Blog / Editorial Standards

Editorial Standards

We are building the most accurate, evidence-based health content library on the internet. Every article is produced under the accountability of a registered doctor. Every material clinical claim is mapped to the most appropriate authoritative source before drafting begins. And every reference sits at the bottom of the page, where you can check our work yourself. This document sets out the full standard — the evidence hierarchy we source from, the review cycles we run, how we use technology, and what happens when we get something wrong — so you can hold us to it.

Our Content Objective

The questions that bring people to a health library are rarely comfortable ones. A lab value flagged in red. A medicine you’ve been prescribed and quietly want to understand before you take it. A symptom you’ve been turning over for weeks. Those questions deserve real answers, and a real answer has three properties: it is precise, it is sourced, and it tells you the parts you didn’t want to hear alongside the parts you did.

Our ambition is simple to state and hard to execute: for every question we cover, the Sapiens article should be the most rigorous page on the internet. That is the bar for publishing here. We expand the library category by category, and this standard travels with every new subject we take on, because it describes how we treat evidence, and evidence works the same way everywhere.

Editorial Integrity & Content Creation Process

Accuracy here is a process, run in the same order on every article, and no article ships until it has cleared every gate.

Writers & Editorial Team

Our articles are written and edited by a small team working directly with the registered doctors who work with Sapiens. Today the doctors carry much of the writing themselves; as the library grows, dedicated medical writers will draft under their direction. Those writers are required to have scientific, clinical or health-journalism backgrounds, and each one is trained on the sourcing standard on this page before their first article, including the discipline that defines our process: read the study before describing it.

What never changes is where the accountability sits. The clinician credited on an article has read the underlying evidence and stands behind every claim in it, and their medical council registration is public record you can verify yourself.

We also hold ourselves to a readability standard, because accuracy only helps if it’s understood. Every clinical term is introduced alongside its everyday name, no article assumes you trained in medicine, and we edit until a capable reader with no clinical background can follow every sentence. Plain language is part of the standard, on equal footing with the science.

Medical Expert Reviewers and Fact-Checking

Fact-checking on Sapiens happens in an unusual place: before the draft exists. Every material clinical claim, threshold and statistic is mapped to the most appropriate authoritative source, and only then does writing begin. Which source that is depends on the claim; the hierarchy below spells it out. The article is built out of what the evidence says. If a claim cannot be sourced, it does not run, however good it would have sounded.

Before publication, every article clears a second gate: each claim re-verified against the finished reference list, every number checked digit by digit against the document it came from, and coverage tested against the questions readers genuinely ask, so the article answers what you actually came to find out.

You can meet the doctors behind this work on our medical experts page.

Technology and AI

We use modern tools, including AI, to assist with research organisation, drafting and production. We are straightforward about this because the tools are not the standard — the verification is. Technology accelerates the work; the evidence determines the content; a registered doctor carries the accountability. Every material medical claim is checked by a person against its cited source before publication, and nothing on this page is waived because a machine helped write a sentence. The “no invented citations” rule below exists precisely because we know where automated drafting fails, and we’ve built the process to catch it.

Compliance Standards

Three separate frameworks touch our work, and it’s worth being precise about what each one governs.

Indian law restricts certain advertisements and promotional claims relating to drugs and medical conditions. We keep educational content and commercial promotion distinct, and our articles do not make unsupported cure or treatment claims. Where you notice our writing become especially careful, it’s usually exactly where a bolder claim would sell better. That caution is deliberate.

Separately, when Sapiens launches its clinical services, consultations will be provided by registered medical practitioners in accordance with applicable professional and telemedicine requirements, including the Telemedicine Practice Guidelines. That framework will govern the clinical service, distinct from this library. And we handle your data under applicable Indian data-protection law, including the Digital Personal Data Protection Act and its Rules as they come into force. Our privacy policy has the detail.

Sources, Citations and References

At the bottom of every article sits a numbered list of every source used, with PubMed identifiers wherever they exist, so you can open the underlying document and independently corroborate our conclusions.

We source from original and authoritative documents, and we match the type of source to the type of claim. Different claims have different correct sources — a drug’s approval status lives in the regulator’s records, while a treatment’s effect size lives in the trial data — so our writers work down an explicit hierarchy:

1. Regulatory and official prescribing information for approval status, indications, contraindications and dosing.
2. Current professional guidelines for clinical recommendations, thresholds and standards of care.
3. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses for the weight of the overall evidence base.
4. Major randomised controlled trials for treatment efficacy and safety.
5. Large observational studies where trials cannot answer the question.
6. Smaller individual studies only when stronger evidence does not exist, and flagged as such in the text.

A few further habits you’ll see in every reference list:

• Limitations declared where the claim sits. If a study was small, done in animals or in vitro, run in a single centre, or funded by the company whose product it examines, we say so in the same sentence the claim appears in. A caveat buried in a footnote protects nobody.
• Evidence matched to the reader. Much of the strongest published research comes from Western populations, and we cite it. Where population-specific data exists and genuinely changes the answer — a different diagnostic cut-off, a different approval status, a different price — we use it and tell you why it matters. We don’t force it in where it adds nothing.
• Recent evidence, with room for landmarks. We prefer current work, and reach further back only for studies that still define their field. When the evidence shifts, the article shifts with it.
• Full text wherever possible. An abstract is a summary of a study, and summaries hide things. Where full text is available, we read it rather than relying on the abstract alone.
• No invented citations, ever. Every reference corresponds to a real, identifiable source we have actually reviewed. This should go without saying. We are saying it anyway, in writing, on a page you can bookmark.

Content Curation

Staying Current (Updates and Removal)

Medicine keeps moving after we hit publish, and a library that stands still becomes wrong on a schedule. So we keep articles current through two distinct mechanisms, and it’s worth understanding both.

Event-triggered review. When we become aware of a material development — a safety warning, an approval or label change, a withdrawal, or a major revision to a clinical guideline — the affected articles are promptly re-examined and revised through the same verification they cleared the first time.

Scheduled review. Because no monitoring catches everything the moment it happens, every published article is also re-examined on a fixed cycle — at least once every twelve months — whether or not anything appears to have changed. Every updated article displays a “Last modified” date, so you always know how fresh the page in front of you is.

Occasionally we retire a page that no longer earns its place in the library. When that happens, links to it across the site are removed or redirected to the most relevant current article, so a search never strands you on advice we no longer stand behind.

Content Corrections

Mistakes happen, even inside a careful process, and a correction policy is only as good as its follow-through. A reported error goes straight back to the source. If we got it wrong, the article is corrected, re-verified end to end, and republished; where the error could have shaped a health decision, we state plainly what changed and when. We would rather publish a visible correction than quietly edit history.

See a mistake? Write to editorial@joinsapiens.in with the article link and the claim in question. Every report gets read, and every genuine error gets fixed.

Transparency

Sapiens is a doctor-led telehealth and diagnostics platform being built in India. Alongside this library, we are building access to consultations with registered doctors, ongoing care and diagnostic testing, so many topics we cover naturally sit close to the conditions and tests those services will address. We are building the library and the platform for the same reason: good health decisions start with accurate information, and too few people have access to either.

That closeness creates an obvious question: can you trust an article about a treatment from a company that offers the treatment? Here is exactly how we handle it. Editorial decisions are made independently of our commercial teams. Nobody who writes, reviews or edits an article is compensated based on the consultations or tests it generates. A treatment or test appears in an article only when it genuinely belongs to the question the article answers, and the education always comes first: what to expect, what it costs, what the evidence supports, and what your alternatives are. Whether you act on any of it, and with whom, is entirely your call.

Our privacy policy and terms are available if you’d like the fine print.

Contact Us

Hold us to everything on this page. Tell us what helped, what confused you, and what you wish we’d covered but haven’t — we’re at editorial@joinsapiens.in.

Articles on Sapiens are for information and education. They are not a substitute for a consultation with a doctor who knows your history, and should never be relied upon as personal medical advice. Always speak to a registered medical practitioner about the risks and benefits of any treatment.