When you are reading about your own body at 11pm, you deserve to know where the answer came from. So here are our medical sourcing standards, in plain terms. Every efficacy number and every safety statement on The Shot Guide is tied back to a primary source. We name that source right there in the sentence, so you can check it yourself. We rank the sources we trust in a clear order. We keep dated regulatory facts current. And when the evidence is thin or unsettled, we say so out loud instead of dressing a guess up as a fact. We sell nothing and take no manufacturer money. So the only thing steering a page is what the best available evidence actually says. This is general information, not medical advice.
The sources we trust, in order
No single source has the last word on everything, so when they disagree we weight them in roughly this order.
FDA prescribing information and safety communications. The labeled, regulated record for an approved medication is where we start. It is the closest thing there is to an official answer, and it is the source we lean on hardest for what a drug is approved to do and what risks carry a formal warning.
Named randomized controlled trials. We point to the actual studies by name, the STEP and SUSTAIN programs for semaglutide, SURMOUNT and SURPASS for tirzepatide, and other registered trials, so a number is never floating free. Naming the trial means you can look it up and see for yourself who was studied and what was measured.
Peer-reviewed reviews and meta-analyses, especially the ones indexed in PubMed Central at the NIH. When a single study is not enough, a careful review that pools many of them is the next best thing, and it helps us avoid leaning on one outlier result.
Major academic medical centers. Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, Harvard Health, and similar institutions are our go-to for clinically accepted, plain-language guidance, the kind of trustworthy explanation a good clinician would give you in the room.
We link out to these sources generously, right in the body of the page. Pointing you to the original is not a footnote to us. It is most of the job, and it is how you can trust us without having to take our word for anything.
How we cite, line by line
We attribute inline, not in a pile of references at the bottom that nobody reads. When we give you a prevalence figure, an efficacy result, or a safety statement, the source is named in the same breath. You will see it written the way you would say it out loud, for example, "in the semaglutide 2.4 mg trials, nausea affected about 44 percent of people versus about 16 percent on placebo," with the trial or label linked so you can check it. If we cannot point a claim back to a credible source, we do not publish the claim. It is that simple.
When the evidence is thin, we say so
Some of the things people search for at midnight have not been carefully counted in any trial. Sulfur burps are a good example. They are real and common, but the studies never tallied them, so no honest source can hand you an exact percentage. When that is the situation, we tell you plainly that the evidence is thin rather than inventing a number to sound more certain than we are. We would rather give you an honest "we do not fully know yet" than a confident figure we made up.
We treat serious risks the same careful way. We report the things that genuinely matter, the thyroid C-cell boxed warning, pancreatitis, gallbladder disease, and gastroparesis, straight from FDA and clinical sources, with neither alarmism nor minimizing. We do not borrow lawsuit or scare framing that runs out ahead of the evidence, and we never say a medication "causes" an outcome when the data only shows the two are associated.
The class-accuracy rule we enforce
Here is one specific mix-up we guard against on purpose, because it spreads everywhere online. GLP-1 receptor agonists (semaglutide and tirzepatide) are a different drug class from SGLT2 inhibitors. Genital yeast infections are a labeled side effect of SGLT2 inhibitors, not of GLP-1 medications. A lot of content blurs the two and quietly pins SGLT2 effects on the shot. We do not. We check every claim against the right drug class before it goes on a page, and we flag the distinction where it matters, like our page on vaginal and menstrual changes.
We keep dated facts current
Regulatory facts move, sometimes fast. As one recent example, in January 2026 the FDA requested removal of the suicidal-behavior-and-ideation warning from GLP-1 labeling after a review found no evidence of an increased risk. When the label or the guidance changes, we update the page and its review date rather than leaving an old fact standing. If you ever spot something that has gone stale, telling us is genuinely welcome.
What we will not source from
We do not build claims from manufacturer marketing, affiliate-driven telehealth blogs, or anonymous forum posts. Lived experience matters, and we honor it, but we label it as experience and keep it separate from the clinical record. You can read more about how we work in our editorial and review policy, about the people who check our work on our reviewers page, and about why nobody pays to influence us on our independence page.
How we reviewed this: this page describes the standards we hold ourselves to on every other page of the site. Where the evidence on a topic is genuinely unsettled, we tell you that plainly rather than overstating what is known. See our editorial and review policy and sourcing standards.
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.