How our content is written and checked.
Anyone can claim their medical content is reviewed. Very few explain what that means, and a claim you cannot check is worth little. This page sets out exactly who writes PharmBit lessons, what they are written against, what every piece has to pass before it publishes, and which parts of a mature editorial process we have not built yet.
Who writes the content
A practising pharmacist writes the pharmacology. Content is authored from primary sources rather than assembled from other study sites, which matters because errors in this subject propagate quickly once one secondary source copies another. Every drug lesson starts from the mechanism of action and works outward to clinical use, adverse effects and interactions, so that the effects are derived from the mechanism rather than listed alongside it.
What the content is written against
Lessons are not written freehand. There is a written content specification that fixes the structure of every drug lesson and every blog post, covering section order, what belongs in a mechanism paragraph, the vocabulary level, how quizzes are built, and a list of claims that may never appear. It exists so that quality does not depend on how carefully any individual piece happened to be written, and so that a specific, repeatable standard can be applied instead of a general intention to be accurate.
The checks every post must pass
Before anything publishes it is validated automatically against that specification, and the validation fails the piece rather than warning about it. The checks are mechanical and specific. They confirm minimum depth, that mandatory sections are present, that every post carries a minimum number of citations to recognised sources, that internal links fall within a set range, and that banned claim patterns do not appear. Drug lessons carry further checks, including limits on how long a mechanism paragraph may run and confirmation that quiz answers match their explanations.
Automated checking is not a substitute for expertise and does not catch every kind of error. What it does reliably is prevent the failures that come from volume and fatigue: the post that quietly ran short, the citation that was never added, the section that was skipped. Those are the errors that accumulate invisibly across a large library, and they are the ones a human reviewer is worst at catching.
What we do not have yet
We do not currently have a second, independent pharmacist reviewing every lesson before it publishes. Bylines therefore read as the PharmBit Pharmacy Team rather than naming an individual author and a named reviewer, because naming a reviewer who does not exist would be worse than saying so plainly. Independent review is the standard we intend to reach, and when we appoint a named reviewer this page will carry their name, their credential and their registration number so that the claim can be checked rather than taken on trust.
The sources we work from
Content is written from regulatory product information, published guidelines and peer-reviewed literature. In practice that means FDA prescribing information and EMA summaries of product characteristics, DailyMed, NHS and BNF guidance where licensing is relevant, NCBI Bookshelf and PubMed, and the published blueprints of the examinations we cover, including NABP, the General Pharmaceutical Council, the Pharmacy Examining Board of Canada, the Australian Pharmacy Council and the Pharmacists Council of Nigeria. Blog posts cite their sources inline so you can follow any specific claim back to where it came from.
How we handle change and error
Drug information changes, so every lesson carries a last-reviewed date and that date is what tells you how current it is. Areas that change fastest are rechecked first, which in practice means antimicrobials, anticoagulants and diabetes therapeutics. When guidance changes materially we update the lesson and move the review date rather than leaving a stale page in place.
If you find something wrong, tell us. Email hello@pharmbit.app with the lesson or post name and what you believe is incorrect. Verified corrections ship with an updated review date, and we would rather hear about an error from a student than leave it in front of the next one.
What this does not cover
PharmBit is a study aid for examinations and understanding. It is not clinical guidance and does not replace professional judgement, local formularies or supervision, and nothing here constitutes medical advice for an individual patient. The full position is set out in our medical disclaimer, and the authoring process is documented in more detail in our content methodology.