Clinical guidelines and drug labels, cited

What AskMed covers

AskMed covers clinical guidelines and drug labels as two of the four source groups it searches before every answer. The guideline group includes NICE, the US Preventive Services Task Force, the Infectious Diseases Society of America, the European Society of Cardiology, KDIGO for kidney disease, GINA for asthma, GOLD for COPD, ACOG, the CDC, WHO, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the National Cancer Institute. The drug label group includes the FDA and DailyMed, and, when a question names a product, national drug registries from many countries. In the answer, these sources are tagged Guideline or Drug label in the references list, next to Research and Reference sources from journals and textbooks. The home page sums it up in one line: guidelines and drug labels are built in, while with PubMed alone you would run separate searches and a general chatbot may not cite them at all.

How guideline and label answers work

AskMed treats guidelines and labels as the strongest sources for most clinical questions. When a question is about management or current evidence, AskMed adds "guideline" and "latest guideline update" to its search so the newest guidance is found. Among the results, guidelines and health agencies are preferred first. The answer gives the year of every guideline recommendation it states; when guidance has changed or societies disagree, it gives the most recent position, says what changed and since which year, and names any society that still disagrees, so superseded advice is never presented as current. For a drug question, the answer covers the drug's class, mechanism, uses, common and serious adverse effects, named interacting drugs, contraindications and monitoring, each cited. Drug doses are never stated, and dose numbers are removed from the label excerpts shown in the app: an AI rewrites them in general words such as "a weight-based amount", while lab values and thresholds stay as written.

You can also limit a question to one group. Keep only Clinical guidelines on, or only Drug labels, in the source filters.

When it helps

Guideline and label answers help whenever practice depends on the current official position. A general practitioner can check what the latest NICE or USPSTF guidance says about screening and see the year it was issued. A hospital doctor can compare what the ESC and another society recommend and see where they differ. A pharmacist can pull together a drug's boxed warnings, contraindications and interacting drugs from its FDA label in one cited answer before counseling. A nurse can check the monitoring a label asks for and open the label to read it in full. A medical student can learn the guideline pathway for a condition step by step, with the guideline named at each step, which is how exam questions are written. A researcher can see quickly which guideline bodies have covered a topic before writing an introduction. In every case, the citation takes you to the guideline or the label itself.

For how AskMed's drug label sources compare with a general AI assistant, see AskMed vs Grok. Get AskMed on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, on Google Play for Android, or use it on the web.

Limits

Guideline and label answers are only as complete as the sources AskMed searches. The guideline group is a fixed list, so many national and specialty guideline bodies are not in it, and an answer may lean on NICE, WHO or a US body when your own country's guidance differs. The FDA and DailyMed labels describe US products, and approvals, indications and warnings can differ elsewhere; check your national label or formulary. Label excerpts in the app have dose numbers rewritten in general words, so they are not word-for-word copies of the label; open the full source for the exact text. AskMed never gives doses, dose adjustments or schedules, so it can't replace the prescribing information. The AI model can misread a guideline or miss a recent update, and no person reviews answers before you see them. Check the guideline's date and open the citation before you act on a recommendation.