How we research and write our guides

Our Learn guides are written by the RECVIA team. RECVIA is an online store serving customers in Australia, and we sell the RecLegs Recovery Boots. We're not health professionals, and no qualified health professional has reviewed our guides yet. AI tools help us research and draft; a person checks every fact against its source. We say what research hasn't shown.

  • Australian health authorities come first, then systematic reviews, then individual studies. Every guide lists numbered sources you can open.
  • Our evidence labels (Strong, Moderate, Weak, No good evidence) describe the research on a question, never a product we sell.
  • Where a guide mentions RecLegs, it sticks to its features and how to use it. Our guides carry no RecLegs prices, discounts or testimonials.
  • Our guides are general information, not medical advice. Spotted a mistake? Contact us.

Who writes our guides

Every guide carries the byline "RECVIA team": the people who run RECVIA, an online store serving customers in Australia. We sell the RecLegs Recovery Boots, air compression boots for at-home use.

We're not doctors, nurses or physiotherapists, and we don't present ourselves that way. No qualified health professional has reviewed our guides yet. If a qualified reviewer joins us, their name, their qualification and exactly what they checked will appear on the pages they review, and this page will say so.

You won't find invented experts here: no "Dr" bylines, no stock photos of clinicians and no AI-generated faces. Google's guidance for publishers describes made-up author profiles and false credentials as deceptive[1].

How we choose topics

We start from the questions people in Australia actually ask: why legs can feel heavy at the end of the day, what's normal for how legs look, how to build a realistic recovery routine, how air compression boots work and how to use them, and which at-home wellness trends have research behind them. They became the five topics in Learn. A few ground rules apply:

  • One question, one page. No near-identical pages for every suburb, job or spelling. If an existing guide can answer a new question well, we add to it.
  • Body-neutral by default. On leg appearance, we explain what's common and what the research says, without presenting normal skin texture as a flaw to fix.
  • Health conditions are explained, never diagnosed. We point you to your GP and healthdirect.
  • Australian context. Australian seasons, workplaces, metric units and health services.

Where our information comes from

  1. Australian health authorities and professional bodies, such as healthdirect, the Better Health Channel, Safe Work Australia and the Australasian College of Dermatologists. healthdirect aims to use Australian, non-commercial sources and has its clinical content checked by health professionals[2], which is why we link to it so often.
  2. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses. They bring together the results of many studies on one question, which usually makes them more reliable than a single study[3].
  3. Individual peer-reviewed studies. We say who took part, how many people, and who funded the study where that's reported.

Brand blogs, affiliate ranking lists, press releases and influencer posts are never our evidence. We don't link to brand, retailer, affiliate or influencer content that makes health claims about compression boots. When we cite a research study, we link to it so you can check what it did and didn't find. A person opens and reads every source before we cite it.

What our evidence labels mean

Guides that discuss research carry an evidence label. Our scale is loosely based on GRADE, an approach for judging how much confidence research findings deserve. Australia's National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) advises guideline developers to use GRADE, which it notes is considered best practice by many international guideline organisations[4]. Our labels aren't formal GRADE ratings, and the NHMRC hasn't reviewed them.

  • Labels describe research, not products. Findings from studies of other devices, settings or groups of people can't be assumed to apply to a product used at home, and we won't suggest they do.
  • What lowers a formal rating lowers ours: risk of bias, inconsistent results, imprecise estimates, studies in a different population, and signs that unfavourable results went unpublished[4].
  • Between two levels? We use the lower one.
  • They're our judgement. The NHMRC describes it as good practice for two people to rate each outcome independently, then discuss and agree[4]. We don't work that way yet, so read our label as a guide and the cited sources as the real thing.

How we use AI

  • Where AI helps: finding and summarising studies and official pages, suggesting an outline, drafting first versions and checking our Australian spelling.
  • What a person does every time: opens each cited source, checks every fact, number and date against the source itself (not an AI summary), rewrites the draft and decides whether it's ready.
  • What we never publish: a source, quote or number that a person hasn't checked against the original.

Google's guidance says an AI disclosure helps wherever readers might reasonably wonder how a page was made[1]. So, for the record: this page was drafted with AI help too, and a person on the RECVIA team checked it against its sources before it was published.

What we sell, and what we don't claim

RECVIA sells the RecLegs Recovery Boots, a consumer wellness product for at-home use. That's a commercial interest, and you should know it. Victorian Government guidance on judging health websites notes that a site selling products may have a conflict of interest[5].

Because we sell a product that some of our guides discuss, we hold every guide to the same rules as our advertising. Under Australian Consumer Law, a business's claims must be accurate, truthful and based on reasonable grounds, whether or not anyone meant to mislead[6]. In practice:

  • We don't claim RecLegs treats, prevents or relieves any condition, or that it changes how your body works. Where a guide mentions RecLegs, it describes what the product is: its features, how a session feels and how to use it.
  • Only a few guides link to RecLegs: three Compression guide pages (how the boots work, how to use them, sizing) and our recovery routine guide. Other Compression guide pages name RecLegs, for example in their disclosure note, but don't link to it. Our guides on heavy legs, leg appearance, health conditions and other at-home wellness tools don't link to it in their content, although the site menu appears on every page.
  • No RecLegs prices, discounts, countdowns or testimonials appear in our guides.
  • Nobody pays us to write about a product, and we don't publish sponsored or guest articles. Apart from RecLegs, we don't currently sell any of the products we write about, such as red light panels, LED masks or massage guns; if that changes, those pages will say so.

Medical disclaimer

Corrections and updates

If something in a guide looks wrong, out of date or unclear, contact us with the page, what you think is wrong and, if you can, a source. Please leave out personal health details: we can't give individual advice, and we don't need them to check a fact. Then:

  1. A person checks your point against the sources.
  2. If we got a fact wrong, we fix it and add a dated correction note at the end of the page saying what changed.
  3. We reply to tell you what we changed, or why we didn't.

We review every guide at least once a year, and sooner when we learn that a source we cite has changed or that important new research has appeared. A guide's "Last reviewed" date changes only after a real review, never just to look fresh.

How to check any health guide, including ours

These questions, adapted from Victorian Government guidance on finding reliable health information[9][5], work on any website:

  • Who wrote it, and are they selling something?
  • Has a qualified health professional reviewed it? (Ours haven't been reviewed yet.)
  • Is it dated, and when was it last reviewed?
  • Does it list sources you can open, from organisations you recognise?
  • Does it cover limits and risks, not just benefits?
  • Does it sound too good to be true?

We'd add one more: does it tell you when to see a doctor? We aim to pass these checks, except the one about qualified review, which we can't meet yet. If one of our guides falls short, please tell us.

Published · Last reviewed · RECVIA team

Sources

9 sources
  1. Google Search Central. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content. Last updated 1 October 2026. Accessed 5 October 2026.
  2. Healthdirect Australia. About our content. Last reviewed May 2025. Accessed 5 October 2026.
  3. Cochrane. What are systematic reviews? Accessed 5 October 2026.
  4. National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC). Guidelines for Guidelines: Assessing certainty of evidence. Last updated 6 September 2019. Accessed 5 October 2026.
  5. Better Health Channel, Victorian Department of Health. Health information and health products online. Last reviewed March 2014. Accessed 5 October 2026.
  6. Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC). False or misleading claims. Page dated 11 July 2026. Accessed 5 October 2026.
  7. Healthdirect Australia. How healthdirect can help you. Last reviewed September 2023. Accessed 5 October 2026.
  8. Healthdirect Australia. 13 HEALTH. Last reviewed May 2024. Accessed 5 October 2026.
  9. Better Health Channel, Victorian Department of Health. Finding reliable health information. Last reviewed September 2015. Accessed 5 October 2026.