometimes a win, often a shrug. I built ScarInsight because that cycle shouldn't be the default.
What got me here
The first thing you learn when keloids run in your family is that nobody seems to agree on anything. The dermatologist gives you a steroid shot and a six-week follow-up. The internet tells you silicone sheets cure everything, and also that they don't work. A cream with zero clinical evidence sits next to a treatment with decades of trial data, both sold with the same confidence.
Between my grandfather, my mom, my brother, and me, we've run through most of the menu. Silicone sheets and gels. Over-the-counter creams. Steroid injections. Cryotherapy. Surgery. Changes to diet and supplements. More recently I've been testing red light therapy on myself. Some of it helped. Some of it wasted money. Some of it made scars worse. Effectiveness varied wildly across family members for reasons we didn't understand at the time.
Knowing what I know now, I'd have sequenced several of those treatments differently. That's the part that bothers me most. The research was always there. It just wasn't readable for regular people, and it wasn't the voice coming back at us from product pages and forum threads.
So I learned to read the papers. Then I got frustrated that my family, and everyone else like us, couldn't. So I built this.
How I grade evidence
Every treatment page on ScarInsight carries a badge — strong, moderate, emerging, or limited. The badge reflects the quality and volume of published research, not how well the treatment works in practice. A strongly-studied therapy can still be modest in effectiveness; a thinly-studied one can still help the right patient.
I weight study design (RCTs over case reports), sample size, replication across independent trials, and whether the outcomes studied are the ones that actually matter to patients — scar volume, symptoms, recurrence — rather than a lab surrogate.
- StrongMultiple RCTs or meta-analyses
- ModerateSome controlled studies, consensus forming
- EmergingEarly studies, promising but thin
- LimitedCase reports, low-quality data
How I stay honest
A few commitments I make to you:
- Every affiliate link is marked as one before you click.
- Evidence ratings are set before any commercial relationship exists. I've never changed a rating because a brand asked.
- I include non-affiliate options whenever they're the right clinical answer.
- When new research changes my view, I update the page and date the change.
If ScarInsight ever grows to the point of formal sponsorships or outside contributors, these rules stay — they just get written more formally. Full affiliate disclosure →
Pick a starting point
Whether you're early in the research, comparing options, or about to walk into a dermatologist visit — there's an entry point for you.