Is This Medical Advice? Purpose, Scope, and Who Is Responsible

The short answer#

No. The information on this site is general medical education. It explains what the evidence says for people in general; it does not diagnose you, prescribe for you, or create a clinician relationship with you. For any decision about your own body, a licensed clinician who can examine you and read your history is the right source. Every case analysis and evidence guide has completed human review by Jasaman (Jasmin) Tojjar, MD, PhD. Use the collection to understand your options and ask sharper questions, not as a stand-in for care.

Key points#

• General information about conditions and evidence is not the same thing as advice tailored to one person, which is what a clinician provides.
• Reading this site does not create a patient-physician relationship. The American Medical Association describes that relationship as forming when a physician begins to serve a specific patient's medical needs.
• Nothing here is a diagnosis, a prescription, a patient record, or a product. Nothing is sold, and no treatment or brand is promoted.
• Every case analysis and evidence guide has been fully reviewed by Jasaman (Jasmin) Tojjar, MD, PhD, and each detail page identifies her review role.
• Every clinical claim is tied to named, current sources (specialty guidelines, major trials, government health agencies) so you can check the original for yourself.
• For anything about your own health, confirm with a clinician who can examine you. For the warning signs listed near the end, seek urgent care rather than searching.

Is the information on this site medical advice?#

No, and the distinction is worth being precise about. Medical advice is a professional judgment applied to a specific person by someone who has taken responsibility for that person's care. It rests on your examination, your history, your medications, and your test results, and it comes with accountability to you. General health information describes what is known for a population and leaves the application to you and your clinician.

The line is not just rhetorical. The AMA frames the patient-physician relationship as beginning when a physician starts to serve a patient's needs, whether by the patient's request, a contract, a legal duty, or an emergency. Opening a web page does none of that. No one here has examined you, taken your history, or agreed to be responsible for your care, so nothing on this site can be treated as advice directed at you.

Here is the difference in plain terms:

What is this resource, and what is it not?#

This is an educational evidence library and a clinical reasoning casebook. The library articles explain how conditions work and what current evidence says. The case series walks through how a clinician thinks about a presentation, one reasoning step at a time. The goal is health literacy: helping readers and the clinicians who teach them read the evidence with more confidence.

What it is not matters just as much. It is not a set of patient records; the cases are teaching scenarios built to illustrate reasoning, not real identifiable people, and no personal health information is published here. It is also strictly non-commercial. Nothing is for sale, no supplement or device is promoted, and no efficacy claim is made in the site's own voice. That last point is deliberate: the U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires that health-related product and efficacy claims be truthful and backed by competent and reliable scientific evidence, and the cleanest way to stay clear of that whole category is to sell nothing and to attribute every claim to a cited source.

Who is responsible for reviewing the content?#

Jasaman (Jasmin) Tojjar, MD, PhD, has completed the human review of every case analysis and evidence guide on this site. Each detail page identifies her as the reviewer, and its structured data records the same role. The review credit describes review, not authorship, and it does not imply that a general educational page is advice for a particular person.

Good health information tells you who stands behind it, what evidence supports it, what its limits are, and how to report a problem. MedlinePlus advises checking who runs a site, whether pages carry dates, and whether the content leans toward selling something. This site makes the reviewer, sources, educational boundary, and correction route visible.

If you want the mechanics, see the companion editorial-method page and the piece on the physician-scientist and medical humanities thinking that shapes the standards. Together they describe the sourcing rules, the review role, and the reason claims carry citations readers can open.

Should I use this instead of seeing a clinician?#

No. Nothing here replaces a clinician who can examine you and knows your history. MedlinePlus puts it simply: discuss what you find online with your own provider before you rely on it. That advice fits this site exactly.

Use it well, and it earns its place. Reading a plain-language explanation before an appointment helps you follow the conversation and ask better questions. Seeing the actual guideline or trial behind a recommendation helps you understand why a clinician suggests one path over another. Learning how risk is framed, in absolute terms rather than scary relative ones, helps you weigh a choice honestly.

Use it as a substitute, and it fails you. Do not self-diagnose from a page, start or stop a medication based on an article, or delay care because a symptom seems to match a description here. Bodies vary, evidence is incomplete, and a page cannot see the detail that changes the answer for you. When your situation and a general statement disagree, your situation and your clinician win.

How do I report an error or suggest a correction?#

This library is meant to be corrected. Every article names its sources, so claims can be checked against the original and flagged if they have drifted out of date. Outdated citations, broken links, and factual errors are exactly the feedback the project wants. The contact section of the site is the route for that kind of correction. It is not a channel for medical or urgent questions, and you should never send personal health information through it. Keeping the correction pathway visible and separate from clinical care is part of how a trustworthy reference stays honest over time.

When to seek care#

Some situations call for urgent help, not reading. Based on the U.S. National Library of Medicine's list of medical emergencies, get emergency care (call 911 in the United States) for any of the following:

• Chest pain or pressure that lasts more than a couple of minutes, or spreads to the arm, jaw, or back
• Sudden trouble breathing, or choking
• Sudden weakness, numbness, or drooping on one side of the body, trouble speaking, or a sudden severe headache
• New confusion, a change in alertness, fainting, or a seizure
• Bleeding that will not stop, or coughing or vomiting blood
• Severe pain anywhere, including severe abdominal pain
• Thoughts of harming yourself or someone else, or a poisoning or overdose

For symptoms that are new, worsening, or simply will not settle but are not emergencies, contact your own clinician rather than treating a web page as the decision.

For any decision about your own health, talk with a clinician who knows you.