Our editorial process

We prioritize authoritative public sources, including the National Cancer Institute, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, MedlinePlus, other recognized governmental health agencies, publicly available patient guidelines from established oncology organizations, and peer-reviewed guidelines and systematic reviews where appropriate.

Not every page uses every source. Source authority reduces — but does not eliminate — the possibility of error, and a source can be misread or become outdated.

AI may help us organize source material, translate medical terminology into plain language, structure articles, generate draft questions patients may ask, connect related topics, identify repetition, and standardize formatting.

AI can make mistakes, so its output is never trusted on its own — every draft is subject to the separate checks below. AI does not diagnose, recommend treatment, invent medical facts, fill gaps in a source with assumptions, or create unsupported thresholds.

Factual claims should be traceable to a cited source. Our checks look at whether the source exists, whether it actually supports the claim, whether it is current enough for the subject, whether our wording overstates it, whether a citation is being used outside its original context, and whether the source link still works. We cannot guarantee perfect verification.

Most pages carry a line reading Sources last checked with a date. On that date a person opened the document cited at the foot of the page and compared it, claim by claim, with what the page says. Specific numbers, thresholds, drug indications, dates and quotations are checked individually, not sampled.

When a claim is not in the source it is cited to, we do not quietly soften it or quietly delete it. It is replaced with a conclusion the source does support, or removed, and the change is recorded. Recent examples: a page attributed a carcinogen listing to the National Toxicology Program that the Report on Carcinogens does not contain; a treatment page gave a session length its cited source contradicted; a symptom page carried an urgency threshold no named authority sets.

This is a source check, not a medical review. It establishes that the page matches the document it cites. It does not establish that the document is the right one, or that a clinician would have written the page the same way. Where a drug label and a government summary disagree, we say so on the page rather than choosing one silently.

Automated checks look for individualized diagnosis, treatment recommendations, medication changes, unsupported emergency thresholds, false certainty, prognosis claims, missing caveats, supplement or alternative-treatment promotion, fear-based language, stigmatizing language, unsupported causal claims, and statements that conflict with the cited sources. High-risk pages that cannot meet these requirements are held as drafts or rewritten as limited general education, and excluded from search and the sitemap.

We check for jargon, reading difficulty, long sentences, unexplained abbreviations, alarmist tone, and missing context — and confirm that the direct answer appears near the top and that the page identifies a practical next step.

Before a page publishes we check whether a similar page already exists, whether the new page adds distinct value, whether pages compete for the same search query, whether content was created merely to rank, whether the page offers a real next action, and whether it should instead be merged with an existing resource.

At this time, most Cancer Explained content has not been reviewed by a physician or other healthcare professional. Pages with documented human medical review will identify the reviewer, their credentials, and the review date directly on the page. We never describe AI checks or citation checks as medical or clinical review.

Anyone can report an error. Reports are reviewed by our editorial team; anything suggesting a safety problem is prioritized. When we correct a page we update its content, record the change, and refresh its dates. A change in a source can also trigger a re-review.

This process cannot guarantee complete accuracy, applicability to your individual situation, that all guidance is current in every jurisdiction, that the content reflects your complete medical situation, or that AI will never misunderstand a source. Cancer Explained is general education and does not replace your healthcare team.