Editorial Policy

Ayushman Health sits on an awkward but useful join: one patient’s account of losing a gallbladder, and the clinical facts a surgeon would stand behind. This policy explains how those two are kept apart, then fitted back together, so you can judge how far to trust what you read.

Who writes and who checks

The articles are written by Bridget Nolan, a gallstone patient and the founder of this site, not a clinician. Anything that touches the medicine, how a keyhole removal differs from the open operation, what recovery involves, how often complications such as bile leak or bile-duct injury happen, when silent stones are best left alone, is reviewed by Mr Anand Verma, Consultant General Surgeon, FRCS (Gen Surg), before it goes live. He performs cholecystectomy himself, and his job is to catch anything that drifts from current practice or the published evidence. Where a page shows a reviewed date, that is the day a surgeon last checked it.

The line between experience and advice

Lived experience and clinical guidance are not the same thing, and we do not let them blur. When Bridget describes her own trapped-gas pain, the same-day discharge, or the months it took her digestion to settle, that is one gallbladder and one recovery, marked as personal. When a page states what the operation does, who it suits, or what the risks are, that is the reviewed clinical content. What happened to one patient is not a forecast of what will happen to you.

How figures and sources are handled

• Numbers on this site, recovery times, conversion rates, complication rates, the chance of looser stools afterwards, come from authoritative bodies and peer-reviewed surgical literature, never from clinic marketing.
• We lean on the NHS, NICE (its gallstone-disease guidance CG188), the American College of Surgeons, NIDDK, and Cleveland Clinic, plus general and upper-GI journals. The Resources page lists them.
• Where the evidence gives a range rather than one figure, we write the range, for example “about 1 to 2 weeks” back to normal after keyhole surgery, and we say plainly when a question is genuinely unsettled. We do not round a range up into a promise.

Independence

Nobody pays to appear here. We do not take money to recommend a surgeon, a hospital, or a technique, and we run no affiliate links to anyone selling surgery. Where the site mentions the option of treatment abroad, it does so to explain the questions to ask, not to send you anywhere.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, out of date, or unclear, we want to know. Tell us through the Contact page. Genuine errors of fact are corrected promptly, and where a correction is material we update the page and its dates so the change is visible.

What this policy is not

None of this makes the site medical advice, and a review by a surgeon is not the same as being examined by one. Please read the Medical Disclaimer alongside this policy.