How we work

Who this is written for

Larkfield Health Library publishes general health education for adult, non-specialist readers in English, internationally. Pages are written to help someone understand a condition well enough to have a better conversation with a qualified clinician. They are not written to support self-diagnosis or self-treatment, and they are not a clinical decision-making resource for professionals.

Sourcing

Every factual claim traces to a source we consider adequate for the specific claim. Our order of preference, strongest first:

1. Current clinical practice guidelines from recognised professional bodies, such as the European Association of Urology and the American Urological Association.
2. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including Cochrane reviews.
3. Patient-facing material from national health institutions: the NIH and NIDDK, MedlinePlus, the UK National Health Service.
4. Individual peer-reviewed studies, used for narrow points and explicitly identified as single studies rather than consensus.
5. Patient information from major academic medical centres, used chiefly to check that our plain wording matches the accepted explanation.

Sources we will not build content from: commercial health blogs, supplement or clinic marketing, press releases, forum and social-media anecdote, and machine-generated summaries of other websites.

Every guide ends with the sources it draws on, with links, and the month those links were last checked.

How claims are framed

• Evidence strength is stated, not implied. If trial results are mixed, small, or borrowed from a different condition, the text says so.
• Uncertainty stays visible. Where a cause is not established, we describe it as not established rather than reaching for a confident-sounding paraphrase.
• Population figures are labelled as population figures. Prevalence and response rates describe groups and predict nothing about an individual reader.
• Disagreement between guidelines is reported. We do not resolve it silently in favour of whichever body we read first.
• No cure claims. We describe no treatment as a guaranteed, permanent or universal cure, and we flag such claims as a warning sign when readers meet them elsewhere.

What we will not publish, at any price

• Doses, prescribing guidance, or anything else a reader could use to medicate themselves with a prescription-only drug.
• A recommendation or endorsement of any named medicine, brand, supplement, device, clinic or practitioner.
• An offer to sell, supply, import or arrange any medicine, supplement, test or medical service.
• A diagnosis, personalised advice, or an answer to an individual medical question.
• Miracle cures, guaranteed outcomes, scare tactics, before-and-after claims, or a testimonial we cannot verify.
• Anything likely to put a reader off seeking professional care or off finishing a course they have been prescribed.
• Sponsored writing, paid placement, or advertorial dressed up as independent editorial.

Authorship and the limits of our expertise

Guides are written and fact-checked by the Larkfield editorial team: writers experienced in health communication, working from the sources listed above. They are not practising clinicians, and we do not claim clinical review where none has happened. We are explicit about this because unverifiable claims of clinical authorship are one of the commonest ways a health site borrows authority it has not earned.

If we commission review by a named, credentialled clinician in future, that reviewer's name, qualifications and review date will appear on the page itself, and this section will be rewritten to say so.

Review and updating

• Every guide carries a “last updated” date, and every source list shows when the links were last verified.
• Guides are reviewed at least once a year, and sooner whenever relevant guidance is revised.
• Substantive corrections — anything that changes the meaning of a health statement — are made promptly and reflected in the update date.
• Minor fixes such as typography or a dead link are made without a note.
• Pages we can no longer keep accurate are rewritten or removed rather than left to rot.

Commercial independence

The library is paid for by its owner and by nobody else. Most of the pressure that bends health writing out of shape never reaches us, because the arrangements that carry it are simply absent:

• No advertising appears on these pages, in any format and from any network.
• No space is sold, rented or bartered to anyone, at any price.
• No outside party may commission, review, approve or amend what we publish, and no page exists because a company wanted it to.
• Affiliate commission on a medicine, supplement, device, test or clinical service is not accepted, and no affiliate link to one appears anywhere here.
• Were a commercial relationship to arise that could bend our editorial judgement, we would say so on the about page and on whatever content it touched.

The short list of things collected when you visit is set out in the privacy policy.

Accessibility and plain language

We aim for pages that are readable without specialist knowledge and usable with assistive technology: semantic headings in a sensible order, link text that makes sense out of context, adequate colour contrast, keyboard-accessible navigation, and no meaning carried by colour alone. Clinical terms are defined where they first appear, and collected in the glossary. If any part of this site is unusable for you, please tell us what you were trying to do.

Corrections and complaints

To report an inaccuracy, a statement that has aged badly, a source we have misread or a broken link, email [email protected] with the page address and, if you have one, the source that supports the correction. We aim to reply within five working days. If you believe content breaches a health-information standard, say so and we will review it against this page and act on what we find.