Cookie policy
What this site stores, and when
The Holistic Rheumatologist stores nothing on your device when you open a page and read it, which covers almost every page here. There are no analytics, no tracking pixels, no fingerprinting, and no advertising cookies anywhere on this site. The one exception is worth a section of its own.
A few pages here hold recordings of the talks, and those players come from YouTube. Nothing is requested from YouTube until you press a button asking for it, so opening one of those pages sets nothing either. This policy was last updated on 21 September 2026, when the players were added.
Before that date this page said the site set no cookies of any kind and needed no consent banner. That stopped being true the moment a player went on a page, so this page was rewritten in the change that put it there. What follows is a description of what happens now.
The one key this site keeps
If you agree to load the players, this site stores a single item in your browser's local storage, and it's called ha-video-consent. It holds one word, either yes or no, and nothing else. There's no identifier in it, nothing that distinguishes you from anybody else, and it never leaves your device.
Its only job is to save you being asked again on the next page with a video on it. If you say no, that answer is remembered too, and no player will load. If you never press either button, nothing at all is stored, and every page behaves just as it did before.
You can undo the answer whenever you like. Any page with a player on it has a control that clears the key and reloads the page, and clearing your browser's site data for this domain does it too. Nothing about that is hidden behind a settings page.
What YouTube sets once you allow it
Once you allow a player to load, the frame comes from youtube-nocookie.com, which is Google's privacy-enhanced form of the embed. It sets less than the ordinary YouTube player does, and it doesn't set nothing. Google can see that a video was loaded and played, along with the technical details any web request includes, and it may set cookies or similar storage of its own.
That storage belongs to Google rather than to us, and it's governed by Google's policies rather than by this one. We have no control over it and no access to whatever it records. What we can control is whether it happens at all without you choosing it, which is why the frame isn't there until you press the button.
The alternative is still on every page. Underneath each player there's a plain link to the same recording on YouTube, and it works whether or not you have JavaScript turned on. Following that link takes you to YouTube on your own terms, which is what this site did for every recording before today.
What your browser and our host do anyway
Your browser and your internet provider still handle your visit in their usual way, and this policy doesn't change any of that. Our web host records ordinary server logs when you request a page, and the privacy policy describes those. Those logs are on a server rather than on your device, which means they aren't cookies and they aren't used to recognize you when you come back.
If you reached this site by following a link from a social media application, that application may have added tracking information to the address. That's the application's doing rather than ours, and we don't read it or store it. You can delete everything after the question mark in the address bar without affecting the page.
We still run no analytics of any kind. We don't know how many people read a given page, which pages are popular, or where our readers come from. That's a real cost to us in understanding what's useful, and we've accepted it rather than tracking readers of a health website who are researching their own diagnoses.
If this ever changes
Adding an analytics tool or a newsletter widget would introduce storage of a different kind, and either would need this page changed before it went live. The same goes for any third-party script that arrives without a reader asking for it. We won't begin storing something while a page on this site tells you we don't.
The build itself enforces part of that promise. Every third-party origin the site is allowed to load is declared in one file, anything in that file which stores something on your device has to be named on this page, and the build fails if this page still claims the site stores nothing. That check is why this page changed on the same day the players did.
What no check can see is a tool that never appears in a page, such as analytics switched on in a hosting dashboard. Those have to be caught by a person. If you think something on this site is storing more than this page describes, please tell us and we'll look.
Contact
Questions about this policy can go to the email address published on this site. Please put the word privacy in the subject line when you write, which helps more than it sounds like it should. That gets it to the right place a good deal faster than a general enquiry does.