Medical Review Process

SYLO does not currently retain an in-house medical reviewer. This page explains why that is a deliberate, honest policy, and what supports our content quality instead.

Why we don’t claim a medical reviewer we don’t have

Google’s Quality Rater Guidelines classify mental-health content as YMYL (“Your Money or Your Life”) under the health-and-safety sub-category, the highest-stakes quality tier. One of the common industry patterns in this space is naming a “medical reviewer” on articles that the named professional has not actually reviewed, or attaching credentials to an author that do not reflect who wrote and approved the content. Healthline, WebMD, and most reputable health publishers treat this as a trust-audit red line, and so do we.

If we claimed a medical reviewer we did not engage, we would be lying to our readers and to search quality raters. The safer and more honest option is the one SYLO has chosen: don’t claim clinical review until we can stand behind it in writing. The article JSON-LD graph reflects this. SYLO articles do not emit a reviewedBy field, and no article UI displays a “Medically reviewed by” line. What you see on the page is what actually happened during production.

What grounds our content instead

In place of a single named reviewer, SYLO content quality rests on a stack of automated and human gates documented in our Editorial Process:

• Peer-reviewed source citation requirement. Every factual claim in a SYLO article is anchored to a specific cited source, and readers can open the original paper from an inline hyperlink.
• Tier classification. Sources are classified Tier 1 (peer-reviewed primary research), Tier 2 (systematic reviews and meta-analyses), or Tier 3 (reputable secondary material). Articles that would need to rest on Tier 3 material alone are sent back to research.
• TF-IDF relevance gate. Sources that do not materially overlap the article’s keyword are rejected before they can influence the draft.
• Automated fact-check review. Each cited claim is checked against the underlying source by the reviewer agent before the draft ever reaches a human.
• HWG regex gate for German content. A compliance gate against the German Heilmittelwerbegesetz (HWG) § 3 forbidden-claim patterns blocks publication on any match, with no override path.
• Named human editorial review. Every draft is read end-to-end by one of three named editors before publication, with an explicit fake-author-prevention checklist owned by the Seelenfreund Founder/CMO.

Crisis resources on every mental-health article

Articles that fall into the mental-health, stress, sleep, relationships, self-reflection, meditation, or longevity clusters carry a visible crisis-resource footer regardless of the specific topic. The footer surfaces the numbers that matter in an acute situation rather than relying on a reader to find them elsewhere:

• Germany: Telefonseelsorge (free, 24/7) 0800 111 0 111 or 0800 111 0 222
• Europe (incl. UK): 116 123 Samaritans (free, 24/7)
• United States: 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (free, 24/7)

The crisis footer is part of the static page HTML, not a runtime injection, so it is present on first paint and indexed by search engines alongside the article body.

The activation path

SYLO is designed so that engaging a real medical reviewer is a data-only change, not a new code branch. The pipeline and schema already support reviewedBy graph edges and a “Medically reviewed by” UI line; both are intentionally inert today because the underlying reviewer records are empty.

When SYLO contracts a licensed medical professional, a German Ärztekammer-listed physician or a Psychotherapeutenkammer-listed psychologist, this page will be updated to name them and their verified credentials. The “Medically reviewed by” line will start appearing on YMYL articles under their scope, the JSON-LD reviewedBy edge will begin emitting, and the activation is logged in writing by the Founder/CMO. Activation is a merge of a single data file, not a code-level trust change, which is the whole point of the honest-disclaimer-today architecture.

For licensed professionals

If you are a licensed mental-health professional interested in reviewing SYLO content (physician, psychotherapist, clinical psychologist), email us at editorial@sylodigital.com. We are looking for reviewers with verifiable chamber registration and the willingness to be named publicly on the articles they review.