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List of archives

Merged Archive WikiProject Preclinical medicine: 1 Merged Archive WikiProject Clinical medicine: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 WikiProject Medicine Archives: Index, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 109, 110, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, 168, 169, 170, 171, 172, 173, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179

Discussion concerning Provo Canyon School's classification

 You are invited to join the discussion at Talk:Provo Canyon School § therapeutic boarding school. There is an ongoing discussion concerning how Provo Canyon School should be described and classified. Issac I Navarro (talk) 20:43, 31 August 2026 (UTC)

same topic/article below--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:44, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

WikiProject Medicine Newsletter, Issue 27

Issue 27—September 2026

WikiProject Medicine Newsletter
Greetings from WikiProject Medicine.

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WPMED news and help

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	Free books for editors The Wikimedia Foundation is offering a free book or similar source to experienced editors through their Resource support pilot. The source must be important for your work on Wikipedia, and it must not already be available through The Wikipedia Library or through the WikiProject Resource Exchange.
	Ban on AI-written articles: Since the last newsletter, the community has adopted and expanded a ban on writing articles with any AI tools (aka chatbots and LLMs). See Wikipedia:Writing articles with large language models for more information.

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Work to do

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	The Vital Signs campaign: Can you help too? Adopt an article! Or if you have less time, adopt a section of an article (epidemiology is great to get started) or integrate recent guidelines. Assess if it now meets the B-class criteria in the progress table.
	100% sourced: Last year, WikiProject Medicine became one of the few groups that has ever managed to have zero {{unreferenced}} articles. Please check this PetScan report to see if any unreferenced articles have recently been tagged for our group. Add one or more sources, and then remove the tag. It often takes only a few minutes, and many hands make light work!
	Bad site: The community has deprecated a web archiving service called archive.today. New links are not allowed, and old links are being removed and replaced. A list of all affected WikiProject Medicine articles is at Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Deprecated archival service. The list is updated by bot. We also have a report listing only popular articles. Thanks to long-time WikiProject Medicine editor Netha Hussain, you can scan individual articles and categories at https://fixarchive.toolforge.org/.
	Can you help answer questions? See Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Discussions for a list of new discussions on article talk pages. It's updated frequently by a bot.
	Tools you can use: HotCat If you're interested in organizing categories for articles, make sure you've gone to Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-gadgets-gadget-section-editing and enabled HotCat. This will allow you to add and remove categories to articles directly, by clicking + or – buttons at the bottom of the page.

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See also

Newsletter comments and suggestions welcome.

You are receiving this because you added your name to the WikiProject Medicine mailing list. If you no longer wish to receive the newsletter, please remove your name.

MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 16:12, 6 September 2026 (UTC)

Quick update: Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Deprecated archival service is under 2,000 articles now (thanks, and please keep it up!), and there are only five unsourced articles at this time: two lists: List of diseases (S), List of diseases (T) for which https://www.nhsinform.scot/illnesses-and-conditions/a-to-z/ will be useful, plus three pages about medical schools: List of medical schools in Iran, List of medical schools in Israel, Suzuka University of Medical Science. WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:43, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Allergic salute#Requested move 2 September 2026

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Allergic salute#Requested move 2 September 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. Thanks! —1isall (talk | contribs) 19:56, 9 September 2026 (UTC)

thank you for post--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:43, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Rhinorrhea#Requested move 4 September 2026

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:Rhinorrhea#Requested move 4 September 2026 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. NomanPK44 (talk) 10:18, 11 September 2026 (UTC)

commented--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 11:42, 14 September 2026 (UTC)

Draft biographies underway at Draft:C. Hunter Shelden and Draft:Winchell McKendree Craig

I have started biographies at Draft:C. Hunter Shelden and Draft:Winchell McKendree Craig, both eminent neurosurgeons. Craig mentored Shelden, who famously advocated for cars having seat belts to reduce incidences of head trauma in accidents. Any help here would be appreciated! BD2412 T 20:03, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

I have promoted these to mainspace. BD2412 T 11:55, 17 September 2026 (UTC)

Aloe, medicinal uses

Hi, could someone please improve the section on medicinal uses in the Aloe#Uses and Aloe vera#Uses articles? It needs to be expanded and supported by sources. ~2026-50119-47 (talk) 21:16, 15 September 2026 (UTC)

What sort of improvements are you hoping for? For example, are you hoping to see more specific information (e.g., not just "used for skin conditions", but "effective for second-degree burns")? WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:05, 16 September 2026 (UTC)

"Mpox vaccine" listed at Redirects for discussion

The redirect Mpox vaccine has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2026 September 18 § Mpox vaccine until a consensus is reached. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 16:48, 18 September 2026 (UTC)

WikiProject Banner Tagging Request: Category:Rare diseases

Hello, I am planning to run a bot trial to tag untagged article talk pages in Category:Rare diseases with {{WikiProject Medicine}} (using |rare-disease=yes / |society-task-force=yes if applicable). Please let me know if there are any specific subcategories or pages to exclude. --Have A Nice Life ^talk 13:49, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Please don't do this, @Have A Nice Life.

The |subject-area=yes syntax represents a Wikipedia:WikiProject Medicine/Task forces. We don't have a "Rare disease" task force. The |society-task-force parameter is wrong both technically (there's no such parameter) and categorically (|society=yes is for non-biomedical content, like government agencies and laws; it should never be used to tag disease articles).

If you can tell me what you're trying to accomplish, without using any sort of chatbot or AI system to write your message, then I'd be happy help you find a functional path to that goal. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:31, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

I'm grateful for you for catching that and pointing it out. I'm still learning the exact syntax for WikiProject banners. What I am trying to accomplish with my bot is to tag talk pages of articles in the rare diseases catalog with the correct banner parameters. Could you point me to the correct parameter syntax or banner structure I should be using for rare diseases? Thank you for your help. Have A Nice Life ^talk 17:33, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

These articles are already tagged with the correct banner parameters. The correct banner parameters for rare diseases is to not tag them as rare diseases in the WikiProject banner.

Is there something you're trying to accomplish beyond messing with the WikiProject banner? For example, if your goal is "I'd like to make a bunch of repetitive edits", then I can suggest some productive options. If your goal is "I need a way to make a list of articles about rare diseases, so I check that their infoboxes have the correct _____", then there are ways to go about this that won't break the WikiProject banner on the talk page.

But if your goal is merely "I'm trying to put a tag on these articles for a non-existent task force, because I didn't understand that these parameters aren't just redundantly and pointlessly duplicating the mainspace categories", then please stop. That would not be helpful. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:06, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Acknowledged. Thanks for the explanation regarding the template parameters and redundancy. As noted earlier, I'll pause/withdraw the BRFA to sort out the configuration offline. Appreciate the technical clarification. Have A Nice Life (talk) 19:35, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Medical dictionary available through The Wikipedia Library

Black's Medical Dictionary is a lay-oriented medical dictionary. Eligible Wikipedia editors can get free access to Black's Medical Dictionary through Wikipedia:The Wikipedia Library via Perlego. Perlego is an online textbook service. You have to log into to The Wikipedia Library website, find Perlego (search in the lower left sidebar, not in the top box), and apply for Perlego separately. AFAICT anyone with a good story ("I have made 500+ edits across dozens of medical articles, and I'm looking for good sources") will be approved. Medical dictionaries are handy for sourcing very basic information, the kind that "everyone knows", so none of the in-depth sources bother to write down. Once you're approved for Perlego, you have access to all their books, not just one. WhatamIdoing (talk) 19:58, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Percutaneous

I'm not crazy about the title, Percutaneous, since it is an adjective. Any thoughts on options? BD2412 T 22:18, 19 September 2026 (UTC)

Percutaneous procedure? WhatamIdoing (talk) 03:37, 20 September 2026 (UTC)

why not--Ozzie10aaaa (talk) 00:56, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

I was thinking that as well, but I just added a link at Mpox vaccine to Percutaneous, that being the article name, which I would call percutaneous administration but not a percutaneous procedure. However, I could see that being a minor issue. I'll make the move. BD2412 T 01:01, 21 September 2026 (UTC)

• There are a bunch of percutaneous vaccines, including BCG as another one. It is within the larger topic area of percutaneous medication delivery. I would not see either of those as a procedure per say. Maybe a disambig? Our current article on the topic is Transdermal Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:16, 10 October 2026 (UTC)

Suture (anatomy)

Hi, could someone from the project please expand and improve the article Suture (anatomy)? It is short and somewhat lacking in sources. Furthermore, the entry deals primarily with animals, but the suture can also occur in humans. ~2026-52226-62 (talk) 09:03, 27 September 2026 (UTC)

What information can be incorporated from this source, and how should it be done?

Hi all. I've recently read the paper Interventions to reduce incidence and progression of myopia in children and adults (open access link), and I think it's very interesting and has lots of valuable information. It appears to be reliable; it has 23 authors, all of whom are experts in the field of myopia. However, I am not a medical professional, I'm just someone who likes to read medical research. I also really struggle with figuring out how to condense very large amounts of information into something that's useable in something like Wikipedia.

Could someone please try to figure out how to incorporate this source into the myopia article? It might also be useful in articles like atropine, low-level laser therapy, light therapy, etc. I also wonder if it might be justifiable to make a page like myopia prevention? It might be better than trying to fit many different techniques into just the myopia article. Sorry for my somewhat disjointed rant, I'm not familiar with editing medical articles, so I'm just a bit unsure. Let Me Edit It (talk) 10:09, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

@LetmeEditit, this is a good source. You could use it in several of those articles. I also agree with you that Myopia prevention is a notable subject. As a first step, would you please add or update a sentence in Myopia#Prevention and control with this source? Start with a simple "X works" sentence; it should be treated as a settled fact, so it doesn't need any "According to so-and-so" verbiage. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:14, 2 October 2026 (UTC)

Thanks for the advice! Check out my sandbox — I got a bit carried away, and ended up changing several sentences, and I also removed a couple refs that I thought were outdated. Just want to make sure I haven't overlooked anything before making such a large change. Thanks again! Let Me Edit It (talk) 12:08, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

@LetmeEditit, your planned update looks good. The only change I'd suggest is that when you have a rock-solid WP:MEDRS source, you shouldn't write "A 2025 comprehensive review of myopia prevention and control found outdoor time to be the best method". Instead, you should just write "Outdoor time is the best method". WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:45, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

Thank you so much, especially for linking WP:MEDSAY and giving a practical example, that really helped. I've made the edit now :) Let Me Edit It (talk) 10:34, 8 October 2026 (UTC)

Oh, one more question, if you don't mind. I've been more busy lately (in a good way!), so I don't have the time to write a full article for myopia prevention. Is there anywhere that I can put the idea, so that someone else might see it and decide to give it a go? Thanks Let Me Edit It (talk) 14:54, 8 October 2026 (UTC)

I think you're looking for Wikipedia:Requested articles/Medicine#Diseases; conditions; signs; symptoms. I suggest adding a URL or two to show that there are sources. However, the page isn't used much, so don't get your hopes up too high. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:12, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid § Requested move 26 September 2026

An editor has requested that 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid be moved to 2,4-D, which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 16:42, 2 October 2026 (UTC)
(Notification provided by Move+)

List of Types of Diseases for Possible Use in Articles on the Specific Disease Mentioned Below:

• List of autoimmune diseases
• List of cancer types
• List of heart diseases

— Preceding unsigned comment added by Starlighsky (talk • contribs) 02:22, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

Pervasive issues in the 'Traditional Medicine' sections of plant articles

After some interactions with Zefr I noticed there's a very consistent problem in plant articles Traditional Medicine section where many of them contain claims that are old, unreliable or that otherwise fail WP:MEDRS, is this a known issue, and if not, would a collaborative effort be warranted (especially on common and or toxic plants)? An example is Lantana camara, which is toxic and had text saying it was used to treat cancer, asthma and whatnot, which was there since 2014. Eduardo7z (talk) 19:42, 3 October 2026 (UTC)

It happens, but is it a "very consistent" problem? There are many editors aware of this kind of issue. If you see a problem, please address it. Bon courage (talk) 03:27, 4 October 2026 (UTC)

"is it a "very consistent" problem?"

Yes, it is, on my little excursion adding the Morton citation to articles I stumbled upon plenty of it (check the versions before my edits) . I think that the only articles that I edited which didn't have a problem were the Aloe Vera one and another article, which didn't have a Traditional Medicine section at all.

As for the address it, I could probably do it on the very blatantly problematic ones, but for the most part I'm not familiar with the requirements for WP:MEDRS so I prefer to not meddle with it; when you add something wrong anyone can see and fix it, when you remove something that wasn't wrong only the users who check the history or have an account and are watching the page notice it, so I avoid that.

You said there are many editors aware of this kind of issue but this raises some questions to me as to why that cancer claim stayed on Lantana camara for 12 years: Is the volume of problematic pages too big so this issue (medical claims on plant articles) becomes minor compared to other problems people in the Project Medicine (or a Botany/Pharmacognosy/Phytomedicine project) deal with? What tools/methods editors use to crawl through articles to search for problems? An example here's my thought process on how an editor would approach this: scan all articles in the Plantae section containing medical condition words like "cancer", filter for the ones in which this word appear under Uses, *medic* sections (to capture sections like Medicinal Uses, Medical Uses, Traditional Medicine, Medicinal value, etc), and the like (though probably just from having a medical condition word in the article already warrants adding it as a candidate), then one can sort them using any number of heuristics to decide on what to prioritize (number of medical words the article had, how popular the article is, how old the citations are, feed to a LLM to score it); does a list of such articles exist? I'm aware stuff like WP:CBM and Category:Articles requiring reliable medical sources exist, maybe one needs to be created for this?

Any thoughts on this? After writing this I feel like I could do it (at least the article search/filtering part, not editing haha) but I would like some guidance or direction (does this issue warrant this? Is this already addressed elsewhere? etc).

Eduardo7z (talk) 06:23, 4 October 2026 (UTC)

This is a little complicated, but the key point is to differentiate between statements that are biomedical in nature and statements that are cultural or historical in nature. Compare:

• "Parsley is a good source of dietary iron."
• "In Victorian era, parsley was used as folk remedy for indigestion."

Only one of those requires a MEDRS-style source. WhatamIdoing (talk) 15:59, 4 October 2026 (UTC)

And a lot hinges on what can reasonably be perceived as pertaining to human health. While in practice nobody is going to care (much) about parsley and indigestion, it becomes much more complicated with statements like "throughout the Middle Ages, a tea of {mushroom X} was used as a means of inducing abortion". Bon courage (talk) 16:51, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

I think that it mostly hinges on what a few individuals personally believe makes a statement about human health. In practice, most additions get reviewed until someone decides to remove the content. Consequently, we can have a statement added by A and reviewed by RecentChanges patrollers B, C, D, E, F, etc., and they all think it's fine, so they silently leave it in place, but if Z, who holds atypical views, sees it, then he'll remove it. We don't put the same effort into reviewing removals by experienced editors, so we end up with content accepted by the majority being removed by a small minority. WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:19, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

This is precisely my concern with all of this ethnobotany under Traditional Medicine issue, most seem fine with it existing when the section and wording are appropriate (i.e. when they use appropriate wording unde the appropriate section and document relevant historical/ethnobotanical practises and not factoids), there is a discussion precisely about this at the NPOV noticeboard, some editors seem to dislike it even when the wording is appropriate by claiming that mentioning those practises in the articles endorses them, specially on toxic plants like Lantana camara where Zefr completely removed the traditional medicine aspects from the page, I assume his rationale is that the plan is toxic so anything remotely suggesting its consumption it shouldn't even be present in the article. Eduardo7z (talk) 17:07, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

Zefr said in the edit summary that he believed the statement implied that it actually had "biological/medicinal effects" (e.g., assuming that "used for treating" means "used to successfully treat"). I doubt that concerns about toxicity entered into it at all. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:15, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

He mentioned the toxicity aspect elsewhere (my talk page, his, or some board, don't recall now); in this case, shouldn't he have rephrased the text instead of removing it (I left it alone precisely because he mentioned the toxicity and proceeded to remove the section so I assumed that was the rationale)? Eduardo7z (talk) 17:33, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

Did a pass on the "cancer" word (some of those don't have problems with cancer treatment claims but with other parts): Aquilegia, Areca nut, Arthraxon hispidus, Aspidistra letreae, Arum cyrenaicum, Bracken, Camellia petelotii, Crocus, Hormuzakia aggregata, Steganotaenia araliacea, Thespesia garckeana. Also the ones Zefr would probably trim from the Traditional Medicine section: Catharanthus trichophyllus, Leonotis leonurus, Salvia hierosolymitana

Eduardo7z (talk) 16:57, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

Let's take a sentence from the article you mention at the top of this discussion:

• L. camara has also been used in traditional herbal medicines for treating a variety of ailments, including cancer, skin itches, leprosy, chicken pox, measles, asthma and ulcers.

This is technically a statement about what people do: they take this plant and sell it to people who have certain medical problems. It does not say that it works; it just says people have done this. However, this statement has been interpreted by @Zefr as making claims about "supposed biological/medicinal effects". This is not a completely unreasonable interpretation, if you add a layer of inferences on top of the actual words.

The source in question is not a pro-altmed source. It is an ordinary biology database. The relevant section of that source says:

• "Uses Lantana camara has several uses, mainly as a herbal medicine....There has been much work conducted, especially in India, on the chemical constituents of lantana; extracts from the leaves exhibit antimicrobial, fungicidal, insecticidal and nematicidal activity (Chavan and Nikam 1982, Sharma and Sharma 1989, Begum et al. 2000, in Day et al. 2003). The use of lantana extracts as potential biocides has been suggested....Verbascoside, which possesses antimicrobial, immunosuppressive and antitumor activities, has been isolated (Mahato et al. 1994, in Day et al. 2003). Lantanoside, linaroside and camarinic acid have been isolated and are being investigated as potential nematocides (Begum et al. 2000, in Day et al. 2003). Lantana oil is sometimes used for the treatment of skin itches, as an antiseptic for wounds (Anon. 1962), and externally for leprosy and scabies (Ghisalberti 2000). Plant extracts are used in folk medicine for the treatment of cancers, chicken pox, measles, asthma, ulcers, swellings, eczema, tumors, high blood pressure, bilious fevers, catarrhal infections, tetanus, rheumatism, malaria and atoxy of abdominal viscera (Anon. 1962, Kirtikar and Basu 1981, Ghisalberti 2000, in Day et al. 2003)."

This source clearly supports the content as written.

If you wanted recent peer-reviewed review articles that say the same thing, PubMed gives me nine review articles in MEDLINE-indexed journals in the last five years. Several of them say things like "Extracts from L. camara exhibit significant antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, and wound-healing activities" and "Traditional medicine utilizes its bark, leaves, pods, and seeds to treat a variety of ailments including stomach disorders, skin infections, wounds, and eye diseases" and "Triterpenes, flavonoids, phenylpropanoids, and iridoid glycosides are the bioactive compounds naturally occurring in L. camara that have demonstrated anticancer, antifilarial, nematocidal, antibacterial, insecticidal, antileishmanial, antifungal, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant properties" and "L. camara is one of the most important herbal medicines in the world. For example, it is well known in the Ayurvedic medicinal system with the Sanskrit names of Chaturangi and Vanacchedi. Different parts of the plant are used as traditional remedies for the treatment of various human ailments, such as itches, cuts, ulcers, swellings, bilious fever, catarrh, asthma and bronchitis, eczema, chicken pox, tetanus, malaria, tumors, stomachache, toothache, headache, scabies, leprosy, rheumatism, and as an antiseptic agent to treat wounds" and "Ethnomedicine has long recognised L. camara for its active constituents, including lantadenes, alkaloids, and terpenoids (Ghisalberti 2000; Kohli et al. 2006; Patel 2011; Negi et al. 2019). These compounds have shown potential for producing biopesticides like herbicides and insecticides (Sharma et al. 1988; Patel 2011; Negi et al. 2019). In some Asian countries, L. camara’s leaves are utilised to treat rheumatoid arthritis, ulcers, and hypertension. Its roots and bark contain lantamine, an alkaloid with antipyretic and antispasmodic properties, although these effects remain scientifically unproven (Ghisalberti 2000)".

In fact, it looks like every single recent review article describes L. camara's traditional medicinal uses. Therefore, if we have an article that doesn't mention traditional medicine, we're violating the Wikipedia:Neutral point of view – basically putting our thumb on the scale to say "The policy says we have to represent fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, this particular view that has been published by high-quality reliable sources, but we don't want to, because we don't think Wikipedia should say anything 'positive' about traditional medicinal uses of any plant."

Biased editing is a policy violation. It'd be great if someone could improve this article, and add some of these better and newer sources, but fundamentally the articles are supposed to reflect the sources, including sources that are not currently cited in the article, and these edits made the article not reflect the sources. I emphasize "sources that are not currently cited in the article" because this is sometimes incredibly important. It is occasionally possible to find a source that meets all the usual standards for reliability, but due to an unfortunate oversight (sometimes even just a typo), it says something that all the other sources disagree with. An article should not say "Tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer" just because an editor can find a single "good" source claiming that. (Indeed, tobacco doesn't cause lung cancer – if you're using it as an ornamental garden plant instead of smoking it.) The article's contents needs to reflect the views given in reliable sources at all times, regardless of what's inside the ref tags. Editors shouldn't remove content solely due to perceived failings of the cited source, if the content itself is still correct. It doesn't matter how old the source is that says smoking causes lung cancer, or that L. camara has been used as an herbal medicine, because the facts haven't changed in the intervening year. Fix the source if you want, but don't remove the accurate content. WhatamIdoing (talk) 17:09, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

See also Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#TBAN proposal for Ggck2, where some of the same editors are complaining about some of the same things in the context of polyphenols. We probably need to reach a shared understanding for not just herbal medicine narrowly, but perhaps anything not regulated as a drug/biologic by the FDA more broadly, and then document that understanding formally. WhatamIdoing (talk) 23:45, 12 October 2026 (UTC)

(1) The medical sourcing rules were supposed to stop Wikipedia from promoting unproven medical treatments, but are being applied by people who are sitting firmly in the medical school, and don't realise that next door is the ethnology department. We need to be able to say that an indigenous people use a particular dried leaf to treat warts, just like we say they use a particular tree to make canoes. We need to have a way to do so without implying that their treatment meets standard of proof required by western science-based medicine; it's just an ethnological statement of what these people do with a plant. Maybe we need a special header for medical sections in articles, or a special disclaimer for articles that contain information that could be construed as medical but isn't? But (2) there's a sort of fuzzy boundary between the two, because Western science-based medicine often looks at indigenous uses of plants and fungi and investigates whether there is some tangible basis behind it. Sometimes the leaf really does work, because it contains a useful chemical. Very often, the main Western interest in the chemical is based on the fact that it's found in leaves used to treat warts (were this not true, we wouldn't need the Nagoya Protocol to protect the economic rights of the people who were rubbing leaves on warts). The fact that the chemical has been tested is part of its history, part of its human relevance, even if it turns out to be utterly ineffective - and we should be able to tell the story of a chemical. I understand why the medical community is being rather aggressive about this, but I think the current enforcement is overly-narrow and misses the point that we are a broad-interest encyclopedia catering for historians, ethnologists, botanists, artists, linguists, as well as medics and their patients. Elemimele (talk) 09:37, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

I think a good solution would be to have different sections where different standards apply (which I believe they already are). Historical use can't really be judged against current standards because they didn't exist then, and the same applies to use under different "medical frameworks". Germany, for example, (used to) license tea drugs for certain indications partly based on historical use. That would often not meet WP:MEDASSESS - but would still be relevant.

Perhaps having a dedicated section on human health might address this? Ggck2 (talk) 11:56, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Sedative was merged to general anaesthetic

Not sure if anyone here noticed, but Sedative was merged to General anaesthetic. Windwardcoast (talk) 21:14, 6 October 2026 (UTC)

It seems that the article became an original research after the merge. As I see across the literature, those terms are different: , , . Under sedation, patients are able to respond to stimuli such as pain. However, under general anaesthesia, patients are unable to respond to any stimuli. These states are caused by different drugs, they can be used for different purposes, and they have different advantages and disadvantages. D6194c-1cc (talk) 06:04, 7 October 2026 (UTC)

A sedative and a general anaesthetic are different. Not all sedatives result in general anesthesia. Unmerged now, discussion here Talk:Sedative#Merge_with_General_anesthetic? Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 13:03, 10 October 2026 (UTC)

Requested move at Talk:Mental disorder § Requested move 1 October 2026

An editor has requested that Mental disorder be moved to Mental illness, which may be of interest to this WikiProject. You are invited to participate in the move discussion. Skarmory (talk • contribs) 08:42, 8 October 2026 (UTC)
(Notification provided by Move+)

Lethal injection doses

I happened across Smallbones forthcoming Signpost write-up about botched executions and people involved checking Wikipedia for dosage information. The story isn't that Wikipedia was wrong (it's more about a sign of the person's incompetence), but we do have a guideline that says to err on the side of excluding dosage information. I went ahead and removed it from Pentobarbital, then started poking around. Sure enough, doses were listed at sodium thiopental, too, and then lethal injection, which had a rather shocking amount of unsourced content, including doses. I checked the talk page and its archive and did not see any affirmative consensus to override the MOS advice, but as I started to click through the other articles in Category:Lethal_injection_components, it seemed like a good time to pop in here to gauge thoughts. (apologies to Smallbones for sorta-kinda scooping the back-end of your story -- it seemed like something best addressed quickly). — Rhododendrites ^talk \\ 03:05, 9 October 2026 (UTC)

Yah this was one of the reasons we started MDWiki:Main_Page, so that we would have more control over included dosing information as this was one of the common requests from those who use our EN offline app. Doc James (talk · contribs · email) 12:55, 10 October 2026 (UTC)

RSN

Input would be appreciated in WP:RSN#WP:MEDRS and material about effects in animals. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested «@» °∆t° 09:08, 12 October 2026 (UTC)

MEDRS guidance for mental-health claims at Sam Vaknin

This LLM-generated text has been collapsed and should be excluded from assessments of consensus. — Newslinger talk 12:15, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

The following discussion has been closed. Please do not modify it.

Could editors familiar with WP:MEDRS review whether parts of Sam Vaknin contain medical or psychological claims that require MEDRS-quality sourcing?

The article includes, or recently included, detailed material about narcissistic personality disorder, trauma, "Cold Therapy", narcissistic supply, cold empathy, prognosis, treatment, and related terminology. Much of this appears to be sourced to the subject's own publications, interviews, websites, videos, or affiliated material.

I am not a medical professional, and the article does not appear to establish the subject, through independent reliable sources, as a clinician or licensed mental-health professional. I would therefore appreciate guidance from editors familiar with MEDRS on what level of sourcing is required for these claims.

My question is narrow: do these kinds of claims require MEDRS-quality secondary sources, and are self-published or interview-based sources adequate for presenting them in Wikipedia's voice?

Related article Talk discussion and full rationale: Talk:Sam Vaknin#Comprehensive BLP rewrite: self-sourced clinical material and due weight

Dtf1978 (talk) 07:09, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

To answer the general question: In a biography about a person, it is acceptable to report someone's beliefs as being their beliefs, even if those beliefs are about a medical condition. It is not necessary to have a WP:MEDRS source to describe an individual's history (e.g., "In 1990, he was diagnosed with ____") or the individual's beliefs (e.g., "He believes cancer is caused by ____"). Any ordinary source will do for that. WhatamIdoing (talk) 21:54, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Strategy needed for addressing misinformation *inside* mainstream institutions

The concept likely doesn't need much of an intro ("If RFK gets the CDC to declare that vaccines cause spontaneous decapitation, that doesn't make it true - but who gets to define what is 'misinformation' if we can't trust institutions like the CDC?"), but I suspect the breadth of the need will take some people by surprise. It is going to impact a lot of Wikipedia articles over the next while (on topics of life-or-death importance), and I anticipate edit wars springing up over whose "official" source is definitive. So it will be important to work out a coherent, science-based policy for resolving discordances. As far as I can tell there is not an existing discussion on this, but I'm new here so if I missed a link in my searches please let me know.

My apologies for the length of this post, but I want to nail down the evidence so we can get past the "is this really as serious as all that?" stage and into dealing with it. I've been working on this professionally for years so this is actually just the tip of the iceberg...

The starting point is the Module 3 report of the UK COVID Inquiry, sections 1.50-1.86. This sounds like a lot, but each section is generally only 1-3 sentences so it's a quick read - and I'd suggest an essential one for everyone concerned about keeping misinformation out of Wikipedia. As the Inquiry findings highlight, this is a "widespread failure" (s1.52), where assumptions held by large portions of the mainstream clinical infectious-diseases community and the policy and guidance based on them "were and are wrong" (1.58).

For those unfamiliar with the story, it's the infamous "5-micron error" - the mistaken belief that when you generate a particle of respiratory fluid >5 microns in diameter (by coughing, talking, breathing, etc) it will fall rapidly to the ground within 3 feet / 1m; and that therefore most pathogens can't possibly be airborne. That's taught in medical schools - here's one example (open the "Why aren't N95 respirators recommended..." section) that only stopped in 2024, and that only because I emailed a contact there and explained all this to them. The problem is it's completely, demonstrably wrong - aerosols of that size take around half an hour to fall to the ground in still air, without considering evaporation, and under real-world conditions everything up to 100 microns or so (3+ orders of magnitude greater volume) shrinks to a size that can stay airborne indefinitely before it hits the ground. Worse, while a large portion of clinical infection control policy is based on this error even today, the true behaviour has been non-controversially established in the sciences since at least 1934 (here's the original paper, it's very well written and accessible). This is Millikan-oil-drop level physics, there's nothing to even have a controversy about at this point, and there hasn't been for decades.

The problem we face now is that despite the findings of the UK Inquiry, and the identical point highlighted by the SARS Commission in its 2006 report on errors made in the handling of SARS-CoV-1 (see notes at bottom of the 3rd page in this PDF), this failure nevertheless persists. If anything, there's an ongoing effort to double down and bury the error, rather than correcting it. The group of clinicians at the top of the international infection control space is very small, close-knit, and sure of itself ("there wasn’t enough good evidence to say that we were uncertain" - see s1.85 of that UK Inquiry report). As this error was so badly out of date, made after shouting down the world's top scientific and subject matter experts in aerosol transmission of pathogens, and (in the words of the WHO's recent ADG and previously its Chief Scientist), "a very big mistake" that wasted "an enormous number of lives", the conflicts of interest involved are immense. They insisted we must only try to stop an airborne disease with handwashing - not merely arguing against the likelihood of aerosol transmission but asserting certainty that it was not a risk that needed mitigating just in case the experts were right. With on the order of 25 million people dead as a direct result, and long COVID affecting orders of magnitude more, this may well be the single most harmful preventable medical error in history.

But now the latest WHO guidance on everything from Ebola to pneumonic plague doubles down on that initial error, and denies the need for aerosol-appropriate PPE (at minimum particulate respirators - see for example this standards-based tool from the Canadian Standards Association, or this interdisciplinary review) - instead substituting the loose-fitting medical / surgical masks they mistakenly advised for COVID. I initially made a note to write this up after seeing the misinformed claim that surgical masks were adequate on the page for pneumonic plague, however I note that has since been corrected (I don't know who @Paigette is, but good work!). The assumption that Ebola is certainly not airborne is another one of those "everybody knows" things, but no-one can actually point to the primary evidence proving that to be the case (and from animal studies it appears likely that Ebola is actually at least partially airborne already, if not very efficient at it - for the moment).

So this is something that is going to come up across just about all diseases that infect or can be shed or bled into the lungs, and will require a coherent policy highlighting that pages touching on PPE / ventilation / aerosol transmission of disease should rely on scientific and subject-matter (OHS, HVAC engineering etc) sources, rather than medical guidance and what "everybody knows" in the clinic. This is particularly important due to the accelerating trend of even very official medical guidance and reviews going off the rails, due to reliance on secondary and tertiary sources rather than the primary literature - and in many cases when claims in them are traced back through the citation chains to the primary literature they are not actually supported by the original source(s).

So my ask here is that this group establish and apply such a policy, ensuring it is based on knowledge and understanding from a diverse range of fields with relevant scientific and subject-matter expertise; and then be prepared to defend it against the political pressure and back-room games I have seen in other areas. I am happy to contribute, but didn't want to launch into it without starting with a broader discussions.

Thanks!

Consilientoutlier (talk) 19:08, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Hi @Consilientoutlier! Thanks for posting. I think many wikipedians have limited time, can you condense this down and summarize for some of us who dont have that much time? We do have a very in depth guide for this on WP:Identifying reliable sources (medicine) User:Bluethricecreamman (Talk·Contribs) 19:21, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

The really short version is: per the UK COVID Inquiry and a bunch of other references (a subset of which are cited above), systematic reviews and guidance from within the clinical space are not reliable sources for assertions about topics from other fields such as aerosol science, OHS, what constitutes appropriate PPE for different airborne pathogens, which pathgens are airborne, efficacy of ventilation at removing aerosol-containing pathogens, release of pathogens from the lungs, etc.

This results from a combination of misinformed beliefs held within the clinical sphere about topics that fall outside of clinical competencies (the "widespread failure", in the words of the Inquiry), and widely-used heuristics for evidence synthesis within the clinical space that suffer from "subjectivity involved in virtually every important decision in rating certainty of evidence and moving from evidence to recommendations", and are systematically biased against non-clinical sources (which are often the most rigorous sources of relevant scientific evidence).

Wikipedia requires clear safeguards against the resulting misinformation (and, as the COIs kick in, disinformation). Consilientoutlier (talk) 19:34, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Also worth noting that this is the same mechanism the MAHA types are using to push their misinformation into medical guidance so fast. Common medical evidence-synthesis formalisms are primarily a way to reach consensus between whoever is allowed in the room - so he who picks the pickers, picks the cherries, whether the subject matter is vaccines, trans healthcare, drinking pathogen-laden water, or breathing pathogen-laden air. This is why it's so challenging to clearly explain how what RFK is doing is breaking the rules - because it's not. That's the system operating as designed. It's just that the positions being pushed into guidance now are more obviously extreme - but you can already see them being normalized, because a generation of MDs have been taught that these sources represent the voice of science.

From a philosophy-of-science perspective, the problem is that heuristics like GRADE are inherently incompatible with scientific approaches, as the latter rely on consilience, and the former is fundamentally a policy on how to cherry-pick. Yes, in a structured way, and that's better than unstructured cherry-picking, but in the end it's still cherry picking - just with someone's arbitrarily chosen rule set layered on top. At this point there's a huge amount of money and authority at stake to muddy the waters further as well.

EBM+ can be useful for quick-and-dirty decisions, such as when a patient's coming in the door in an hour and there's no time to learn an entire field of science, but GRADE etc lack the rigour imposed by the scientific prioritization of reconciling discordant evidence. Which is pretty much the whole "widespread failure" the UK Inquiry was talking about. Consilientoutlier (talk) 20:38, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

Here's a short answer:

1. WP:DUE is still the key policy. If one agency/organization/country is out of step with the rest, then we ignore the outlier and report the mainstream POV.
2. If the mainstream accepted position is wrong, then Wikipedia will be wrong, too. Wikipedia is not the place to correct the rest of the world's errors.

Sorry if that's disappointing, but the approach is helpful overall. You personally, of course, are not required to add any material that you believe is inappropriate, and you could (gently) suggest the removal or softening of material that you believe is wrong, and you could (gently) encourage the occasional inclusion of the minority (i.e., correct) POV, but you can't add the minority POV in a way that presents it as the currently accepted mainstream POV. What's possible looks like "Most scientists say these fall out of the air, though some disagree". What's not possible is "These stay in the air for a long time, and I've got proof that's being unfairly ignored by mainstream medicine".

WhatamIdoing (talk) 22:02, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

I get where you're coming from, but in this case, it's actually the other way around: scientists and the entirety of the scientific literature dating back to at least 1934, the UK COVID Inquiry, the SARS Commission, everyone who knows anything about aerosols, you name it - they all confirm that these things float around in the air. Even the WHO as an organization takes the position I am advocating. If you pick a random aerosol scientist and email them to ask how long it takes say a 10-micron aerosol to fall to the ground, you will get my answer from them, rather than the position infection control leaders are pushing. It's so definitively established that it's embedded in national standards that predate COVID by a decade. There isn't even a debate (in the sense of people willing to publicly dispute that mainstream scientific consensus) - just a few well-connected political types off in the corner ignoring the consensus, and writing down their preferred alternative facts in documents they control (exactly like RFK). I can probably get some of the top aerosol scientists in the world to confirm that if you need it.

So the tiny minority - and demonstrably false - position is that taken by a subset of infection control clinicians with no relevant advanced science training (and TBH almost no advanced science training at all), who continue to claim that these things fall out of the air. This tiny minority is very influential - but again, the situation is directly analogous to RFK taking control over the CDC. They just haven't been as spectacularly, stereotypically loopy as RFK, so they get away with it more by playing the old-boys'-club card.

So WP:DUE is great - all I'm asking is that Wikipedia follow it (specifically "Wikipedia should not present a dispute as if a view held by a small minority is as significant as the majority view") and ensure it is not fooled by the games being played in the arena of medical politics and regulatory capture.

If you haven't already, it's really worth reading that bit of the UK COVID Inquiry (Module 3 report, s1.50-1.86) - it'll take you maybe 10 minutes, it confirms this is correct, and it doesn't get any more mainstream or thorough than that. Consilientoutlier (talk) 23:56, 13 October 2026 (UTC)

If that POV is DUE, then you should have no trouble finding more and stronger sources to support it, compared to editors who are claiming the opposite. A reputable medical-school textbook trumps a website; a recent review article is better than a newspaper article; a reference manual overrides public hearings. The rules for what counts as a good source for medical content are at Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources (medicine).

Round up your two or three best, most gold-plated secondary(!) sources and go correct one article, or even just one section of one article. Wait a couple of days and see if anyone's reverted it or complained. If not, then find another and make another small-to-medium change. Repeat as needed until you encounter problems or you've corrected all the relevant articles on Wikipedia.

(BTW, I like your username.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 16:18, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

• As a general rule, government bodies, and papers or studies released by governments or under the auspices and direction of the government, or anything that is clearly not independent of the government (ie. done by an appointee, selected by someone in the government to write something, etc) are considered WP:PRIMARY sources for exactly the reasons this makes clear; they reflect the opinions of the government and nothing else. There are some exceptions when there's a clear wall of separation coupled with an editorial policy and a reputation for fact-checking and accuracy - the BBC or NPR remain reliable as long as the prime minister or president can't just call them up and order them to publish XYZ - but as we've seen, these protections can sometimes fall very quickly, and when they do, prior reputation no longer applies and it collapses to being a primary source for the opinions of the elected official calling the shots and nothing else. --Aquillion (talk) 18:41, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

  That's a useful lens. The UK COVID Inquiry would pretty clearly fall outside that, as is it is an independent public inquiry (which independence it demonstrated by being highly critical of the governments in question). The same is true of the SARS Commission. And of course independent scientific examination by qualified individuals (meaning, people with relevant scientific and subject-matter expertise) all yields the same consensus position I am trying to raise awareness of here, all the way up to national-level standards, top-tier international reviews and even WHO guidance - where it involves adequate disciplinary breadth to provide independence from the conflicts of interest driven by commitment to prior medical errors.

  In contrast, the medical guidance processes producing the misinformation I am concerned about do clearly fall afoul of that rule. They rely on GRADE methods, whose originator has described them by saying: "We see only one serious limitation in the Core GRADE approach, and that is the subjectivity involved in virtually every important decision in rating certainty of evidence and moving from evidence to recommendations" - by definition they are merely a primary source for the opinions of the individuals calling the shots. And that makes sense, because this is exactly what they are - GRADE is fundamentally a process for aligning subjective opinions about the evidence held by whoever is allowed in the room. He who picks the pickers, picks the cherries.

  There was a recent scandal about exactly this, involving the use of GRADE to rewrite science on trans health care to satisfy certain preferred ideological positions that runs along very similar lines as the issue here about trying to rewrite science on aerosol behaviour and PPE. The power to choose who's in the room is the power to determine the output, because the process itself discards evidence from outside a very narrow range of methods to begin with, and then participants are entitled to up- and down-grade what's left (essentially at will - there are requirements to justify these calls, but they are not made public in any meaningful detail so there's no opportunity for independent review).

  Participants can then fill in the many resulting blanks with their personal opinions (the GRADE evidence hierarchy formally defines medical opinion and even editorials as higher-value evidence than all of science from any other field). So what you get out (whether it's guidance, policy, etc) reflects the opinions you put in. Ideally those opinions might happen to coincide with the conclusions you would get from more rigorous scientific approaches - in theory, in the absence of COIs and where the team includes all necessary expertise, you would hope that it would do so consistently. But there just aren't any safeguards that could ensure any sort of reliably objective output. Consilientoutlier (talk) 19:42, 14 October 2026 (UTC)

  Wikipedia:Independent does not mean secondary. We have two considerations here:

  • Someone (e.g., a politician, or someone presenting information in a public hearing hosted by the independent inquiry) has a view, and they announce it: "Keeping newborns at home reduces the risk of spreading respiratory viruses, so their first medical appointment after birth will be with a home health nurse in their own home, assuming they have one." This is:
    • primary for what their view is (including any actions they're taking),
    • non-independent for the fact that this is their view (and what they plan to do about it), and
    • independent for the claim that a home health visit would reduce viral transmission compared to having all the babies spend time sharing germs in the pediatricians' waiting room (because nobody is paying the speaker to state this fact, and the politician is unlikely to get tangible/financial benefits from this). If this same statement were made by someone who is paid or otherwise stands to benefit (e.g., a lobbyist, business, or nursing society), then it might not be independent.
  • Someone (anyone) took some prior information and stirred it up to produce a new idea: "Based on the combined data from this 2016 study and that 2019 experiment and this other 2024 paper, I conclude that there's a 1% chance of a newborn getting a virus from being in a doctor's waiting room during the first 7 days after birth." This is typically:
    • secondary for the fact and
    • independent for the fact, unless:
      • they stand to personally benefit from getting the Correct™ conclusion, in which case they're non-independent, or
      • they did the prior research that they're relying on (a more academic kind of non-independence).

  A UK independent inquiry is independent of the government. Being independent of the government doesn't make them independent of everything in the world.

  They should be producing a secondary source, but that doesn't mean that everything they say – and certainly not everything they hear – is a secondary source. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:41, 16 October 2026 (UTC)