If something is going wrong, stop and get help.
If you think a supplement, a device or a protocol is harming you, stop and get help. Nothing on this site is worth waiting on.
Call emergency services now if any of these are present
- Difficulty breathing, swelling of the face, lips or throat, or a spreading rash
- Chest pain, fainting, or a heart rhythm that feels wrong and will not settle
- Sudden weakness on one side, trouble speaking, or a sudden severe headache
- Bleeding that will not stop, black or bloody stools, or vomiting blood
- Confusion, a seizure, or a level of drowsiness that is hard to rouse from
- Yellowing of the eyes or skin, or pain in the upper right abdomen
These are general red flags, not a complete list, and they are not specific to supplements. If something feels seriously wrong, treat it seriously.
If it is not an emergency
FDA's guidance for a suspected reaction to a dietary supplement is to stop using the product immediately and file a safety report through its Safety Reporting Portal. The report asks for the product's lot number and expiry date, which are often the only way a contaminated batch can be traced, so the bottle and its label carry the details a report needs. A doctor or pharmacist is the person who can judge whether the product caused the reaction, and a photograph of the label carries the same details as the bottle.
Report it, even if you recover
In the United States, suspected problems with a dietary supplement can be reported to the FDA through the Safety Reporting Portal, and the FDA advises contacting a healthcare provider as well. Reporting is what turns one person's bad reaction into a signal anyone can act on. Most harms from supplements are never reported, which is a large part of why the evidence on harms is thinner than the evidence on benefits.
FDA Safety Reporting Portal · How to report a problem with a dietary supplement
Outside the United States, your national medicines regulator will have an equivalent route. Your pharmacist can tell you which one.
What EBL can and cannot do
EBL grades published evidence. It cannot assess you, it does not know your history, and it is not a route to urgent care. The tools on this site are built to be taken to a clinician, not used instead of one.
EBL does not collect adverse-event reports and is not a reporting channel. If you want to tell us that something on this site is wrong, that is a different thing and we want to hear it, but report the harm itself to your clinician and to the regulator first.
A note on why this page exists
It was missing until August 2026. A site whose most-used tool is a medication safety check had no stop-use pathway anywhere on it. An outside reviewer pointed that out and was right.
It is not a quality measure. A longer reference list is not better evidence, and a page can cite forty papers and still rest on none of them. The grade on any entry here comes from what its trials actually tested and in whom, never from how many were attached to it. Counting references measures breadth, and breadth is the least interesting property evidence has.
It is not fixed. The figure moves whenever a paper is added, retired or superseded, which is why every statement of it here carries the date it was generated. Two documents written a week apart may honestly carry different numbers, and saying so is more accurate than forcing them to agree.
It is not a claim that every paper was read the same way. What each citation was checked for, and what remains unverified, is set out separately in the citation audit, which lists every defect found in this site's own citations rather than only the ones found in other people's.