Editorial standards

Sourcing

Articles are built from published research, professional society guidance and publicly available clinical documentation. Where guidance is contested — and in preventive medicine a great deal of it is — we say so rather than picking the version that makes a cleaner story.

We try to be specific about the limits of what a piece of evidence supports. A marker being associated with an outcome in a population is a different claim from that marker being useful for an individual, which is different again from acting on it changing anything. Those distinctions are usually where the interesting part of the story lives.

What “composite” means

Several of our articles open with a person: a man who noticed he was recovering more slowly, someone who got a warning in an emergency room. These are composites. They are assembled from patterns that recur across published research and widely reported experience, and they are written to illustrate a situation rather than to report a case.

Every article containing a composite carries this line at the end of the body, rendered automatically rather than added by hand:

Stories in this article are composites drawn from common experiences. Details do not describe any specific individual.

No detail in a composite describes a real, identifiable person, and none is drawn from a private account given to us. If we ever publish a real account, it will be identified as one and published with consent.

Bylines and credentials

A byline is either a real person or Coastline Health Review Staff, which indicates a piece written and edited internally. We do not invent authors, we do not generate biographies or photographs for writers who do not exist, and we do not attach medical credentials to a byline. If a piece has been reviewed by a clinician, we will name them and say what they reviewed.

What we do not publish

• Testimonials, reviews, star ratings or endorsements. We have not published any, and we would only ever publish real ones, identified as such.
• Claims that anything we or a partner does diagnoses, prevents, resolves or undoes any disease.
• Individual medical advice. We report on measurement; decisions belong to a reader and a physician who knows their history.
• Content bought by an advertiser. Our featured partner does not commission, review or approve articles.

Independence from our funding

Coastline Health Review is funded by a disclosed featured partner arrangement, explained in full on the our disclosures page. The partner has no say in what we cover or what we conclude, and does not see articles before publication. Anywhere a specific clinic is named on this site, it appears with a visible featured partner badge and a plain-language disclosure attached.

Corrections

We correct errors in place, with a dated note describing what changed. Material corrections are noted at the top of the article. Write to get in touch if you find something wrong.

Updates

Articles about screening and diagnostics go stale as guidance changes. Where a piece has been revised after publication, the article header shows an updated date alongside the original.