Medical-review policy.

The policy.

No licensed physician has reviewed individual pages yet. Until clinical review is complete, this site should be treated as an evidence-reading guide, not medical advice.

CellDecide is written and maintained by Jimmy L Wu, an evidence-first regenerative-medicine writer. Jimmy L Wu is not a licensed physician. Every page is reviewed against primary sources before publication — U.S. and international regulators, ministries, trial registries, peer-reviewed studies, systematic reviews, and professional-society guidance, with translated non-English sources handled per the translation standard at /sources.

CellDecide is informational. It is not a substitute for clinical care. Always consult a licensed physician before making any medical decision.

Last review of this policy: 2026-05-14.

What review happens before publication

Before a page ships, each factual claim is checked against the source type that can actually answer it. Source review on this site is structured around the principle that different questions belong to different source authorities — a registry can confirm a trial exists, a regulator can confirm a local authorization, a clinic page can confirm what the clinic claims, and none of those alone can confirm clinical benefit. The matching below is what we do in practice.

• U.S. FDA status is checked against FDA consumer pages, the FDA-approved cellular and gene therapy products list, and the FDA warning-letter database.
• Non-U.S. regulatory status is checked against the relevant local regulator or ministry — Japan PMDA and MHLW, South Korea MFDS, Thai FDA and Ministry of Public Health, China NMPA and National Health Commission, Mexico COFEPRIS, Panama MINSA, the European Medicines Agency, and others named on the page that uses them.
• Trial existence and registration is checked against ClinicalTrials.gov, the WHO ICTRP, the EU Clinical Trials Register, jRCT, ChiCTR, and other primary trial registries.
• Study findings and effect sizes are checked against the underlying peer-reviewed paper or Cochrane systematic review, not against a press release or clinic summary of it.
• Professional-society guidance(ISSCR, ASGCT, AAOS, IFATS, specialty societies for the indication in question) is checked against the society's published guideline, with the date.
• Clinic, hospital, and manufacturer claims are read as claims to verify — pricing, protocol, consent language, accreditation, product description — and cross-checked against the regulator, registry, or study that can confirm or contradict each claim. We do not accept provider documents as proof of clinical benefit on their own.
• Claims that depend on non-English sources are handled per the translation standard at /sources — official English where available, careful machine translation reviewed against the original where not, and disclosure on the page when a translated source was used.

What source-reviewed means

Source review is mechanical and auditable. It is not the same as clinical review, and the site does not present it as such. In practice it looks like this:

• We open the source.Not the summary, not the press release, not the clinic page's interpretation — the source itself.
• We match the claim to the source. The sentence on the page must reflect what the source actually says, for the indication and population the source actually covers.
• We do not cite a source for more than it can support. A registry listing is not an efficacy claim. A regulator authorization in one country is not a global proof claim. A single study is not a category verdict.
• We attach the source near the claim. Footnotes carry publisher, URL, source type (regulator, registry, study, society, provider document), and a verification date.
• We disclose when a translated source was used. The footnote names that translation was involved and which original-language source was read, per the translation standard at /sources.
• When sources disagree, we name the disagreement. If U.S. and non-U.S. regulators reach different conclusions about the same cellular product, the page reports both — not the more convenient one.

What clinical review would add

Source review can verify whether a claim matches its source. Clinical review — by a credentialed physician or scientist with relevant expertise — adds a different kind of check that source review cannot do on its own.

• Whether the medical framing on the page is fair to a practicing clinician's reading of the same evidence.
• Whether important clinical context is missing — a contraindication, a baseline-care alternative, a known interaction, a population-specific caveat.
• Whether the patient-facing interpretation overstates, understates, or implies certainty the underlying evidence does not earn.
• Whether risk and adverse-event language is calibrated to the realistic profile of the intervention.
• Whether the page's suggestion to discuss a treatment with a physician is the right next step for the specific indication and population being described.

Global regulatory review

Regenerative medicine is global. When a page on CellDecide discusses care offered in Thailand, Japan, South Korea, China, Mexico, Panama, the European Union, or any other jurisdiction, review includes checking the relevant local regulator, ministry, and trial registry where available, in addition to U.S. sources. The complete list of authorities we read from is at /sources.

The review principles we apply across borders are:

• FDA status is stated for U.S. readers. It is the answer to the U.S. regulatory question, and we name it plainly.
• Local regulatory status is stated separately. A Japanese conditional approval, a Thai hospital exemption, a Korean biopharmaceutical review, a Chinese hospital exception — each is reported under the authority that actually grants it.
• One status does not automatically override the other. When a U.S. FDA position and a non-U.S. regulator position disagree, the page reports both, names the disagreement, and does not silently pick a winner.
• “Available abroad” is not treated as proof of benefit. A treatment being legally offered in another country is a fact about that country's regulatory pathway, not a fact about clinical efficacy.
• “Not FDA-approved” is not treated as useless. It is a fact about U.S. labeling and enforcement, not a global verdict on the underlying biology or on a registered trial pipeline elsewhere.

Translation review

Many of the international regulators and registries we read publish their most current and most specific documents only in the original language. The translation standard for those sources is established at /sources — when a source is not in English. The short version of how that standard interacts with review is:

• We prefer official English versions of regulator documents when they exist.
• When no official English version exists, we may use machine translation as a first pass, then verify key terms manually against the original language.
• High-stakes claims — approval status, adverse-event statements, safety notices — are not cited from a machine-translated snippet in isolation.
• Regulatory terms with no clean one-to-one English equivalent (conditional approval, hospital exemption, clinical-use pathway, compassionate use, registered vs. licensed) are preserved in the original wording alongside an English description.
• When a translation is uncertain, the page says so rather than smoothing it over.

Corrections and escalation

Readers, clinicians, researchers, native-language regulators and reviewers, and translators are all welcome to challenge a citation on this site. If a claim does not match its source, a citation is broken, a regulatory status is out of date, a translation is wrong, or a label is mis-assigned — tell us.

We treat substantiated source, regulatory, safety, and translation corrections as priority work and aim to address them within 48 hours of receipt. When a correction affects regulatory status, safety language, or clinical framing, the affected page is updated and the last-updated date moves with the change.

When clinical review goes live

We are actively working to engage a credentialed clinical reviewer — a physician or a scientist with relevant regenerative-medicine, immunology, or specialty expertise. The intent is clinical review of individual pages, not a one-time site sign-off.

When clinical review is live, every reviewed page will carry a top-of-page disclosure naming the reviewer, the reviewer's credentials and primary affiliation, and the review date. Pages that have not yet been clinically reviewed will continue to carry the “not yet reviewed” disclosure verbatim until they have been.

We have not set a public deadline for the clinical-review process to be in production, and we will not estimate one until the engagement is far enough along that the estimate would be credible. The honest answer today is actively engaging, not yet live.

Related

• Methodology — the worldview behind the source tiers, the evidence ladder, and the eight dimensions we score on every treatment page.
• Sources — the regulators, ministries, registries, journals, and guidelines we read from, with the translation standard for non-English documents.
• About — who runs the site, and the global, evidence-disciplined posture.
• Disclosures — affiliate, advertising, and editorial-independence statements.
• How CellDecide weighs evidence — a plain-English reading guide to lab studies, early human trials, controlled trials, and approvals.
• Contact — corrections, source challenges, and translation feedback.