Terms of Use

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These Terms of Use govern your access to and use of Pharmacopedia.wiki ("Pharmacopedia"), operated by the Pharmacopedia Collective. By reading, contributing to, or creating an account on Pharmacopedia, you agree to these terms. If you do not agree, please do not use the site.

Pharmacopedia is a free, open medical reference. It is built by a team of AI assistants, invited human experts, and volunteer contributors under the editorial oversight of Mark Elliott, MD. It is funded by Mark Elliott, MD; donations are accepted only if operating costs exceed what he can self-fund. There are no paid tiers, no subscriptions, no ads.

1. What Pharmacopedia is and is not

Pharmacopedia is a reference resource. Every page describes what is known about a medicine, problem, or health topic, with content organized for multiple reader audiences (Clinician, Patient, Traditional, Researcher) and sourced across multiple knowledge traditions (pharma, plant, experiential, traditional). It is not a clinical service, a diagnostic tool, or a prescribing platform.

Pharmacopedia does not give medical advice. Nothing on this site constitutes a diagnosis, a treatment recommendation, or a substitute for the advice of a qualified clinician who knows your individual circumstances. Do not make decisions about your health, your medications, or your treatment based solely on information you read here. If you have a medical question or emergency, consult a licensed clinician or call emergency services.

Pharmacopedia does not create a doctor-patient relationship. Reading Pharmacopedia, contributing to Pharmacopedia, or communicating with any Pharmacopedia contributor or editor does not establish any clinical relationship between you and anyone affiliated with this project.

2. Who operates Pharmacopedia

Pharmacopedia is operated by the Pharmacopedia Collective, a California nonprofit public benefit corporation formed under the California Nonprofit Public Benefit Corporation Law (Cal. Corp. Code § 5110 et seq.). The Collective has applied (or will apply) for federal tax-exempt status under Internal Revenue Code § 501(c)(3); that determination is pending IRS review. Pending federal determination does not affect the Collective's status as the operator of this site.

Mark Elliott, MD (mark@pharmacopedia.wiki) is the responsible officer of the Collective and the point of contact for legal, privacy, and editorial matters arising under these Terms.

3. Your account

You may read all of Pharmacopedia without an account. Creating an account allows you to submit proposed edits through our propose-review-approve workflow.

When you register:

You must provide accurate information. Impersonating a real person, a professional credential you do not hold, or another organization is prohibited and is grounds for immediate account termination.
You are responsible for keeping your credentials secure. Do not share your password.
You must be at least 13 years old to register. If you are under 18, a parent or legal guardian must review these terms with you.

We reserve the right to suspend or terminate accounts that violate these terms, abuse the editorial process, or harm the project or its contributors, with or without notice depending on severity.

4. Contributing content

Pharmacopedia uses a propose-review-approve editorial model. All submitted content is proposed first; it is reviewed by a qualified human reviewer before it becomes visible to readers.

By submitting any content to Pharmacopedia, you:

Confirm that you are the author of the content or have the right to submit it under the license below.
Confirm that the content does not infringe any third-party intellectual property rights.
Grant Pharmacopedia and all downstream users a perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, distribute, reproduce, and modify your contribution under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Text you contribute becomes part of the CC BY-SA 4.0 corpus of Pharmacopedia. You retain your own copyright; you are granting a license, not transferring ownership. You cannot later withdraw a contribution already incorporated into the project's CC BY-SA content under that license.

Do not submit content that:

You copied from a source without rights to reproduce it (copyrighted pharmaceutical-company materials, journal articles behind paywalls, etc.).
Includes protected health information (PHI) or personally identifiable information about any real individual.
Is false, misleading, or fabricated.
Is harassment, abuse, or threats directed at any person.
Promotes a commercial interest in a way that bypasses our editorial independence commitments.

Pharmacopedia has no obligation to publish submitted content. Rejected proposals are not published.

5. Adverse experience reports

Pharmacopedia provides a reader-experience reporting feature on medicine pages. This feature lets readers describe their own experiences with a medicine for quality-improvement purposes at Pharmacopedia.

This feature is not a registered adverse event reporting system. It does not satisfy any legal or regulatory requirement to report adverse reactions to health authorities. Reports submitted through this feature are not forwarded to the FDA, the CDC, or any other regulatory body. Raw individual reports are not published; they are held internally and only an anonymized signal (meeting a minimum count threshold) may eventually be surfaced in aggregate on the relevant page.

If you believe you or someone else is experiencing a serious adverse reaction, report it directly to:

FDA MedWatch (US): www.fda.gov/safety/medwatch
Your national pharmacovigilance authority (if outside the US)
Emergency services if the reaction is immediately life-threatening

6. Privacy

Our Privacy Policy explains what information we collect, how we use it, and your rights under California law (CCPA/CPRA) and other applicable law. Using Pharmacopedia is subject to the Privacy Policy in addition to these Terms.

In brief: we do not sell data, we do not run third-party tracking scripts, and we do not share user data with advertisers. Full details are in the Privacy Policy.

7. Intellectual property

Pharmacopedia content is CC BY-SA 4.0 unless otherwise stated on a specific page. You may copy, adapt, and redistribute Pharmacopedia content under the same license with attribution. The preferred citation form and BibTeX/Chicago/APA/Vancouver formats are available on each page via the citation widget.

Pharmacopedia's visual design (the Pharmacopedia seal, typography choices, color palette, and custom interface elements) is not CC BY-SA and is not available for reproduction without permission.

If you believe a page or contribution infringes your copyright, contact mark@pharmacopedia.wiki with: (a) a description of the allegedly infringing content and its URL; (b) your contact information; (c) a statement that you own the copyright or are authorized to act on the owner's behalf; and (d) a statement of good-faith belief that the use is not authorized. We will investigate and respond.

8. What we commit not to do

The Refusals page lists the things Pharmacopedia will never do. The most relevant to these Terms: we will never sell your health data, run ads, paywall content, accept commercial influence over content, or operate as a Class III medical device without proper regulatory review. Those commitments are incorporated here by reference.

9. Disclaimers and limitation of liability

Pharmacopedia makes reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy of information on this site, but medical knowledge changes rapidly and errors can occur. We do not warrant that any information on Pharmacopedia is complete, accurate, current, or applicable to your specific situation.

To the maximum extent permitted by applicable law, the Pharmacopedia Collective, Mark Elliott, MD, and all contributors disclaim all warranties, express or implied, regarding the site and its content. We are not liable for any harm arising from your reliance on information found on Pharmacopedia, including missed diagnoses, medication errors, or treatment decisions made without professional consultation.

California law does not permit the disclaimer of liability for gross negligence or willful misconduct; nothing in this section is intended to disclaim liability for those.

10. Governing law and disputes

These Terms are governed by the laws of the State of California, without regard to conflict of law principles.

Any dispute arising from these Terms or your use of Pharmacopedia will be resolved in the state or federal courts located in the State of California. You consent to the personal jurisdiction of those courts.

There is no mandatory arbitration clause here. You are not waiving your right to have a dispute heard in court. There is no class-action waiver. If a dispute is one that can properly be brought as a class action, you retain that right.

11. Changes to these Terms

We may update these Terms from time to time. Material changes will be announced on Pharmacopedia:Newsroom and, where feasible, by a site notice. The effective date at the bottom of this page will be updated. Continued use of the site after the effective date constitutes acceptance of the revised Terms.

We will not change the governing-law clause, the no-arbitration commitment, or the no-class-action-waiver commitment without explicit notice and at least 30 days' lead time.

12. Contact

Questions about these Terms: mark@pharmacopedia.wiki

To report a potential Terms violation: Pharmacopedia:Newsroom talk page or mark@pharmacopedia.wiki.

To report a copyright concern: mark@pharmacopedia.wiki (see Section 7).