Reading health claims carefully

Wellness marketing is fluent, confident and often wrong. The checklist below is the one used inside this practice, and it applies to this website as much as to anyone else’s.

1. Is an outcome being promised?

Health does not work on guarantees. Language such as cure, reverse, eliminate, balance, boost or detoxify is a signal that certainty is being manufactured. Careful practitioners describe what might change, for whom, and how confident they are, and they are comfortable saying they do not know.

2. Does the mechanism actually exist?

A plausible-sounding explanation is not the same as an established one. Several popular wellness mechanisms are not recognised diagnostic entities, and describing something in biological-sounding language does not make it measurable or treatable.

3. Would the test change anything?

The useful question about any test is not “what will it show” but “what would be done differently depending on the result, and who is qualified to act on it”. A test that leads only to a product recommendation has answered a commercial question, not a clinical one.

4. Who benefits from the advice?

When the person recommending a supplement also sells it, the recommendation carries less information. That is one reason nothing is sold at this practice.

5. Does it sit alongside your medical care, or against it?

Any advice that encourages you to delay medical assessment, distrust your treating clinicians or alter a prescribed medicine should be treated as a serious warning sign. Habit work is a companion to medical care. It is not an alternative to it, and it never substitutes for assessment of a new or changing symptom.

Applying the same checklist here is encouraged. If something on this site reads as overclaiming, please say so.