Advertising and editorial are separate

Health Captain may carry advertising to fund its work. If it does, advertising is a commercial arrangement that sits alongside the content — never inside it.

  • Every advertisement is visually distinct from editorial content and labelled as advertising, in text, at the point where it appears.
  • Advertising never uses our editorial typography, our card styles, or any layout designed to read as one of our articles.
  • Sponsored content, if we ever publish it, is labelled "Paid content" or "Sponsored" at the top of the page and in every place it is linked from — not in a footnote after the reader has finished.
  • We do not publish advertorial presented as editorial. There is no arrangement under which a commercial partner gets an article that looks like ours and is not.

Where advertising never appears

These placements are prohibited outright, and no commercial arrangement overrides them.

  • Emergency and crisis content. No advertising, no affiliate links, no promotional blocks and no newsletter forms on emergency resources, on crisis and suicide-related content, or adjacent to any red-flag warning section on any page. A person reading about chest pain or a crisis line is not an advertising audience.
  • Medication pages. No pharmaceutical advertising anywhere in the medication center, and no advertising for any drug, supplement or treatment on a page that discusses medicines.
  • Symptom and diagnostic contexts. No advertising placed to intercept a reader in the middle of working out whether something is serious.
  • Anywhere it would appear to be a recommendation — no ad unit positioned so that a reader could reasonably read it as our clinical advice.

What advertisers cannot do

  • They cannot influence editorial decisions. Not what we cover, not what we conclude, not which treatments we describe, not which organisations we cite.
  • They cannot see content before publication. No pre-publication review, no advance copies, no right of reply built into the process.
  • They cannot buy their way out of coverage. Being an advertiser does not soften what we write about a product, a company or a category.
  • They cannot request removal or amendment of accurate content. Errors are corrected under our corrections policy because they are errors, not because an advertiser objects.
  • They cannot target readers using health signals we hold, because we do not hold any. Nothing you enter into a tool or game reaches us. See our privacy policy.

Advertising we will not accept

  • Products claiming to cure, reverse or prevent disease without evidence supporting the claim.
  • Unapproved treatments, unproven stem cell or "regenerative" clinics, and diagnostic tests marketed direct to consumers without evidence of clinical utility.
  • Weight-loss products making rapid-results claims, and anything promoting disordered eating.
  • Tobacco, nicotine and vaping products.
  • Anything targeting children.
  • Advertising designed to imitate a system alert, a search result, or a clinical warning.

If something looks wrong

If you see an advertisement on Health Captain that appears to breach this policy — particularly one near emergency content or on a medication page — tell us at editorial@healthcaptain.com with the page address and a screenshot. Programmatic advertising sometimes places things nobody intended, and we would rather hear about it than not.