Why does 'evidence: none' keep showing up on compounds with hundreds of studies?

Genuine question, not a complaint. BPC-157 says evidence: none but the page itself says three decades of animal research. TB-500 the same. There are hundreds of papers. How is that "none"?

It reads as harsh, and I think it puts people off trusting the rest of the page.

Because the label is answering a specific question and it is not "has anyone studied this". It is "has a completed trial in humans shown this does what it is sold for".

For BPC-157 the answer is no. Not "not yet convincingly" — no completed human trial. Everything else, all three decades of it, is animals and cells.

Harsh is the right register for that. Softening it to "early" would put it in the same bucket as Semax or Selank, which have actual human data, poor and small though it is. That would be less accurate, not kinder.

Right, so it is a category not a score. "None" means zero of a particular kind of study, not "nothing worth reading".

Exactly that. And the reason it matters is the failure rate.

Rodent-to-human translation is bad. Not "somewhat unreliable" — the great majority of things that work in a mouse do not go on to work in a person, across every therapeutic area anyone has measured it in. So three decades of rodent work is genuinely interesting biology and genuinely weak evidence that it will do anything for your tendon, and both of those are true at once.

How to Read a Peptide Study Without Being Fooled goes through why.

There is a second thing about the BPC-157 literature specifically that the raw paper count hides.

A very large share of it comes from one research group. That is not misconduct and I am not implying any. But "three hundred papers" and "three hundred papers from thirty independent groups" are wildly different evidentiary situations, and the first is routinely quoted as though it were the second.

When you see a big number, the question is how many labs, not how many papers.

Speaking as someone who has been injured a lot and has therefore been marketed at a lot: I would rather the page said none.

Every product page I have ever read says "studies show". The number of times one of those studies turned out to be a completed human trial is zero. A site that will just say the word none has bought itself a lot of credit with me for everything else it says.

Fair enough, I withdraw the complaint. It reads as harsh because it is harsh, and the alternative is worse.

For what it is worth, this is the one thing on the site that does not move. Tone gets rewritten — the compound pages were reworked to read as articles rather than warning notices, and that was the right call — but the evidence labels and the acute-harm notes came through that pass untouched, on purpose.

If evidence: none ever gets softened to something warmer, that is a bug and I would like to hear about it in this category.