How this archive is made.
What qualifies as a case
A case needs a documented promise of longevity, restored vitality, prevention as a route to longer health, or cure/survival from a named life-threatening disease. It must also show promoter authority, a vague or surrogate mechanism, a financial conflict, and sourced disconfirmation or an authoritative finding that the marketed claim is false, ineffective, unproven, ahead of evidence, or incapable of producing its advertised effects. For historical cases, that finding may come from contemporaneous professional analysis or an authoritative medical, pharmacy-history, or institutional-archive source that directly assesses the marketed effects; a modern randomized controlled trial is not required. Composition alone, or the absence of a trial in the attached record, is not enough. Ordinary investigational medicine and incomplete evidence alone do not qualify.
Access is descriptive
Every case has an Access and distribution slot describing how the intervention reached people when sources establish it. Access may be broad, controlled, wealthy and exclusive, or left unclassified. Price and exclusivity never decide whether a case is published. The wealthy-access view is a sourced informational subset.
Sourcing
Every factual characterization is anchored to a cited source: a primary document, a peer-reviewed study, a regulator action, an established scholarly history, or the subject's own published material. Bibliographic identifiers (PMID, DOI, ISBN) are resolved against the issuing record — PubMed, Crossref, Open Library — rather than taken on trust, because fabricated-but-plausible citations are the characteristic failure mode of AI-written prose. A case that cannot be sourced is not published.
AI authorship, disclosed
Most cases are researched and drafted by an automated pipeline built on large language models, not written by hand. That pipeline does not publish on its own judgment. Each case passes deterministic gates — citation resolution, a conflict-of-interest and voice check, a living-subject scope check — and is then reviewed by an independent model from a different family before it goes live. The sources, not the model, are the authority; an AI "looks supported" is treated as a prompt to verify, never as verification.
Living people and active enterprises
The archive covers current products and the companies still selling them, and it keeps its critical voice when it does. The discipline is the same: every present-day claim is anchored to a cited source (a regulator, a peer-reviewed trial, a named expert, or the company's own materials), and the case states what the enterprise sells and claims today rather than implying it quietly faded. Criticism that a cited source does not support is not made.
Not medical advice
Nothing here is medical advice, and nothing here endorses any intervention — past or present. The archive documents how marketed claims met evidence; descriptions of what was sold are history and criticism, not a recommendation. Consult a qualified clinician for health decisions.
Corrections
The archive aims to be accurate and to correct errors promptly. If a citation is wrong, a date is off, or a characterization outruns its source, the correction is welcome and will be made. Reach the archive at @MethuselahArch. The archive's text and metadata are licensed CC BY 4.0; images and other media are not — each is reproduced under its own terms (public domain, a stated license, or fair use). See the license page.