Medical review policy

This page explains exactly what our review labels mean, so you never have to guess how a page was checked.

Our current status, plainly: Pages here are not signed off by a clinician before they publish. That is not an oversight we are quietly working around: we restate published guidance and cite it, so the authority belongs to the source rather than to us, and every page names where its claims come from — you can verify us instead of trusting us. Where a volunteer clinician has reviewed a page, their name and credentials appear on it; where no name appears, no clinician has checked it. We are glad to have reviewers and are recruiting them, and we do not hold pages back waiting for one. Use this site to understand your situation and to ask better questions of the people treating you. Most pages carry editorial source review, meaning they are checked against cited sources from organizations such as NCI, NIH, CDC, and FDA. We are recruiting volunteer clinician reviewers; see how to help.

Review levels

Editorial source review: The page was checked against cited sources from organizations such as NCI, NIH, CDC, FDA, or other listed authorities. This is the standard review level for most pages. It is not a review by a physician.
Medically reviewed: A named, credentialed healthcare professional reviewed the page. The reviewer's name, credentials, role, and review date appear on the page. We never apply this label without that record.
Pending review: The page is drafted but held from search and site indexes until its review is complete.
Requires update: Something may have changed (a guideline, an approval, a source). The page stays visible with this notice while we update it, unless the concern is safety-related, in which case it is unpublished.
Archived: The page is no longer maintained and is excluded from discovery.

What we never do

We never add a “medically reviewed,” “doctor reviewed,” or “expert reviewed” label without a named reviewer record. We never emit structured data claiming a reviewer relationship that does not exist. We never present an update date as a review date.

Review schedules

Every page has a risk tier, and each tier has a maximum interval between source checks: high-risk pages every 180 days, moderate pages every 365 days, and general education pages every 730 days. Pages past their interval are flagged by our automated freshness audit and prioritized for re-checking. Each page shows its last source check, last updated date, and next planned review in the “How this page was created” panel.

Related policies

Editorial process · How we create and review content · How we use AI · Sources and evidence standards · Editorial independence, advertising and sponsorship · Corrections