Editorial Policy

Our aim is to put out accurate, useful, and clearly sourced material on preventive health screening and routine checkups. This page covers how that gets done, and why a site written by a layperson holds itself to physician review.

The writer and the checker

The experience, and the plain-language writing that comes with it, are our founder’s, and she is not a clinician. For that reason any article carrying a medical claim is read by a physician before it is published. The split is deliberate: the founder keeps the priorities grounded and the wording clear, while the physician stands guard over the clinical accuracy. Reviewed articles carry the reviewer’s name, credentials, and review date. Our reviewer at present is Dr Aaron Vandermeer, MD, who works in internal and preventive medicine.

What we research from

We draw on authoritative, international sources, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, Cochrane systematic reviews, and the peer-reviewed primary literature among them. Anything quantitative, screening intervals, detection rates, reference ranges, gets a citation at the foot of the article. When the major guideline bodies pull in different directions, we set out the disagreement rather than pick one line and dress it up as settled.

Straight talk about the harms of testing

More testing is not automatically better testing. A screen can throw a false positive, tip into overdiagnosis, and trigger downstream procedures that carry risks of their own, and one borderline result can set a whole cascade of follow-up in motion. We will not wave that away. The standard we keep is to lay out both the benefit and the harm of any given screen, the cases where the evidence of benefit is weak or disputed very much included, so readers can weigh them clear-eyed.

Keeping it up to date

At regular intervals we go back over what we have published, amending it as guidance and evidence shift. The date it first appeared sits on every article, and where there has been a revision, so does a note of its most recent update or re-review.

Independence, and putting errors right

We take no payment to point readers at a clinic, laboratory, test, or product, and we name no provider. Since costs and the way services are arranged differ by country and health system, we hold that framing general rather than tie it to one place. Found something wrong? A note via the Contact page is all it takes, and we will look into it without delay.