How we review · Plainly Her

Health content is only worth as much as the process behind it. Here is ours, including the parts that cost us money.

Nothing clinical publishes without a named reviewer

Every clinical page carries the name and credentials of the clinician who checked it, and the date they checked it. Not an "editorial team", not "medically reviewed" without a person attached. If you cannot verify the reviewer, the review is decoration.

Pages are re-reviewed at least every twelve months, and immediately when guidance changes. The date on the page is the date of the last actual review, not the date the page was last touched.

How we grade evidence

Every supplement and intervention gets one of five grades. The grade is set from the evidence before commercial terms are looked at, and it does not move because something sells well.

strongConsistent evidence from well-conducted trials or a body of good-quality research pointing the same way.

moderateReal evidence with meaningful limits: smaller trials, shorter follow-up, or populations that do not quite match the woman reading the page.

weakThin, inconsistent or largely mechanistic evidence. Frequently recommended anyway. We say so, and we usually do not link a product.

insufficientNot enough good evidence to reach a view in either direction.

avoidEvidence of harm, a meaningful safety signal, or a claim that the ingredient cannot support.

Which sources we use

We work from public health authorities, regulator labelling and primary literature: the National Institutes of Health and its dietary supplement office, MedlinePlus, the Office on Women's Health, openFDA and DailyMed for drug labelling, and published cohort studies such as SWAN. Where a claim rests on a single study, we say which one.

We do not copy or ingest content from commercial health publishers. Where their material is the best explanation of something, we link to it rather than reproducing it.

What every symptom page must contain

A direct answer, what else could cause the same thing, when to speak to a professional, the red flags that mean urgent care rather than an appointment, sources, and a named reviewer. The section on other possible causes is not optional. Not everything in your forties is hormonal, and a platform that implied otherwise would not be worth trusting.

How the assessment was built

It scores severity rather than presence, across six domains, because every validated menopause instrument scores severity and every direct-to-consumer quiz in this category scores presence. The domain structure follows the approach used in validated scales; the wording is our own, because the established instruments are licensed commercially and we are not going to reproduce one without a licence or call ours by their name.

Red-flag routing runs before scoring. Postmenopausal bleeding, very heavy bleeding, chest pain and thoughts of self-harm exit the flow to a clinical pathway. They never reach a result page and they never see a product.

Your answers stay in your browser. We record that an assessment was completed, the band and the top domain. Not the answers.

Corrections

We publish corrections with dates rather than quietly editing pages. If we have something wrong, tell us. Corrections log