Healthline
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Healthline

Healthline Media, Inc. is an American website and provider of health information headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1999, and purchased by Red Ventures in 2019. Healthline contains AI-generated articles, and is included on Wikipedia's spam blacklist due to its publication of misinformation.

Healthline Media runs healthline.com, which publishes health and wellness information. It also has provided health content to third party websites. In 2010, Healthline Media signed an agreement to provide medical and health-related content to Yahoo! Health. Other partners have included AARP.com, The Dr. Oz Show web site, and insurance company Aetna.

There are questions about the quality and neutrality of their content.

For example, the site Health News Review said a Healthline article about a new medication used promotional language copied from the drug-maker's press release, neglected to cite side effects, and framed the drug's claimed benefits in misleading language that failed to accurately reflect the evidence in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Another news reviewer noted that an article on depression cited studies that had not been peer-reviewed, but provided "multiple perspectives from both within and outside the research articles" without exaggeration.

In a study using coverage of neck pain to evaluate a tool designed to review health websites, researchers from the University of Brighton gave Healthline a score of "good". In particular, the website received high marks in areas such as accuracy, readability, disclosure of sources and ownership, and usability, with lower scores in areas such as comprehensiveness and accessibility.

Healthline's quality has been assessed as falling towards the middle of health information websites. A study of top-ranking health websites published in 2021 evaluated its quality as "good", lower than MedlinePlus's "excellent" scores but higher than affiliate Medical News Today's "fair/good" ranking. Healthline is included on Wikipedia's spam blacklist due to its publication of misinformation.

While some writers have used terms like "reliable" to describe Healthline, others have questioned both the quality of its content and its usability and readability. A 2020 study of readability ranked Healthline the second hardest to read (highest education level required) among the top five Google search results for "phenylketonuria", excluding Wikipedia.

Healthline Media was founded in 1999 by endocrine specialist James Norman as YourDoctor.com. In 2006, the company re-launched as Healthline Networks.

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