Who writes this, and how

Who publishes Galen

Galen is an independent publisher, and this journal is what it publishes. It is not a clinic, a laboratory, a distributor, a manufacturer or a regulator; it holds no stock, dispenses nothing, and sells nothing to the people who read it. The journal exists because one question kept arriving in a dozen different forms from people who work with animals for a living — what does this label actually mean, and what changes if I get it wrong.

The name is borrowed from Galen of Pergamon, the second-century physician whose surviving work on preparing and describing remedies is roughly where the idea of a documented, reproducible medicine starts. That is the ambition of the site in miniature: describe the product accurately, and let the description be checkable.

Who writes the articles

Articles are written and revised by the Galen editorial team. Nobody on that team is presented here as a practising veterinarian, because nobody on it currently is, and a reference site that invents a clinician's byline to look more authoritative has already told its first lie. The editorial team's competence is in reading regulatory and manufacturer documentation carefully and rendering it in plain English — which is a real skill and a limited one, and the limits are what decide what gets published.

The practical consequence is visible in the articles themselves. They explain how a system works — units, authorisations, residue limits, storage conditions, resistance mechanisms — and they stop at the point where a clinical judgement would be required. There is no dosing guidance on this site, no treatment protocol, no recommendation to use one product rather than another for a sick animal, and no attempt to help a reader decide whether an animal needs treatment at all. Those judgements need an examination and a professional who is accountable for the outcome.

Adding named veterinary review is the next thing this site should earn. When a page is reviewed by a named clinician it will say so, with the name, the qualification and the date of review attached to that specific page — not as a site-wide badge, which is a claim about pages nobody looked at.

Where the material comes from

Every article is built from three layers, in this order. First, the regulatory framework: the texts published by the bodies that actually authorise and control veterinary medicines — the European Medicines Agency and Regulation (EU) 2019/6, the United States Food and Drug Administration's Center for Veterinary Medicine, the United Kingdom's Veterinary Medicines Directorate, the World Organisation for Animal Health, and the Codex Alimentarius maximum residue limits agreed through the FAO and WHO. Second, established veterinary reference works, of which the Merck Veterinary Manual is the most frequently used here. Third, the structure of the labelling itself — the fields that appear on an approved product and what each of them is for.

Sources are listed at the foot of each article with the publishing body named, and they are held in a single registry in the site's source code rather than typed into the prose. That is a small piece of housekeeping with a real effect: when an agency reorganises its website, one entry is corrected and every article that cites it is corrected with it, instead of a dead link surviving in eight pages because nobody re-read them.

Numbers are attributed in the sentence that carries them. A figure with no institution attached to it is not something a reader can check, and an unverifiable number in a veterinary reference is worse than no number, because it is repeatable. Where a value is a national rule rather than a universal one — and in this field many of them are — the article says which country's rule it is.

What is deliberately not here

The absences are as considered as the contents, so they are worth stating in one place:

• No dosing. No milligrams per kilogram, no volumes, no treatment intervals, no duration of course. The manufacturer's labelling for the specific product carries these, and a veterinarian applies them to a specific animal. What we do explain is what the units on that labelling mean.
• No diagnosis. Articles about clinical signs describe what is worth noticing and what a veterinarian will want to know — as in early signs of illness in cats and dogs. They do not name what is wrong with an animal from a list of symptoms.
• No product recommendations. No brand is presented as better than another, and no article exists to sell one.
• No affiliate links and no sponsored articles. Outbound links point at primary sources and carry no commercial relationship.
• No advice on obtaining prescription-only medicines outside the route your country's law provides.

Two of these deserve a word of justification, because readers do ask for them. Dosing is withheld not to be evasive but because it is the single most dangerous thing to generalise: the same active substance can be authorised at different strengths for different species, and the interval that is routine in one product is an overdose in another. Diagnosis is withheld because a list of signs is a screening tool at best, and animals conceal illness well enough that a confident wrong answer delays the visit that would have helped.

How a page is put together and kept current

Each article starts from a question that is asked in a recognisable form — how long a vaccine keeps once it is out of the fridge, what the percentage on a bottle converts to, when milk can go back in the tank. The draft is written against the regulatory and reference material, then revised specifically for the failure modes that matter in this field: a claim stated without its source, a national rule presented as universal, a number that cannot be traced, a sentence that drifts from describing a system into advising a course of action.

Pages carry two dates: when they were first published, and when they were last revised. Those dates are real. A page whose text has not changed does not get its date refreshed to look current, which is both a straightforward piece of honesty and an explicit rule of the search platforms that would otherwise reward the pretence.

Every figure and diagram on this site is drawn from numbers the page itself states and attributes — the temperature-humidity grid in heat stress in livestock and poultry is computed from the formula printed above it, and the species ranges in normal temperature, pulse and breathing rate are plotted from the table beside them. Nothing is plotted from invented data, and nothing that looks like a measurement is generated for decoration — a chart shaped like real data that is not real data is a lie that reads faster than the paragraph correcting it. Diagrams here are free to reuse elsewhere with a link back to the page they came from.

Corrections, questions and reuse

Corrections are welcome and they are the most useful message this site receives. If a figure is wrong, a source has moved, a rule has changed, or a sentence is ambiguous enough to be read two ways, write to [email protected]. Substantive corrections are made in the text and the revision date is updated; where a correction changes the meaning of something a reader may have acted on, it is noted on the page rather than quietly overwritten.

Short quotations with a link back are fine and need no permission. The figures and diagrams are drawn specifically so they can be reused: each one carries a line saying so, and the only condition is a link to the page it came from. If you are a veterinarian, a pharmacist or a regulator and you are willing to review a page in your area, that is the collaboration this site most wants, and the same address reaches us.

Why the site is free, and what it is not selling

There is no subscription, no paywall, no advertising and no newsletter to sign up for. Nothing on these pages is placed here because someone paid for it to be, and no article was commissioned by a manufacturer, a distributor or anyone else with a product to move. Galen is building a reputation for getting this material right, and that reputation is the only thing the journal is accumulating — stating it plainly seems better than leaving a reader to wonder what the catch is.

The consequence worth stating is what that model does not permit. An article that recommended a product would be worth money to somebody, which is exactly why there are none. The site does not rank brands, does not run comparison pages between commercial products, and does not link to shops. Where a reader needs a product decision, the right person to make it is the veterinarian who knows the animal, and the useful thing this site can contribute is a reader who arrives at that conversation already understanding what the label is saying.

The standing caveat

Nothing on this site is veterinary advice, and reading it is not a substitute for having an animal examined. If an animal is unwell, deteriorating, or may have swallowed something it should not have, contact a veterinarian or an emergency service rather than a web page — in a suspected poisoning the useful information is the product name, the strength, the amount and the time, and the useful action is a phone call made early.