Health information is only as trustworthy as the people standing behind it, so here is exactly who they are. The Shot Guide is written by a small editorial team of plain-language health writers who work from primary sources, and it is reviewed by independent credentialed clinicians as we build that review bench out. We have one rule we will not bend: we never list a reviewer we do not actually have, and we never invent a credential, a photo, or a bio. Until a real, named clinician has reviewed a page and signed their name to it, that page tells you so plainly. That honesty is not a weakness here. It is the whole point.
Who writes these pages
The words you read are drafted by our editorial team: writers whose job is to take dense, sometimes frightening medical material and turn it into something a worried person can actually use at 11pm. They are not pretending to be your doctor, and they will never tell you to change a dose. What they do is sit with the primary sources (FDA labels, named clinical trials, NIH and PubMed Central research, and major academic medical centers like Cleveland Clinic and Mayo) and translate them faithfully into kitchen-table English.
Every draft is built under the standards on our editorial and review policy and sourcing standards pages. That means a claim does not go on the page unless it traces back to a source we can show you, and where the evidence is thin or simply does not exist yet, we say that out loud instead of papering over the gap with a confident-sounding guess.
Who reviews these pages
Writing is only half of it. The other half is medical review by people with the letters after their name to catch what a writer might miss. As we confirm each reviewer, we are matching them to the kind of page they are best suited to check:
- Physicians (MD or DO) for the symptom, serious-risk, and comparison pages, where clinical judgment about what is normal and what is a red flag matters most.
- Pharmacists (PharmD) for medication, interaction, and titration questions, since they live closest to how these drugs actually behave alongside everything else you might take.
- Registered dietitians (RD) for the nutrition pages, like our foods to eat and avoid guide, where protein, hydration, and gentle eating advice belong in expert hands.
We are building this bench now, deliberately and slowly, because a reviewer who genuinely knows GLP-1 medications is worth waiting for.
The rule we will not bend
A lot of health sites decorate their pages with stock-photo "experts" and credentials nobody can verify. We refuse to do that. On The Shot Guide, a reviewer is named on a page only once their review is real and attributed: their actual name, their actual credential, and the date they reviewed it, with off-site verification such as a professional profile where it is available. No invented people. No borrowed authority. No roster of impressive-looking names we cannot stand behind.
Until a given page has had that real review, its review line says so honestly, in plain sight, rather than implying a clinician signed off when none has yet. We would so much rather show you an honest "pending" than a fabricated authority. If that makes us look less finished than a site full of stock-photo doctors, we are at peace with it, because the alternative is lying to someone who is scared and trusting us.
That is also why this honesty is itself the trust signal. When you see a name on one of our pages, you can believe it, precisely because we did not put one there before it was true.
Are you a clinician who wants to review for us?
If you are a licensed MD, DO, PharmD, or RD who knows this medication class and wants to help keep this information accurate for the people reading it at their kitchen table, we would genuinely like to hear from you. You can learn more about how we stay neutral, and why no one pays to influence what we publish, on our independence page.
How we reviewed this: this page describes our own editorial and review process rather than a medical claim, so it carries no clinical citation. The standards behind it live on our editorial and review policy and sourcing standards pages. Our review bench is still being built, and we will name reviewers here only as their real, signed reviews go live.
Every medical claim above is cited to a primary source such as an FDA label, the NIH, or a named clinical trial. See how we review and our sourcing & fact-check standards.