No pharma advertising, no sponsors

What no pharma advertising means

No pharma advertising means that nothing in AskMed is paid for by a drug or device company. AskMed shows no ads: there are no banners, sponsored answers or promoted products in the apps or the web app, and the apps include no advertising network that could place them. No company sponsors AskMed, and none can pay for its product, guideline or study to be cited or ranked higher. AskMed's privacy policy says it does not sell your questions or use them for advertising, and the answers you give during setup, such as your role and specialty, are not used for advertising and are not sold. AskMed does advertise itself, for example on social media, and measures those ads as the privacy policy explains; that is AskMed looking for new users, not anyone advertising to you inside AskMed. The business is simple: AskMed is a subscription app, built independently, so the people who pay for it are the people who use it.

How sources are chosen instead

Because no sponsor is involved, sources are chosen by fixed rules about the type of evidence. AskMed searches only a fixed list of medical sites: journals and databases such as PubMed, Cochrane, NEJM, The Lancet, JAMA and The BMJ; guideline bodies and agencies such as NICE, WHO, CDC, ESC and KDIGO; FDA and DailyMed drug labels; and references such as StatPearls, the MSD Manual and BMJ Best Practice. Among the results, the AI is told to prefer clinical guidelines and government health agencies first, then systematic reviews and meta-analyses, then review articles and established references, then large clinical trials and other studies, and to prefer sources from the last 10 years. When an answer names treatment options, it is told to name every guideline-recommended option, not a favored one. Drug names come from the sources cited, with the drug class and alternatives alongside, and every claim carries a citation you can open.

You can narrow the sources further yourself with the source filters, for example to guidelines only.

Why it matters

No pharma advertising matters because clinical decisions and learning should rest on evidence, not on who paid to be seen. A doctor comparing two drug classes can read an answer that names every guideline option without a sponsored product placed beside it. A pharmacist can look up a drug's interactions and warnings knowing that no manufacturer chose what appears on the screen. A nurse can share an answer with a colleague without an advert attached. A medical student learning how a condition is treated sees the pathway the guidelines describe, not the brand a company is promoting. A researcher can use AskMed to scope a topic without promoted studies mixed into the results. Advertising next to clinical answers is common in medical tools: for example, OpenEvidence's App Store listing says the app contains advertising, as covered in OpenEvidence vs ChatGPT for Clinicians vs AskMed. With AskMed, the screen holds the answer and its sources.

Get AskMed on the App Store for iPhone and iPad, on Google Play for Android, or use it on the web.

Limits

No pharma advertising removes one source of bias, but not every source of bias. The journals, trials and reviews that AskMed cites can themselves be funded by industry, and AskMed does not check who funded a study or screen sources for conflicts of interest, so read the funding and disclosure statements in the papers that matter to you. Guidelines can carry their authors' conflicts of interest too. The AI model ranks sources by type of evidence, not by an independent quality assessment, so a well-funded trial can still be cited ahead of a smaller independent one. Drug names in an answer come from the sources, and AskMed never gives doses, so prescribing decisions still need the label and your own judgment. AskMed promotes its own subscription plans inside the apps, which is not third-party advertising but is worth knowing. Like every AskMed answer, an answer can contain errors, so open the citations before you act.