How we work
Editorial & sourcing policy
This page explains who writes articles on adhdtestonline.net, which sources we trust first, how we handle medical claims, how we correct mistakes, and what we will not publish. If something on the site looks wrong, this is where you find out how to get it fixed.
Who writes these articles
Our articles are written by a small team of health writers and editors. We are not a hospital, a clinic, or a research institute. None of our writers are practising licensed physicians, psychiatrists, or therapists, and we never use the title “Dr.” as a prefix unless a named contributor actually holds that licensure — which, for now, none of our in-house writers do.
You can read the individual writer profiles on the Writers page. Each profile includes what that writer covers, how they research, and what they explicitly do not do (diagnose, prescribe, provide therapy, or give personal medical advice).
How we source
Every claim that could affect a health decision is tied to at least one named source. We work off a three-tier hierarchy, and we prefer the higher tiers.
Tier A — public-health and specialty guideline bodies
- U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) — adult and child ADHD pages
- U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
- UK National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) — NG87 ADHD guideline
- UK National Health Service (NHS)
- World Health Organization (WHO)
- American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and American Psychiatric Association (APA/DSM-5-TR)
Tier B — peer-reviewed clinical reviews and meta-analyses
We prefer recent (≤5 years) systematic reviews or meta-analyses published in peer-reviewed journals, and named clinical textbooks where the subject is established rather than emerging.
Tier C — primary studies and specialist sites
Individual primary studies, CHADD, ADDitude Magazine, and Russell Barkley’s or Edward Hallowell’s published work. We use these to illustrate or explain, and we check them against Tier A / B before relying on them for a health claim.
We do not use random Medium posts, marketing blogs, TikTok threads, AI-generated paraphrases, or supplement-company websites as primary sources for medical claims.
AI use disclosure
We use large language models as a research and drafting aid. Generated drafts are not published as-is; a human writer rewrites them, checks every citation against the original source, and rewrites any sentence that is a known AI pattern. An article that reads like it was written by an LLM is a bug, and we want to hear about it.
We also use LLMs to help caption and describe images, and to summarise long clinical documents for internal research notes. They do not have final say over what ships.
Medical claims we will and will not make
We will describe what published guidelines say, what peer-reviewed studies have found, what a common ADHD presentation looks like, and what happens in a formal assessment.
We will not tell you that you have ADHD, that you don’t, that you should or shouldn’t take a specific medication, what dose you should take, or whether to change an existing prescription. Those are clinical decisions; they belong to you and a licensed clinician who has seen your history.
Where a topic is close to a clinical decision — medication choice, dosage, starting or stopping therapy, crisis support — the article is deliberately written to send you to a licensed clinician, not to substitute for one.
Updates and corrections
Our articles are reviewed on a rolling basis. Where an article touches current guidelines, medications, or research claims, we aim to revisit it at least annually and after any notable change from a Tier A source.
If you spot a factual error, a broken citation link, an outdated guideline reference, or a claim that isn’t supported by the source we’ve given, please email joe@adhdtestonline.net with the URL, the sentence, and the correction. We fix confirmed errors by updating the live article, noting the change in the article’s modified date, and, for material corrections, adding a short changelog at the bottom of the post.
Advertising and sponsorship
ADHD Test Online does not run display ads on article pages and does not accept sponsored content. We will never trade editorial placement for money. If that ever changes, it will be disclosed on this page before any sponsored content goes live.
Contact
For editorial questions, corrections, or general feedback: joe@adhdtestonline.net. For a general medical emergency, please call your local emergency number. We are not a crisis service.
Last reviewed: April 2026. This policy is a living document.