How this site works

This is a research reference, not medical advice. Everything here — including the illicit-drug entries — is presented to summarize published research on mechanism and evidence quality, never as a recommendation to use, combine, or stop any substance. Legal status varies by country. Talk to a clinician about your own situation.

Where the research comes from

New studies arrive automatically: saved search alerts (currently covering topics like caffeine, tobacco/nicotine, and omega-3, alongside the core ADHD medications) email new results in, and a Worker parses them into a review queue. Nothing is published straight from an inbox.

The review queue

Every incoming study sits as "pending" until a human reviewer checks the auto-extracted title, authors, and abstract (email parsing is best-effort and sometimes needs correcting), tags it to the right substance, and approves or rejects it. Only approved studies appear on substance pages.

What the evidence badges mean

Each substance and each individual claim carries an evidence-strength badge — RCT, Observational, Mixed, Animal, or Anecdotal. This reflects the quality of the best available evidence, not a guarantee of effectiveness or safety. An RCT badge means randomized controlled trials exist; it doesn't mean the effect size is large or that the substance is risk-free.

The brain diagram

The interactive brain is a simplified, illustrative diagram — not to anatomical scale. It exists to make mechanism-of-action research explorable: click a region to see which substances are documented to act there and how.

Categories

Substances are grouped into vitamins, supplements, peptides, pharmaceuticals, caffeine, illicit drugs, and an "other" bucket for things that don't fit neatly (like nicotine). Presence in the illicit category is not an endorsement — it's included because real research exists and hiding it would make this site less useful, not more responsible.