Where to start How it works Evidence Conditions Calculator For clinicians Decisions Cases Family Find help Problems

Keep your records with the people who can use them

This section has no user accounts, no uploads, no questionnaires that collect health information, and no personalised claim analysis. There is nothing here that can receive a file.

Do not send medical records, decision letters, claim numbers, or Social Security numbers to this site or to me. Send them to VA, your clinician, or your accredited representative through the channels built for that purpose. For your own benefits records, use VA Form 20-10206 or ask your representative.

The notes panel

There is a Notes button in the corner of every page here, and it is the one thing on this site you can type into. It is worth being precise about, because it is the one place you might reasonably put something personal. How it works.

What you type stays in your browser and is not sent anywhere. There is no account on this site, no database, and nothing on the other end to receive it.

It is kept in your browser's per-tab memory, which is what lets your notes follow you from page to page as you read. That has a specific and limited lifetime, and these are the parts that matter:

You can switch it off. The panel has a Turn off button that clears it and stops it opening for the rest of that tab. There is no dialog to accept before you can read this site, and nothing to agree to — the panel just tells you what it is for and what not to put in it.

Two honest caveats, because the useful version of this page is the accurate one. While the tab is open the text is in the page, so lock or close it if you step away from a shared computer, and use Clear when you are finished. And browsers that offer reopen closed tab, or that restore your tabs after a restart, can bring the notes back — much narrower than notes being saved permanently, but not nothing.

Notes are deliberately not kept between visits. Permanent browser storage would mean them sitting on the machine for whoever used it next, which matters because a lot of people read this site on a library terminal, a VSO office computer or a family desktop. The site would rather lose your work than leave it behind for a stranger.

What does get processed

Ordinary web hosting handles technical information such as an IP address and the time of a request. That is true of every website and it is not something this site chooses or keeps.

Beyond that, nothing. This site runs no analytics at all, and no script from anyone else runs on these pages.

It used to use a privacy-focused analytics service — no cookies, no cross-site tracking, aggregate counts only. That was removed in October 2026 when the notes panel was added, for a reason worth stating plainly: any script on a page can read anything else on that page. A measurement script and a box holding your symptoms were sharing the same page, and however well-behaved that service is, trusting it was no longer something this site needed to ask you to do. So it does not.

The cost is real and falls on me rather than on you: nobody now knows which guides are read, or whether this is worth keeping up. That is the trade, and it went the way it did because the material here is about your health.

I would rather state that accurately than claim "we collect nothing" as a slogan. The web host still sees requests, as every host does.

Leaving this site

Every official link here goes to a government or court website. Once you follow one, that destination's practices govern, not these.

If this ever changes

A feature that collected identifiable health information would be a different project under different rules — see the FTC's guidance on consumer health data — and it would require its own privacy and security review before launch. This page would be rewritten before any such feature existed, not afterwards.

Reviewed October 6, 2026