Why we started with prostatitis
Search almost any chronic urological or pelvic complaint and the results split into two disappointing halves. One half exists to sell a supplement, a device or a clinic package, and reads accordingly. The other is so thoroughly hedged that it manages to answer nothing while being technically correct throughout.
Prostatitis is a particularly stark case. It affects a large number of men, it is widely misunderstood in clinical settings as well as online, and the commercial pressure on the surrounding information is unusually heavy — because a condition with fluctuating symptoms and no reliable cure is the ideal market for anyone with something to sell.
Larkfield Health Library was set up to publish the version we wanted to read: specific, plainly written, open about uncertainty, and assembled from public clinical guidance rather than marketing copy.
What we publish, and what we refuse
What we do
- Summarise public clinical guidance and peer-reviewed research in plain English.
- Name the sources behind every page, and the month they were last checked.
- Say out loud where the evidence is weak, mixed or missing.
- Explain how conditions are assessed, so a consultation can be used properly.
- Correct pages when guidance moves or somebody shows us we were wrong.
What we never do
- Sell, ship or arrange any medicine, supplement, test kit or device.
- Offer consultations, diagnoses, prescriptions or personal advice.
- Recommend or endorse a specific product, brand, clinic or practitioner.
- Promise a cure, a guaranteed outcome or a timescale for recovery.
- Publish sponsored content, paid reviews or advertorial dressed as editorial.
- Use fear, urgency or invented testimonials to push a reader anywhere.
Who writes this
Larkfield is a small independent editorial project. Pages are researched and written by our editorial team: writers who work on turning clinical guidance into readable prose, and who are not practising clinicians. We state that plainly, because a claim of clinical authorship is exactly the sort of claim a reader cannot verify — and exactly the sort that a great many health sites make anyway.
What it means in practice is simple enough. We offer no clinical judgement. We answer no personal medical questions. Everything we publish traces back to a named public source you can open and check for yourself. And where our summary and your own clinician's advice disagree, follow your clinician, who has the advantage of having examined you. The full method is set out in how we work.
How it is paid for
The domain, the hosting and the hours spent writing are paid for by the site's owner. Nothing on these pages is sold, sponsored or advertised, which is a dull arrangement but a clarifying one: there is no revenue here that any particular piece of coverage could increase.
- No advertising is carried. We sell no ad space, run no ad slots and host no sponsored sections, so no outside party has a financial reason to care what a page of ours says.
- We take no commission on treatments. We earn nothing on any medicine, supplement, device, test or clinical service, and publish no affiliate links to any of them. If a commercial relationship capable of affecting editorial judgement ever arises, it will be disclosed here and on every page it touches.
What little gets collected when you visit is described in the privacy policy.
The source ladder
Our default order of preference, strongest first:
- Current clinical practice guidelines from recognised professional bodies — in urology, principally the European Association of Urology and the American Urological Association.
- Systematic reviews and meta-analyses, Cochrane reviews among them.
- Patient-facing information from national health institutions: the NIH and NIDDK, MedlinePlus, the UK National Health Service.
- Individual peer-reviewed studies indexed in PubMed, used for narrow points and labelled as single studies rather than settled consensus.
- Patient information from major academic medical centres, used mainly to check that our plain wording matches the accepted explanation.
What we do not build content from: commercial health blogs, supplement and clinic marketing, press releases, forum anecdote, and machine-generated summaries of other websites.
What is in the library now
A four-chapter guide to prostatitis, plus a glossary:
- Four categories and how each one feels — the classification, the symptom patterns, and the conditions that imitate them.
- What starts it and how it gets pinned down — mechanisms, risk factors and the diagnostic pathway.
- Treatment, graded by the evidence — what is used, and how much proof stands behind it.
- Daily life, flares and straight answers — self-care, appointments and twelve common questions.
- A plain-English glossary — around sixty terms from consultations and test reports.
We would rather publish a handful of pages we can keep accurate than a hundred we cannot. Expansion, when it comes, will be slow and into neighbouring territory.
Corrections
If you find an error, a statement that has gone out of date, or a source we have read wrongly, tell us and we will check it. Substantive corrections are made to the page and reflected in its update line. Contact details are here.
This is general information, not medical advice. Nothing here creates a clinician–patient relationship or should be used to diagnose or treat yourself. Please read the medical disclaimer in full.