Who we are

The purpose

Alderbury Health Notes exists to do one unglamorous thing well: take the guidance that urologists already work from, and set it out in a form a non-specialist can read in one sitting and remember afterwards. The guidance is public. It is also long, written for clinicians, and distributed across documents nobody outside the field would think to open. Between that guidance and the person who has just been handed an unfamiliar word there is usually nothing except search results, and the search results on this particular subject are poor.

So the gap we are trying to close is narrow and specific. We are not a second opinion, a symptom checker or a route to treatment. We are the thing you read the evening before an appointment so that the appointment goes better, and the thing you read afterwards when you have remembered four questions you forgot to ask.

The subject is prostatitis, chosen because it is unusually badly served. It is common, it is frequently misunderstood in a way that sends people down an unhelpful treatment path for years, and a large share of what is written about it online exists to sell something. None of those three things is true of most conditions at once.

Who writes it

An editorial team writes these notes: people whose work is turning clinical documents into readable English. They are not practising clinicians, and we will not imply otherwise. That statement costs us something in apparent authority, which is precisely why we make it. A claim of clinical authorship is unverifiable from the reader's side of the screen, and a great many health sites make it anyway.

What follows from that is simple enough to list. We exercise no clinical judgement. We answer no question about an individual. Every factual claim traces back to a public source named at the foot of the page, which you can open and read against what we have written. And where our summary and your own clinician's advice part company, your clinician wins the argument, having had the advantage of examining you.

If we ever commission review by a named clinician with verifiable credentials, their name, their qualifications and the date of their review will appear on the page itself, and this section will be rewritten to say so. Until then, read these notes as what they are: careful journalism about a medical subject, not medicine.

What we refuse to do

Most of what makes health writing untrustworthy is a matter of what the writer is willing to do, rather than what they happen to know. These are the commitments we hold ourselves to.

Who pays for this

The owner does. The domain, the hosting and the hours spent reading guidelines are met out of pocket, and that is the whole arrangement. It is a dull funding model with one useful property: there is no revenue attached to any particular sentence, so no sentence has a commercial reason to say one thing rather than another.

• No advertising runs on this site. We sell no space, rent none, and barter none. There are no ad slots, no sponsored sections and no paid placements of any kind.
• No commission is taken on treatment. We earn nothing from any medicine, supplement, device, test or clinical service, and we publish no affiliate link to one.
• Nothing is sponsored. No outside party commissions a page, reviews one before publication, or has any route to amend one afterwards.

Should a commercial relationship ever arise that could bend editorial judgement, it will be disclosed in this section and on every page it touches, before anything is published. The very short list of things recorded when you visit is set out in the data notice.

The order we trust sources in

When two sources disagree, something has to break the tie. This is the order we apply, strongest first, and we apply it before we start writing rather than after.

1. Current clinical practice guidelines from recognised professional bodies — in urology, chiefly the European Association of Urology and the American Urological Association.
2. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses, including Cochrane reviews.
3. Patient-facing material from national health institutions: the NIH and NIDDK, MedlinePlus, the UK National Health Service and NICE.
4. Individual peer-reviewed studies indexed in PubMed, used only for narrow points and labelled as single studies rather than as settled fact.
5. Patient information from major academic medical centres, used mainly to confirm that our plain wording still matches the accepted explanation.

What never makes it into a note: commercial health blogs, supplement and clinic marketing, press releases, forum anecdote, and machine-written summaries of other websites. The working method, including how we handle disagreement between two sources of equal rank, is in the editorial method.

What is on the site at present

Four notes and a word list. That is deliberately modest: we would rather hold five pages accurate than let a hundred decay.

• The four categories, and what each one does — the classification, the symptom patterns, and the conditions that imitate them.
• How it starts, and how it is identified — mechanisms, risk factors and the whole diagnostic pathway.
• Treatment, sorted by strength of evidence — what is used, and how much proof stands behind each of them.
• Week to week, flares, and plain answers — self-management, appointments, and twelve common questions.
• The word list — around sixty terms taken from consultations and test reports.

Expansion, if it comes, will be slow and into adjacent territory rather than outward in every direction at once.

Corrections

Finding an error here is a favour to every reader who arrives after you. If something is wrong, out of date, or rests on a source we have read carelessly, write to [email protected] and we will check it. Substantive corrections are made to the page and shown in its update line; how that process runs is described under corrections and complaints.