How to read a safety signal vs. a scare headline

Not every alarming anecdote is a safety signal — and "well-tolerated" doesn't mean safe. How to tell the difference:

• Case reports (e.g. regulator warnings around the unapproved "tanning peptide" melanotan II) flag possible harms and generate hypotheses. They don't establish how common or causal something is.
• Controlled trials estimate rates of adverse events vs. placebo — that's where real risk gets quantified.

A genuine signal usually shows consistency (repeats across reports), plausibility (a mechanism), and ideally dose-response in controlled data.

Bring safety concerns here — just anchor them to what the evidence actually supports, not the headline.