Managing Neuropathy
Privacy policy
What this website collects, why it collects it, and what it does not do with it. Written to be read, not to be skimmed past.
Read this part first: do not send us your medical details. This website is an educational and product-review publication. It is not a medical practice, it is not your treating clinician, and it is not operating as a HIPAA-covered entity when you use it. Anything you type into a form or a comment here should be treated as ordinary web correspondence, not as a confidential medical record. If you need to discuss your own feet, your own test results, or your own treatment, contact a clinical practice directly — including Dr. Biernacki’s own practice, which handles patient information under the rules that apply to patient care.
Who runs this site
Managing Neuropathy is published by Dr. Tom Biernacki, DPM, FACFAS. It is a separate publication from Balance Foot & Ankle, the medical practice he founded, and from MichiganFootDoctors.com. Where this site points you toward that practice, you are leaving this publication and entering a clinical setting with its own policies.
What is collected, and why
Analytics
This site uses Google Analytics to understand which pages are read, how people arrive, and where they give up. That involves cookies and a record of your approximate location, device, browser, and the pages you view. We use it to decide what to write next. We do not use it to identify you individually, and we do not attempt to.
Anything you send us
If you submit a contact form or leave a comment, we receive what you typed, along with the technical details that come with any web request — your IP address and browser user-agent string — which are used for spam filtering. Comments and their author details are stored indefinitely so that follow-up replies can be recognized. Comment forms may store your name, email address, and website in a cookie on your own device so you do not have to retype them; that is a convenience, and clearing your cookies removes it.
Server and security logs
Our host records standard web-server logs and runs security and bot filtering at the network edge. These logs contain IP addresses and request details and exist to keep the site up and to block abuse.
Gravatar
If you comment, an anonymised hash of your email address may be sent to the Gravatar service to check for a profile picture. Gravatar’s own privacy policy governs that.
Affiliate links
This site earns commission from some of the retailers it links to, which is described in full in our affiliate disclosure. When you click one of those links you leave this site, and the retailer — Amazon, in most cases — then applies its own privacy policy and its own cookies to your visit. Affiliate links may pass through a link-management service that routes you to the correct regional storefront and records that a click happened. What that records is the click, not who you are.
We do not receive your name, your address, your payment details, or a list of what you bought. We see aggregate reporting from the affiliate program, and nothing more.
Who else touches this data
We do not sell personal information and we do not share it for cross-context behavioural advertising. Data reaches other companies only because they provide the machinery this site runs on:
| Service | What it handles |
|---|---|
| Analytics and search performance reporting | |
| WP Engine | Hosting, backups, and server logs |
| Cloudflare | Content delivery, caching, and edge security |
| Amazon and other affiliate programs | Click attribution after you leave this site |
| Automattic (Gravatar) | Comment profile pictures, if you comment |
Each of these operates under its own privacy terms. We choose them; we do not control them.
Your choices
- Block the analytics. Browser settings, tracking-protection features, and Google’s own opt-out add-on all work here. Nothing on the site breaks if you do.
- Clear or refuse cookies. Your browser controls this, and the site remains readable without them.
- Ask what we hold, or ask us to delete it. If you have commented or contacted us, write to us and say so. Depending on where you live — California, the EU and UK, and a growing list of US states — you may have a formal right to access, correct, delete, or port that information, and to be free from retaliation for asking. We will honor the request either way.
- Do Not Track and Global Privacy Control. We do not sell data, so there is nothing for a GPC signal to switch off, but we treat one as an opt-out request regardless.
Children
This site is written for adults and is not directed at children under 13. We do not knowingly collect information from them. If you believe a child has sent us something, tell us and we will remove it.
How long things are kept
Comments and their metadata are retained indefinitely unless you ask us to remove them. Form submissions are kept as long as they are useful for answering you. Analytics data is retained according to the setting in our Google Analytics property, and is not tied to your identity in the first place.
Changes
When this policy changes materially, the date below changes with it. We do not backdate revisions.
Contact
Privacy questions and requests: michiganfootdoctors@gmail.com. Please put “Privacy” in the subject line so it is routed correctly, and please do not include clinical details in the message.