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Methodology

How we research

Health-critical content earns its trust by being transparent about where every claim comes from. Here's exactly how we build and maintain the drug and breed data.
Independent DVM review in progress

Our anchor authority: WSU VCPL

The Washington State University Veterinary Clinical Pharmacology Laboratory (WSU VCPL), now part of WSU's Program in Individualized Medicine (PrIMe), is the laboratory that discovered the canine MDR1 mutation and developed the first diagnostic test. It maintains the canonical breed-frequency table and the published drug guidance. We treat WSU as the primary authority for every clinical claim on this site.

How a claim gets onto the site

  1. Transcribe from a primary source. Every drug classification, dose-tier rule, and breed frequency is read directly from a live WSU page (or, where applicable, a peer-reviewed veterinary pharmacology source), not from a pet blog or a third-party aggregator.
  2. Record the citation and a verification date. Each fact stores the source URL and the date we last confirmed that URL contained the cited content. Those dates appear on the matrix output, the drug pages, and the breed pages.
  3. Omit what we can't cite-pin.If a drug appears in secondary literature but we can't confirm it against a current primary source, we leave it out of the public list and record it as omittedrather than guess. On health-critical content, “we don't know yet” is an honest and acceptable answer.

How we handle the dose-tier nuance

For the antiparasitic drugs, a single yes/no answer would be wrong — the same drug is safe at one dose and dangerous at another. So the checker deliberately asks a dose-tier question for those drugs and returns the answer for the specific tier, rather than collapsing it into a misleading one-liner. This is the most clinically important design decision on the site.

Re-verification

Veterinary guidance changes, and source pages move. We re-check our primary sources on a recurring basis and update the last-verified dates accordingly. WSU restructured some of its public pages in the recent past, so we keep our links pointed at the live locations and re-confirm them rather than assuming a URL is still valid.

What we explicitly do not do

  • We do not diagnose, prescribe, or examine your dog. We are a reference, not a clinic.
  • We do not fabricate a reviewer or a veterinary advisory board. A real, licensed DVM is named on the about page only once one is genuinely secured.
  • We do not invent drug data, frequencies, or statistics.If it's on the site, it traces to a source on the sources page.
  • We do not log, store, or sell anything about your individual dog. The checker runs entirely in your browser.

Sources

WSU — MDR1 in Dogs (current drug & breed hub)WSU — Is your pet at risk of an adverse reaction to common drugs? (dose tiers, genotypes, signs)WSU — Breeds commonly affected by the MDR1 mutation (frequency table)WSU — MDR1 overview (mechanism, signs, discovery)

This is general information, not veterinary advice for your dog. It does not diagnose or prescribe. Always discuss any medication decision with your veterinarian before acting — they know your dog's full picture, including its MDR1 status if it has been tested. See our disclaimer and how we research.

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