Method

How a study gets into an issue, what the card beside it is allowed to say, and where this can still go wrong.

What gets monitored

Every week, two things are pulled automatically: new and updated registrations from the clinical trial registries, and newly published literature. The scope is set by outcome measure rather than by intervention, which is a deliberate choice. A study is in scope if it measures something in the nervous-system-regulation family: heart rate variability, cortisol and the stress axis, autonomic reactivity, interoception, validated stress and anxiety scales, or sleep.

Defining scope this way means supplement trials and clinical stimulation trials come in on the same terms as breathing and movement studies, and that a popular practice does not get attention just for being popular.

What gets read

The weekly list is ranked and filtered against everything already read, then worked through from the top. It stops when the next paper stops being worth a card, not when the list is empty. A monitoring system that produces more material than one person can honestly check is not thorough, it is an unattended inbox.

Each paper that survives gets read three times with three different jobs: pull the design and numbers with a quoted line for each; argue against the paper's own conclusion; and, where the paper names a registration number, compare it against the registry record to see whether the sample size changed or the primary outcome was swapped after the fact.

Asking the same question three times produces the same mistake three times. Asking three different questions produces useful disagreement, and where the passes disagree, that disagreement usually becomes the limit printed on the card.

What a card says

Every study in the research column carries four things:

A headline that states the finding and its size. "Lifted mood more than meditation, by a small amount" is a finding. "Improves mood" is a press release.
An explanation in plain words, with the mechanism described before it is named.
Sometimes a limitation, under "Worth knowing". Not on every card. It is written when something about the study changes how the result should be read: the effect was tiny, the control was a waiting list, the sample was eighteen people. A hedge on every card teaches a reader to skip the hedge.
The facts: design, sample size, and a link to the paper. These are read directly from the record written when the study was read, so a card cannot claim a design or a sample size that was never recorded.

Where a study was read from its abstract rather than its full text, the card says abstract only. Abstracts systematically overstate findings. That label is the difference between a finding and a press summary, and it stays visible.

What a card never says

No card tells you to try anything, stop anything, or change anything. Reporting that a trial found an effect and recommending that you go and do it are different acts, and the second one requires knowing you.

No card characterises intent. "No results were posted to the registry and no publication was found by two searches" is a fact. "Suppressed" is a claim, and not one that can be supported from a registry record.

What is not rated

Nothing here grades an intervention. This site used to, on a scale from strong evidence to mostly marketing, and those grades were removed.

The honest reason is that a grade carries more authority than the process behind it could support. Producing a defensible rating for a whole intervention means appraising every study on it, having that appraisal independently checked, and re-deriving it every time a new paper lands. That is a full-time job for a team, and it was never going to survive contact with one person publishing weekly.