Sourcing standards
- Primary, authoritative sources only for health claims: SAMHSA, NIDA, CDC/NIH bodies, the ASAM Criteria, and peer-reviewed research — cited in a Sources list on every guide, with direct links (including PubMed) so you can check our work.
- Every citation is verified before publication — papers are confirmed against PubMed's own records, and web sources are confirmed live. If a source can't be verified, the claim doesn't run.
- We are conservative with numbers. Where research findings vary or context matters, we describe findings qualitatively and attribute them, rather than quoting precise figures that outrun the evidence.
- No invented statistics, no fabricated testimonials, no outcome promises. Addiction treatment doesn't come with guarantees, and neither does our writing about it.
Independence
We do not sell treatment, and we accept no payment, commission, or other compensation from treatment providers — for referrals, placements, mentions, or anything else. When our guides point readers toward finding care, they point to the U.S. government's independent locator, FindTreatment.gov, and to public crisis lines (988, SAMHSA's helpline).
Images
The photographs on this site are AI-generated illustrations. They do not depict real people, real patients, or anyone's actual experience of addiction or recovery — no one pictured is a client, a reader, or a case study, and nothing shown is a testimonial. We use them because the alternative in this subject area is stock photography of strangers posed as people in crisis, which we think is worse. The image files themselves carry the same disclosure in their embedded metadata (DigitalSourceType = trainedAlgorithmicMedia) so it travels with the picture if it is ever reused elsewhere. That disclosure, this section, and the line in the footer of every page are how we say it — we do not caption each image individually.
Review and freshness
Each guide shows its last-reviewed date. We re-review guides when major sources (SAMHSA, NIDA, CDC, Cochrane) update their guidance, and periodically otherwise. Our guides do not carry a named clinical reviewer, and we do not plan to add one — see why we publish without names. Read them as carefully-sourced journalism, not clinical advice: every health claim links to the primary source it came from so you can check it yourself, and anything we cannot source does not run.
Corrections
If we got something wrong, we want to know: info@lovedandsober.com. Verified errors are corrected in the text and material corrections are noted on the page.