What Health Captain is

Health Captain is an independent health education publisher. We take the things a person actually needs to understand — a symptom, a diagnosis, a new prescription, a number a clinician mentioned in passing — and explain them in plain language, with the sources linked so you can read the original yourself.

We are not a clinic, an insurer, a pharmacy, a telehealth service or a diagnostic tool. Nothing on this site knows anything about you. Everything here is general education, and the person who knows your history is your clinician.

Who it is for

For the person who has just been told they have high blood pressure and does not know what that means. For the person handed a prescription with a name they cannot pronounce. For the person who wants to sleep better, eat better or move more and has been drowned in contradictory advice. And for the person supporting somebody else through any of that.

We write for a reader with no medical training and no patience for hedging. Plain language is not the same as dumbing down: it means saying the true thing in words that do not require a glossary.

What we publish

  • Health guides — 38 in-depth guides in nine clusters, from sleep and nutrition through metabolic health, the heart, the brain and preventive care.
  • Conditions — plain-language pages on 28 common conditions, each following the same structure: what it is, symptoms, risk factors, diagnosis, treatment categories, prevention, warning signs, and what to ask your clinician.
  • Medications — what a medicine is generally for, how its class works, what side effects are common, and what to ask before starting. Never dosing.
  • Tools — eleven calculators, trackers and planners that run entirely in your browser.
  • Games — nine games that teach something real, including one about deciding how urgently a symptom needs attention.
  • Discover — where health is heading: AI in medicine, wearables, longevity science and the research worth paying attention to, with the hype separated out.
  • Resources and the blog — habit guides, appointment preparation, emergency resources, and new writing as it publishes.

What Health Captain will never do

These are not aspirations. They are constraints on what we are willing to publish.

  1. We will never diagnose you. No page, tool or game on this site will tell you what you have. The Symptom Explorer describes categories of possible causes and how urgently something deserves attention; it does not name your condition, and it is not a symptom checker that pretends to.
  2. We will never give dosing instructions. Not for prescription medicines, not for over-the-counter ones, not for supplements. Dosing depends on your kidney function, your liver, your weight, your age, your pregnancy status and everything else you take. That belongs to your prescriber and your pharmacist.
  3. We will never publish content we have not sourced. If we cannot point to where a claim comes from, it does not go on the page. We do not cite studies we have not read, and we do not invent references.
  4. We will never label something medically reviewed that was not. That label means a named, credentialed professional read that specific page. It will never be applied as decoration. See our medical review policy.
  5. We will never place advertising next to emergency or crisis content. No ad units, no affiliate links, no promotional blocks and no newsletter forms anywhere near information about what to do in an emergency.
  6. We will never sell your health data, because we never receive it. Everything you type into a tool or a game stays in your own browser. See our privacy policy.

How we stay independent

Editorial decisions — what we cover, what we say, and what we recommend readers discuss with a clinician — are made by the editorial team alone. Commercial relationships, where they exist, never influence those decisions, and no advertiser sees content before it publishes. The full rules are in our advertising policy and affiliate disclosure.

When we get it wrong

We will. Health information changes, guidance is revised, and writers make mistakes. What matters is what happens next: we correct it, we say what changed, and we date it. Tell us at corrections@healthcaptain.com and read how we handle it in our corrections policy.