How to report an error
Email corrections@healthcaptain.com. Anyone can report an error — you do not need a credential, and you do not need to be polite about it.
What helps most:
- The page address, and the exact sentence or figure you think is wrong.
- What you believe the correct information is.
- A source, if you have one. A link to a guideline or a study makes verification much faster.
We read every report. We do not require you to identify yourself, and we will not publish your name unless you ask us to.
What we commit to
- Acknowledgement within two business days. A person replies confirming we have the report and are looking at it.
- A decision within five business days for ordinary reports: either the correction is made, or we explain why we think the page is right.
- Same day for safety-critical errors. Anything that could lead a reader to delay urgent care, take a medicine wrongly, or miss a warning sign is treated as urgent. If we cannot verify it immediately, the affected passage is removed while we check.
- We tell you what we did. Every report gets an answer, including the ones we decline.
How corrections are marked
A substantive correction is marked on the page itself, in a correction note at the foot of the article, stating what was wrong, what it now says, and the date it was changed. The page's updated date changes at the same time.
We do not silently rewrite a page that was materially wrong. Quiet edits are how a publication loses the right to be trusted about the things it has not been caught on.
Where an error was serious enough that readers may have acted on it, the correction is flagged near the top of the page rather than at the foot.
Correction, clarification, or update?
These are three different things, and we use the words precisely.
| Type | What it means | How it is marked |
|---|---|---|
| Correction | The page stated something factually wrong — a wrong figure, a misattributed source, an inaccurate description of a treatment or a warning sign. | A dated correction note on the page saying what was wrong and what it now says. |
| Clarification | The page was not wrong, but it was ambiguous or incomplete enough that a reasonable reader could take the wrong meaning from it. | A dated clarification note explaining what has been made clearer. |
| Update | The information was correct when published and has since changed — a revised guideline, a new approval, a new safety communication. | The updated date changes. Where the substance of the advice changed, a note says what changed. |
Fixing a typo, a broken link or a formatting problem is none of the three. Those are made silently, and the updated date does not change.
When we remove a page
Occasionally the right answer is not a correction but removal: a page built on research that was later retracted, or covering a product withdrawn on safety grounds. When we unpublish a page, the address returns a short note explaining that it was removed and why, rather than disappearing without explanation.