Editorial policy
How this site is made
This is published rather than kept internally because people making decisions about their own health deserve to know how what they are reading was produced.
Last updated 18 August 2026
The gate
What has to be true before a page publishes
Every item below must be satisfied. It is a gate, not a wishlist. We would rather publish twelve pages a year that clear it than a hundred that do not.
| Named author with verifiable credentials | Must resolve to a bio page |
| Medically reviewed by a named clinician | Must resolve to a bio page |
| Every health claim cites a primary source | Minimum one per claim |
| Visible last-reviewed date | The date a clinician actually read it |
| Explicit statement of what the page does not cover | Rendered on the page |
| At least one element only we could have written | Editorial judgement, recorded |
Sources
What we cite, in order of preference
- Clinical practice guidelines — AUA, EAU, ACP
- Systematic reviews and meta-analyses
- Randomised controlled trials
- Prospective cohort studies
- Everything else, labelled as such
We do not cite blogs, press releases, manufacturers’ own materials, or news coverage of a study in place of the study. Where the evidence is weak we say it is weak, and where clinicians disagree we say they disagree rather than picking the tidier answer.
Limits
What we will not write
We will not tell you what is wrong with you.
We will not tell you what to take, or at what dose.
No supplement prevents, treats, or cures kidney stones, and we will not imply one does. We describe what a product contains and what the evidence on that ingredient shows.
Our organiser trends your values against your own laboratory's ranges and prints a summary. It does not interpret them, score them, or advise you.
Our directories carry objective public-record facts. We do not rate individual doctors.
Money
Commercial relationships
The credibility of this site is the only asset it has, so these rules are enforced by machinery rather than memory.
- Material connections are disclosed on the page. Our founder is employed by Withings, which manufactures a urine-analysis product in this category. Withings has approved his involvement, has no editorial input, and provides no funding. Any page touching a Withings product renders a disclosure above the first paragraph automatically.
- The commercial firewall. No product is ever surfaced on the basis of your quiz answers or test results. An automated check fails our build if commerce code is imported into the quiz, laboratory, or account sections.
- Directory listings are free and cannot be bought. If we later offer enhanced listings they will be a flat fee, identical for everyone, unrelated to patient volume, and visibly labelled.
- We do not accept payment to write about a product.
Mistakes
Corrections
We will get things wrong. When we do, the correction is made on the page with a dated note explaining what changed, and substantive corrections are also entered in the public corrections log. We do not silently edit a claim out of existence.
Report an error to corrections@livekidneystonefree.com. A site that never publishes a correction is not a site that never makes mistakes.
Process
How content is produced
Drafts are prepared by the editorial team, which uses AI assistance for research, drafting, and data work. This does not change the gate: every health page carries a named human author accountable for it and a named clinician who has reviewed it. We think undisclosed AI-generated health content is a failure of both ethics and quality, so we would rather tell you plainly how it is made.
Every clinically reviewed page is re-reviewed at least every 24 months, and sooner when a relevant guideline changes.