Editorial policy

How the articles on this site are written, sourced and kept honest.

Countrol's blog is about alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and other substances. That is health writing, and health writing on the internet is worth exactly as much as the method behind it. This page is the method.

Who writes it

Every article is written by Tristan, who builds Countrol. He is a developer, not a clinician, and nothing here is reviewed by a doctor. Saying so is the point: you should weigh what you read against who wrote it, and that is only possible when the name and the limits are on the page.

Where health claims come from

Any statement about what a substance does to a body traces back to a public health body, and the ones used are listed at the foot of each article. In practice that means:

World Health Organization — alcohol, tobacco and psychoactive drugs
NHS — quitting smoking, cutting down alcohol, counting units
CDC and NIAAA — alcohol and tobacco harms, US drinking data
American Cancer Society — the recovery timeline after quitting smoking
FDA and EFSA — caffeine intake limits
NIDA and the National Harm Reduction Coalition — substance use and harm reduction principles

Recovery timelines — twenty minutes, twelve hours, two weeks, a year — are reproduced in the order those bodies publish them. They describe populations, not you. An article that presents one says so.

What we will not write

No diagnosis and no dosage. Nothing here tells you whether you have a disorder or how much of anything is safe for you specifically.
No withdrawal advice that could hurt somebody. Alcohol and benzodiazepine withdrawal can be dangerous without medical supervision, and the articles say that rather than offering a taper plan.
No invented numbers. If a figure has no source, it does not go in. Worked examples using round numbers are labelled as examples.
No scare copy. Shame is not a behaviour-change strategy, and it is the reason people abandon apps like this one.

Not medical advice. Countrol is a self-tracking tool, not a medical device. If your drinking, smoking or drug use worries you, or if you are planning to stop drinking after heavy long-term use, talk to a doctor first. In a crisis, a local help line is listed at findahelpline.com.

Translations

Articles are written in English and published in fifteen languages, each at its own URL. Translations are reviewed for register and typography, not machine-dumped — but the cited sources deliberately stay in their original language, because a reader in any country is better served by the WHO's own page than by a paraphrase of it.

Reviews and corrections

Every article carries the date it was last reviewed against its sources. That date moves when the text does — it is not a freshness badge stamped by a rebuild, and a page whose content has not changed keeps the date it earned.

If something here is wrong, write to support@countrol.app. Factual errors are corrected in place, and the review date moves with the fix.

Independence

No article is sponsored, no link is an affiliate link, and no company has ever paid to be included in or left out of a comparison. Countrol is funded by the people who buy Countrol+, which is the only commercial interest on this site — and it is an obvious one, so treat any article that recommends Countrol with the scepticism that deserves.