In August 2026 we removed public user profiles and user-submitted comments from iMedix. Comment submission is closed and the change is permanent.
Accounts themselves were not deleted. Registered users keep their accounts and can still sign in. What no longer exists is the public, indexed layer: profile pages and comments visible to visitors and to search engines.
The profiles that remain belong to our doctors, our authors and people who work or have worked at iMedix in a medical capacity. Every one of them carries a name, a stated qualification and a role.
This is the reasoning, written by the editorial team that made the decision.
What a points score does on a medical page
Our profile pages displayed a name, an avatar, a question count and a points total. The points were a community feature: they accumulated through activity on the site.
On a page about a prescription medicine, that arrangement does something we did not intend.
A name, a photograph, a score. Beside it, on the same page, the reviewing physician with their specialty and review date.
Activity on the site. Not training, not clinical experience, not review of anything. Nothing about medicine at all.
A number next to a name reads as standing. That is what scores are for, and it is why engagement systems use them. On a recipe site the effect is harmless and probably useful. On a page describing a medicine somebody has been prescribed, it places an appearance of authority next to actual authority and offers the reader no way to tell them apart.
We built a ranking system for participation and let it sit where a reader looks for credentials.
What a comment does to a drug page
A medicine page is one document. The dosing table, the interaction warnings, the frequency of side effects — all of it is read as a single body of information by someone who arrived with a question about a medicine they take.
A comment sits on that page with the same visual weight as everything else. Someone reading quickly does not sort the page into this came from approved labelling and this came from a stranger in 2019. They read the page.
A comment saying I take double the dose and I’m fine appears alongside the dose a regulator approved. A comment saying this gave me terrible side effects appears alongside frequencies measured in controlled trials. Both are real experiences. Neither can be verified, contextualised or corrected.
Moderation does not resolve this. We moderated for abuse, spam and obvious misinformation, and that worked reasonably well. But moderation removes what is clearly wrong; it cannot make a stranger’s dosing anecdote safe to display beside approved dosing.
The problem was never the bad comments. It was the ordinary ones, in the wrong place.
The site was holding two different standards
Over the past year we rebuilt how our medicine pages are written and reviewed. The standard we now apply to everything we publish:
- Every claim about dosing, contraindications, interactions or regulatory status carries an inline source marker pointing to a specific section of a specific document
- Each source records its revision date, not only the date we accessed it, so cited sections can be re-verified when labelling changes
- Adverse-effect frequencies are attributed to the population that produced them, rather than presented as universal
- Where evidence is absent, the page states which evidence is missing and why, instead of filling the gap with careful phrasing
- Every page carries a named reviewer whose specialty matches the drug category, with a review date and a public profile
The user-generated layer was exempt from all of it. Profile pages carried no qualification, no editorial oversight and no review date. Comments carried no source and were never revisited when the labelling beneath them changed.
We were applying one standard to what we wrote and no standard at all to what appeared beside it — on the same pages, under our name. That inconsistency is what decided this.
The regulatory and legal considerations
Several considerations outside editorial quality also weighed on the decision. We set them out because readers are entitled to the full reasoning, not only the flattering part.
A comment describing your own diagnosis and medication is, under European data protection law, personal data concerning health — a special category with heightened protection. A public profile linking every such comment to one persistent identity is materially different from an isolated remark: it assembles a health history about an identifiable person and publishes it indefinitely, indexed, with no retention limit. Removing the public layer removes that at source. Accounts remain, because an account is not a publication.
Advertising and consumer protection regimes in several jurisdictions treat claims about a product’s effects as requiring substantiation, including where the claim is made by a user rather than the publisher. Disclaimers of the results may vary kind are not generally regarded as curing an unsubstantiated efficacy claim. A comment reporting that a medicine cured something is a claim on our page.
Where a comment describes taking a medicine for a purpose no regulator has approved, and that comment sits on the page about that medicine, the page begins to carry material about an unapproved use that we did not write, cannot substantiate and did not review.
Some comments described suspected side effects. As a publisher rather than a marketing authorisation holder, we are not part of the pharmacovigilance system and cannot act on them. A suspected adverse reaction left in a comment box reaches no regulator and no manufacturer. It is lost. Every medicine page now routes those reports to the appropriate national scheme instead, which is where they can do something.
We are describing considerations that informed an editorial decision, not offering a legal analysis. Nothing above should be read as legal advice.
What we are giving up
There is a real cost, and it would be dishonest to present this as pure gain.
First-hand experience is genuinely valuable. Knowing that a medicine made many people drowsy in a way the labelling calls uncommon tells a reader something the labelling does not. Patients frequently describe side effects more usefully than prescribing information does. Search engines value first-hand experience, and they are right to.
We have removed that, and we are not pretending it was worthless. Our conclusion is that experience of this kind needs attribution, context and review to be useful — and that an open comment box under an unverified profile supplies none of the three.
Publishing it unreviewed was easier than publishing it well, and easier is not a standard.
Whose profiles remain, and why
The profiles still on the site belong to people with a stated qualification and a stated relationship to iMedix: practising doctors who review our medicine pages, our authors, and colleagues who work or have worked here in a medical capacity.
Each of those profiles states who the person is, what they are qualified in, and what they do here. Where they review medicine pages, the pages name them and carry the date of review.
- A named author on every medicine page, distinct from the reviewer
- A named reviewer whose specialty matches the drug category — a urologist for men’s health, an endocrinologist for hormone therapies, an allergist for antihistamines
- The date of the last clinical review, and when the next is due
- A reference list in which every source states what it was used for, so a source contributing nothing can be identified and removed
For the experience that comments used to carry, we are working on a structured alternative that meets the same standard as the rest of the page: attributable, dated and reviewed. We would rather describe it when it exists than promise it now.
What this is not
This was not prompted by any enforcement action, complaint, legal demand or removal request. Nobody asked. It was an editorial decision, taken because the inconsistency had become indefensible to us.
Saying so matters, because a change made under pressure and a change made on principle look identical from outside. The only thing that separates them is when it happened.
It is also not a claim that user profiles and comments are harmful in general. On many kinds of site they are the most valuable thing on the page. Our conclusion is narrow and specific to what we publish: on pages describing prescription medicines, unverified accounts standing beside verified ones cost more in clarity than they add in perspective — and a participation score standing where credentials belong is worse than no signal at all.
If you had a profile or left comments here
Public profiles and comments were removed in full, across the site. Nothing was singled out and no individual account was actioned for anything it had posted.
Your account still exists and you can still sign in. What was removed is the public page and the published comments, not your registration.
Use your national scheme. Those reports reach the regulator; a comment on a website does not.
- FDA MedWatch — United States
- MHRA Yellow Card scheme — United Kingdom
How we select and verify sources, and how our review process works, is set out in our editorial policy.
