Evidence and methodology

How we choose sources, grade evidence, and correct mistakes. If you find an error, we want to hear about it.

Where our facts come from

• Regulatory sources: FDA prescribing information and public FDA statements, and the WADA Prohibited List for sport status.
• Peer-reviewed literature indexed in PubMed, and registered trial records on ClinicalTrials.gov.
• Chemical identifiers from PubChem, linked on each page so you can check them.

We do not take facts from vendor sites, affiliate blogs, or forum posts. Nothing stated on a compound page rests on one. There is one deliberate exception, and it runs the other way: on the where sources disagree page we sometimes quote a seller, a testing company or a community reference because it is one of the parties to a disagreement. Those panels are labelled with the kind of source they are, and Amiravo’s own position beneath them never depends on the seller or community claim. Links to community discussion elsewhere on the site are labelled as discussion and are not sources for anything we state.

Evidence grades

Every compound page carries one grade describing the strongest evidence available for that compound, not how promising it is.

A

Randomized controlled human trials or regulatory-grade evidence5 compounds

B

Small human studies or observational data2 compounds

C

Animal or other preclinical studies only2 compounds

D

In-vitro or mechanistic work only

A high grade means better-quality evidence exists, not that a compound is effective or safe. Grade A compounds include approved drugs whose trials reported substantial adverse events.

Regulatory status labels

FDA-approved

Approved by the FDA for at least one indication. The page states which.

Investigational

In clinical trials, not approved for any use.

Approved outside the US

Approved in one or more countries outside the United States. Not FDA-approved.

Not approved — research use only

Not approved anywhere we could verify. Available only as a research material.

How we write about dosing

We publish two kinds of dosing information and nothing else:

• Label dosing, for FDA-approved drugs only, quoted from the prescribing information with a link to the label. It is recorded because it is a published regulatory fact, not as an instruction.
• Trial dosing, for investigational drugs, describing what investigators administered in a cited study.

For compounds that are not approved anywhere, we publish no dosing at all, from any source, including clinicians. Those compounds have not been through the process that establishes a safe dose in people, so any number would imply a certainty that does not exist.

Review and corrections

• Each compound page shows the date it was last reviewed.
• Every figure is checked against the primary source before publication, never copied from another reference site.
• An automated check runs against our content database and flags citations that do not resolve, links that are broken, identifiers shown without a source, and language that overstates evidence.
• Corrections are welcome: send us the page and the source. We update the page and its review date.

Independence

Amiravo does not sell products through this site at this time. Some compound pages carry a labelled referral link to a research supplier that pays Amiravo a commission. That relationship never decides what a page states, and no source is included because of it.