How we decide what this library says, what our grades mean, and what we do not cover. If you are a journalist or a clinician checking our work, this page is the place to start — including the parts that are not flattering.
Everything here is reviewed by the HealisticMD editorial team. Accountability is organisational, not personal.
HealisticMD has no clinician on staff and does not give medical advice.
The editorial team is responsible for
That is the whole list. No clinician is on staff — so no page here claims to have been medically reviewed. Where a specific entry has had human review, the reasons are set out under “How entries are written and checked” below.
The grading scheme itself is set out below, and every grade we have assigned is listed with its counts in the evidence report — including how much of the library sits at the bottom of the scale.
Most natural-health sites collapse “people have used this for a long time” and “this has been shown to work” into a single verdict. Those are different claims and we grade them on two independent axes, so a remedy can be a classical staple with almost no trial evidence, and we will say exactly that.
What the published human research supports. We call it an evidence grade, not a clinical grade, because it grades literature — we are a content library, not a clinic, and this is not a clinician’s assessment of you.
A grade is not a recommendation, and a higher grade does not mean a remedy will work for you. Many entries are ungraded, which means we have not assessed the literature yet — not that evidence is absent.
Traditional standing is a historical fact about practice. It is never evidence of safety or of effect, and we do not present it as either.
Where we cite a study we cite a PubMed identifier, and every identifier is resolved against PubMed before it is published — a citation that does not resolve is removed rather than reworded. We check the publication year against what our own text claims, because a real identifier attached to the wrong claim is still wrong.
Where we could not find human research, the page says so in plain words instead of describing studies in the abstract. “No human trials specific to this have been published” is a useful answer.
Every entry carries a safety review. Pages show who should avoid it as direct instructions, and when to see a doctor with the specific symptoms that warrant it. Entries that can cause serious harm are held to a stricter standard, and for restricted or toxic substances we deliberately publish no dose, preparation method or source — the page explains the risk and points to safer options instead.
We publish pages on dangerous substances rather than omitting them. People search for them precisely because they are dangerous, and an honest page is more useful than whatever else they would find.
Entries are drafted with AI assistance and then put through automated checks before publication: the structure and required safety fields must be complete, every citation must resolve, claims are reviewed by a second independent model for anything stronger than the evidence supports, and the writing must meet a plain-language reading standard. A draft that fails any of these is not published until it passes.
Entries involving higher-risk substances, drug interactions, pregnancy or children receive human review. Routine entries are sampled rather than individually read. We would rather state that plainly than imply a clinician has read every page.
If something here is wrong, we want to know and we will fix it. Use the contact page, and tell us which entry and what is wrong with it. Corrections to safety information are treated as urgent.
This page describes our current practice and changes as the library changes. Talk to your clinician before starting anything, particularly alongside prescription medication.
