The To Your Health Programme
Knowing what to ask, and who to ask
understanding your health, finding your way through care
This programme holds what the association publishes about health: understanding how the body works, reading medical information without being taken in, and knowing who to turn to and when. It keeps a strict boundary, and that boundary is not negotiable: educational content explains, it does not diagnose, and it never stands in for a health professional. The association’s rule applies here as everywhere: free of charge, openly licensed, no data collected.
Why this field matters
Health is the field where misunderstood information costs the most
A health question rarely arrives calmly. It arrives with a symptom, a worry, a word read on a prescription or overheard in a waiting room. In that moment the first answer found carries real weight: it decides whether you go and see someone or wait, whether you take fright or let it pass. And the field is crowded with text written to hold attention rather than to inform a decision.
There is a language problem on top of that. The vocabulary of care is precise, and its precision turns against the patient: a word naming a hypothesis is heard as a verdict, a percentage of risk as a personal prediction, a rare side effect as a likely threat. Understanding that vocabulary is not a luxury for the curious; it is what allows a good question inside the short time available.
Finally, knowing where to knock matters as much as knowing what to ask: who to see first, what counts as an emergency and what can wait, what a pharmacist can do, what a medical file contains. These are practical, learnable things, and their absence always penalizes the same people.
Three working ideas
Three working ideas
A symptom is not a diagnosis
The same sign can come from causes with nothing in common, from the most ordinary to the most serious. That is why an examination exists: not to confirm what you had already read, but to decide between hypotheses.
A risk is a frequency, not a prediction
Saying that an effect reaches one person in a thousand says nothing about what will happen to the person reading the sentence: the figure describes a group. It helps compare two options, never predict your own case.
A health source reads like any other
Who publishes it, on what date, and with what interest in your believing it. Verification habits do not change because the subject is medical: they become more useful, because more is at stake.
What this programme does not do, and will not do
The boundary is more useful written down than implied. It is the same for everything this programme publishes.
- Give an opinion on an individual case, remotely or otherwise.
- Suggest waiting, stopping, or changing a treatment.
- Offer a questionnaire that ends in a medical conclusion.
- Gather any health data whatsoever: there is no account, no form, and no server to receive it.
What is online
What is online
This shelf of the catalogue exists, it is named, and it carries the subject above. The house rule holds here as everywhere else: a resource joins a programme the day it is online and can be visited, never on an announcement, and it is named here then, with its address and figures anyone can recount.
The resources of this programme are named on this page when they go online.
The shape
What this programme publishes, and how
The field changes from one programme to the next; the shape does not. These construction rules are not promises: they can be checked today, on the 2 resources the association already has online.
The invariants
- Free, no account, no ads, for every audience.
- No data collected: no cookie, no tracker, no request to a third-party server.
- Content under a CC BY 4.0 license: reuse, adapt, translate, republish, with one attribution line.
- Open data as JSON, so anyone can recount every figure stated.
- Readable without JavaScript and printable, because health material is also used away from a screen.
On a health subject one requirement of method is added: a fact is checked before it is written, a correction is public, and nothing goes out that has not been reviewed by someone other than its author.
Who it is for
Three audiences, three different needs
- General public
- Understanding a word, a leaflet, an order of magnitude, before or after an appointment. Knowing what to ask, rather than answering in the professional’s place.
- Carers and families
- Supporting someone without deciding for them: following an appointment, understanding a prescription, knowing which service to call. An informed carer asks better questions and burns out less.
- Teachers and activity leaders
- Enough to run a health education session without turning a class into a consultation: vocabulary, mechanisms, worked examples, and a license that allows adapting to the level of the group.
Keep going
The shape described above is not an intention: it can be checked on the 2 resources the association already has online, and the catalogue shows the 7 programmes side by side.