How it was built, and what it refuses to do.

The problem it was built against

Take any food that comes up in ulcerative colitis, look it up, and you will find three kinds of statement presented identically: a finding from a randomized trial, a habit that dietitians have arrived at from practice, and a protocol that patients pass between each other on forums.

All three are worth something. They are not worth the same, and a patient has no way to tell them apart. That is the specific failure this tool was built to fix. Not "more information," and not "better design." Making the quality of each claim visible at the point where the patient reads it.

The three levels, and how a rating gets one

Every entry in the food guide carries exactly one level, shown on the card itself, and filterable so a clinician can see only what they are willing to stand behind.

The rule that matters is the one about merging: a card never averages two levels into a single verdict. If the research and the anecdote disagree, the card says so. Some entries exist mainly to name a contradiction rather than to resolve one, because pretending to resolve it would be the dishonest move.

Two ratings, not one

Each food is rated twice, once for an active flare and once for remission, on three steps: lean on these, with caution, avoid. The tool asks the patient which phase they are in and shows the matching set.

This is there to fight the most damaging habit in UC self-management: carrying a flare diet into remission and staying on it for years. A food guide with a single column silently encourages that. Two columns make the widening-out visible, and the meal planner refuses to build a week from foods rated red in the current phase.

What was deliberately left out

The refusals are as much a part of the design as the content.

• No doses. Not for medication, not for supplements. A dose is a prescribing decision and this is not a prescribing tool.
• No ranking of drugs. Treatment classes are explained side by side, never ordered best to worst. Which one fits depends on disease extent, severity, history, comorbidities and coverage, none of which a file can know.
• No claim that diet controls inflammation. The tool states plainly that no diet has been shown to control ulcerative colitis inflammation on its own in adults, and repeats it where a patient is most likely to hope otherwise.
• Nothing to sell inside. No supplements, no affiliate links, no partner products. The only transaction is the one license.
• No symptom score dressed up as a clinical index. The tool records values and shows trends. It does not compute a number that looks like a Mayo score and is not one.

How the American version was made

The original was French. A translation would have been subtly useless, so it was rewritten against four American realities.

• Units. Conventional U.S. units throughout: mg/dL, K/µL, ng/mL. CBC and CMP vocabulary rather than the European equivalents. Male and female reference ranges where they differ.
• The CRP trap. U.S. laboratories report CRP in mg/L or in mg/dL depending on the lab, a factor of ten. The tool carries an explicit unit selector and spells out the trap rather than assuming.
• The table. 238 foods written for what Americans actually eat: grits, bagels, corn tortillas, sweet tea, Gatorade, ranch, rotisserie chicken, coffee creamer. Regional tags, because the country does not eat one way.
• Insurance. Treatment cards explain prior authorization, step therapy and biosimilar switching as part of the treatment, because for an American patient that is exactly what they are.

How the research digest is kept current

The digest holds dated, sourced entries drawn from PubMed-indexed journals and trial results. Each one carries a short "what it changes" paragraph, because a citation the patient cannot act on is decoration.

There is a monthly pipeline behind it, and entries older than two years archive themselves automatically unless they are marked as reference material. The license covers the version delivered, with no update obligation; new versions may be offered separately, and license holders hear about them first.

What the file is, technically

One HTML file. No build step, no framework, no dependency, no network call of any kind. It opens in Safari, Chrome, Edge or Firefox, on a phone, a tablet or a desktop, with the wifi off. It prints cleanly. It has a dark and a light theme.

The patient saves their values by clicking "Save my values into a copy of this page": the browser downloads an identical file with the values written inside it, and they keep the new copy. The file is the database. There is no account, no sync, no server, and nothing for the author to see, which is why there is no covered entity or business associate relationship to create.

How corrections get in

A one-person clinical product cannot honestly claim an editorial board. What it can claim is that everything is written to be checkable: every research entry links to its source, every food rating shows its level, and every clinical statement is phrased so a professional can disagree with something specific.

Corrections reported by clinicians go into the next version. If you find something wrong, or something stated more confidently than the evidence supports, write to [email protected]. That loop is the main quality process, and it only works if people use it.

What it is not

Colitis Compass is an educational and organizational tool. It is not medical advice, not a medical device, and has not been evaluated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It does not diagnose, treat or prescribe. Every card sends the patient back to their gastroenterologist, and the clinician who hands it over remains responsible for the advice they give.