How a verdict is made
Every claim goes through the same ten steps, whether it is about creatine or the pyramids. I print them on each investigation so you can see where a conclusion came from rather than taking it on trust.
- Find how people actually say it. I write down three or four real phrasings rather than a tidied-up version, because the tidy version is usually a different claim and answering it convinces no one.
- Trace where it came from. Most of these have a source: a study, a documentary, a guideline that got simplified, a marketing campaign. Naming the origin usually does more work than correcting the claim.
- Turn it into something a study could answer. Who, doing what, compared with what, measured how, over how long. If a claim cannot be written that way, it is usually a values question rather than an empirical one, and I say so instead of grading it.
- Run a search and publish it. The database, the terms, the filters and the exclusions, written out so you could repeat it and get the same set of papers.
- Read the full texts. Not the abstracts. An abstract is the authors’ own summary, and the limitations usually sit further in.
- Grade the evidence with the reasoning visible. Randomised trials start high and observational studies start low, then the level moves for named reasons: risk of bias, inconsistency, indirectness, imprecision, publication bias. Showing the arithmetic means a grade cannot be quietly adjusted to fit a conclusion.
- Work out who it applies to. A verdict is rarely portable. Who was actually enrolled, and how close that is to you, often matters more than the headline result.
- Name what has not been measured. Sex, genetics, dose, duration, source. Where a variable has not been studied properly, it gets its own section rather than a silent omission.
- Say what would change my mind. Each entry names the specific study that would move the verdict. If nothing could change it, I am not doing evidence appraisal.
- Put a review date on it. Research moves. Every entry carries the date I last examined it and the date it is next due, and I mark verdict changes when they happen.
For claims outside clinical medicine, step six swaps its domains for provenance, primary source, expert consensus and replication. The process stays the same; only the instrument changes.
What a verdict can say
A claim can come back true, partly true, unsettled, mostly false, false, or not covered. That last one means the evidence I found does not speak to the group being asked about, and saying so is more useful than guessing.
Educational information only. Fact Over Myth does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, or individualised nutrition care.
