Sources & Licensing Policy

We do not copy or store the full text of other people's articles. From research and authority sources we keep only metadata (title, a short summary used internally, a link, a date, and the study type) or, for some pages, only a change-detection hash of the page.

Every published article is original, plain-language writing. We summarize a finding in our own words and support each medical claim with a numbered citation and a link to the original source. We do not reproduce copyrighted text verbatim.

T1 (authority): health systems and clinical bodies such as NHS, Mayo Clinic, NIH MedlinePlus, Cochrane, NICE, ECCO, and AGA.

T2 (peer-reviewed): journal literature indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, and Europe PMC.

T3 (patient associations): bodies such as UOAA and Crohn's & Colitis foundations.

T4 (community): forums and social posts. These are demand signals only (what to write about) and are never the sole source of a medical claim.

Where we use information from the NHS website, it is reused under the Open Government Licence v3.0. This page and the articles that draw on it contain public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0 (https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/). NHS logos and images are excluded from that licence and are not reproduced.

Bibliographic data (titles, authors, journals, dates, links) is retrieved through the NCBI E-utilities API. NCBI does not hold the copyright to the underlying articles, does not endorse this website, and provides this data without warranty; copyright in journal abstracts and full text may rest with the respective publishers. We retrieve metadata only and link out to the source of record.

ClinicalTrials.gov records are US Government public-domain material; we use them as sober research-radar context, never as a sole medical claim. Europe PMC metadata is used internally to inform drafting.

Some sources (for example Mayo Clinic) permit only personal, non-commercial use of their content. We never copy their full text; we cite them at link level only and re-source any medical claim to a permissively-licensed authority such as the NHS or peer-reviewed literature.

Our text is curated with AI assistance and reviewed by a person before publishing. We disclose this on our profiles and here.

Images on this website are AI-generated illustrations. They are not photographs of real patients and do not depict real, identifiable individuals. Where the generation tool supports it, AI media carries C2PA content credentials marking it as AI-generated, and any synthetic narration is labeled as AI voice.

We use a privacy-friendly, cookieless analytics service (Vercel Web Analytics) to count page views in aggregate and see roughly which countries readers come from. It does not use cookies, does not store your IP address, and cannot identify you individually. See our Privacy Policy for details.

Nothing on this website is medical advice. For your own situation, please consult your own clinician.

If you believe a source is mis-cited, out of date, or used in a way that does not respect its licence, please tell us at ostomyfan@gmail.com and we will correct it.