About
Editorial mission
Most health coverage is built to make every study sound like a breakthrough. We are built the other way round.
Why we exist
There is no shortage of health information. There is a shortage of health information you can act on without wondering who paid for it, whether the study was any good, and why the same outlet said the opposite last year.
Live Well News exists to close that gap on one beat: what the research actually found about human health, physiology and aging. Not what a press release said it found, not what it might mean one day, and not what would make the best headline.
Who we are for
A curious adult with no training in statistics, who wants to know whether a finding applies to them. That reader is the test we apply to everything: if a piece only makes sense to someone who already knows what a hazard ratio is, we have written it badly, and the answer is to rewrite it rather than to assume the reader will keep up.
What we promise
- We will tell you how strong the evidence is, not just what it showed. A single small trial and a pooled analysis of forty thousand people are different kinds of fact, and you should never have to guess which one you are reading.
- We will not oversell a finding. If an effect is small, we will say small. If it was measured in mice, that will be in the headline, not paragraph nine.
- We will show our working. Every non-obvious claim is cited to the paper it came from, with a link, so you can check us rather than trust us.
- We will say when we were wrong, and say what changed. Our corrections policy is public and so is the log.
- We will keep the money visible. How we are funded, and what we refuse to take money for, is set out on our transparency page.
- We will stay out of your medical decisions. We report research. We do not diagnose, prescribe, or tell you what to take.
What we will not do
A mission is mostly a list of things you have decided in advance not to do, because those are the decisions that get hard later, when the traffic is down and the offer is good.
- We will not cover a study that fails our source bar, however well it would perform.
- We will not sell supplements, take commission on products we write about, or run affiliate links.
- We will not publish sponsored content dressed as journalism, or let an advertiser see a piece before a reader does.
- We will not use a curiosity gap to make you click for a finding we could simply have told you.
- We will not quietly delete a piece we got wrong. We correct it, in public.
How we measure ourselves
Not by traffic alone, which rewards exactly the behaviour above. The questions we hold ourselves to are narrower: would the researchers recognise their own study in what we wrote? Could a reader check every claim we made? Did we say plainly how much this is worth, including when the honest answer is "not much"?
If we fail any of those, we would rather hear it than not. Write to [email protected], or see how to contribute.
Common questions
Why does another health site need to exist?
Because most health coverage is built to make every study sound like a breakthrough, and almost none of them are. The result is a reader who has been told coffee is good for them and bad for them roughly forty times. We would rather cover less and be worth trusting.
Who is this written for?
A curious adult with no training in statistics who wants to know whether a finding applies to them. Not clinicians, not researchers, and not people who already know what a hazard ratio is. If a piece only makes sense to someone with a science degree, we have written it badly.
What will you not do?
Publish a study we would not defend, sell a supplement, take commission on a product we cover, run a sponsored article dressed as journalism, or tell you what to take. We report research; decisions about your health belong with a clinician who knows your history.