How we verify every clinical claim on spine.co. These rules apply to the Guide, condition pages, procedure pages, the second-opinion surface, and any page displaying medical statistics. They are enforced as launch gates — a page cannot be published until it passes.
Every treatment recommendation on the site — on condition pages, the Guide, and procedure detail pages — must reference a published society guideline (NASS, AAOS, ACP, NICE, ISASS) or a named clinical trial with a stable URL. Unsourced recommendations are not published.
Every PMID cited on the site is validated against the NCBI API to confirm (1) the identifier resolves, (2) the article title matches what we attributed to it, and (3) the article is actually about spine care. Hallucinated PMIDs — the kind that link to real but unrelated articles and escape simple HTTP 200 checks — are the single most common source integrity failure in medical content online. We run a validation script before every push that contains PubMed references.
Any numeric medical claim must be traceable to a specific source document with a URL or DOI. If the source cannot be located, the claim is either rewritten without the number or removed. Readers can click through every stat to the originating study or guideline.
When a page is reviewed by a clinician, the reviewer is identified by name, credentials, NPI (for US providers), and review date. We do not publish vague "medically reviewed" or "expert reviewed" attributions. Until a real, named, NPI-verified specialist signs off on a page, the page is transparently marked as awaiting clinical review.
Treatment recommendations are never influenced by device manufacturer, vendor, or pharmaceutical relationships. Providers who have disclosed financial relationships via CMS Open Payments are listed with their relationships shown on their profiles, but those relationships do not shape the treatment ladders published here. Vendor product pages link into the site but do not dictate what the site says about a procedure.
Society guidelines change. Trials publish new follow-up arms. Procedures gain or lose FDA clearance. Every condition page carries a visible "last updated" date. Treatment ladders are re-validated against current guidelines quarterly. Every cited URL is re-checked monthly by an automated script — broken or moved links get flagged for repair or replacement.
Pages on spine.co pass through four independent gates before reaching a reader:
The reason for the two-state distinction — reviewed vs. awaiting — is simple: without named accountability, “medically reviewed” is a marketing phrase. We hold ourselves to the standard that every reviewer must be identifiable, verifiable, and reachable.
We are building a named clinical review board across orthopedic spine surgery, neurosurgery, PM&R, pain management, and allied subspecialties. Contributing reviewers receive attribution on every page they sign and a dedicated reviewer profile page that supports their personal authority.