Why Interval exists
Herpes is one of the most common conditions there is. In the UK, it is sold like the most awkward. We built the opposite of that, and only that.
Every route to herpes care in Britain treats it as an afterthought.
One condition, sold three ways it should not be. We started here because the problem is specific, not vague.
- One SKU in a forty-condition catalogue. Herpes sits on a single page between cystitis and chlamydia, in a pharmacy that also does hair loss and hay fever. Nowhere is it done properly, because nowhere is it the point.
- Branded markup over a generic that does the same job. The same few months of medicine can span a wide price range depending on where you look, and the branded option is routinely marked up several times over the generic. (Our own price comparison, not an independent survey.)
- Your history restarted with every reorder. A full medical questionnaire on each order, as though you had never been a patient before. The care experience forgets you on purpose.
So we built one thing. Not a pharmacy that also does herpes — a care brand that only does. Everything here is for this. Nothing here is for anything else.
Interval was built by a woman who has it.
That is not a campaign, and it is not a story we intend to sell you. It is a plain fact about where the decisions came from.
It is why a reorder does not make you explain yourself from the beginning again. Why there is a course kept at home before you need it, rather than a delivery estimate once you already do. Why nothing here opens with a warning, and why the word clean does not appear anywhere on this site.
None of that came out of research. It came from the ordinary business of living with an ordinary virus and noticing, repeatedly, where the care was thin.
Who she is stays private for now — the same privacy we build for you, held to for the same reason and on the same principle. What matters more for your care is who reviews it, and that person is named below.
The shame was largely manufactured, and it can come apart.
Genital herpes was an ordinary, largely unremarkable virus until the 1980s, when pharmaceutical marketing and the media framing around it taught a generation to be ashamed of it. The stigma is younger than the medicine used to manage it. That is a fact about history, not a claim about any product.
It matters because the shame is doing real harm now. It keeps people from getting care, from telling a partner, from believing an ordinary thing about their body is ordinary. We are on the other side of that. The tool we use to undo it is the opposite of the one that built it: calm, matter-of-fact, unhurried care.
On our sources. Prevalence figures on this site are WHO estimates and clinical statements come from NHS and BASHH guidance, cited on the page where they appear. The stigma-origin account is widely repeated but we have not independently verified it, and we say so where we use it. This page is educational, not medical advice.
A common virus should be met with the same calm competence as any other common condition.
Everything we make — the plan, the privacy, the price — is built to make that ordinary. That is the whole mission, and it fits in one line on purpose.
Four pillars, and what each one means.
These are not values on a wall. Each one is a decision we can be held to.
Dedicated
One condition, done properly. We do this and only this, so the depth goes where a catalogue never can.
Calm
An ordinary virus met with ordinary competence. Steady, never dramatic and never pitying. Calm is how we take the stigma down.
Honest
The whole price ladder on the table, generic-first, with the maths shown. No decoy pricing, no fee revealed at checkout.
Discreet
Privacy engineered into every surface as a form of respect, never as secrecy. A neutral name on your statement, nothing on your parcel.
A named clinician, who does this one thing.
Not a duty prescriber working through forty conditions. Someone who specialises in this one, and whose name and registration you can check yourself.
Not yet filled in. This section is a placeholder. Interval has no named prescriber, no CQC registration and no GPhC-registered pharmacy at the time of writing, and it cannot describe itself as a care service until it does. Nothing on this page should suggest otherwise.
To complete it: prescriber name and role, GMC or GPhC number, relevant sexual-health background, CQC provider registration, registered pharmacy details, and the date this page was last clinically reviewed.
What we are, and what we are not.
- A dedicated care brand for one condition, built around continuity of record.
- A calm, plain-spoken voice for the first-diagnosis moment and every ordinary one after it.
- A published, generic-first price ladder you can read before you decide anything.
- A supporter of the NHS route, which is free and a good option — we say so plainly.
- Not a general pharmacy, and not a marketplace that cross-sells you a second thing.
- Not a source of medical advice — the guidance here is educational, and a clinician makes the call on your care.
- Not a brand that will tell you a plan removes the risk of passing it on. It lowers it; it does not remove it.
- Not a story we will trade on. It was built by someone who has this, which shapes every decision here and is stated once, plainly, rather than sold back to you.