Legal
Medical & educational disclaimer
Last updated 30 August 2026
Read this first. Nothing on ICU Decoded is a diagnosis, a prescription, or a substitute for your own clinical judgement. Every dose, rate and pathway must be independently verified against your local formulary and current guidelines before you act on it.
Who this is for
ICU Decoded is an educational reference, a summary of published decision pathways, and a set of bedside calculators built for licensed healthcare professionals, resident physicians and medical trainees. It assumes clinical training. It is not written for patients or the general public, and it should not be used to self-diagnose or to guide your own treatment.
If you are a patient looking for advice about your health, please speak to your own doctor or attend your nearest emergency department.
This is not medical advice
The algorithms, decision pathways, dosing summaries and infusion calculations here do not constitute a formal medical diagnosis or a definitive treatment prescription. They are condensed summaries of published consensus guidance — including the Surviving Sepsis Campaign, ATLS, the Difficult Airway Society, ESC and KDIGO — presented for rapid recall.
Guidelines change. A pathway that reflected best practice when it was written may be superseded. Where a pathway cites a governing society, confirm you are working from the current version.
Independent clinical judgement is required
Medicine is individual. Comorbidity, organ function, pregnancy, allergy, drug interaction, local resistance patterns and resource availability all change what is correct for the patient in front of you, and none of that is known to this site.
Before administering any therapy derived from this site, the prescribing clinician must independently verify:
- the drug, concentration, diluent and compounding recipe;
- the infusion rate and pump programming;
- contraindications, interactions and allergy status;
- renal, hepatic and extracorporeal clearance adjustments;
- weight, age and indication-specific dose limits.
Calculators
The calculators perform deterministic arithmetic on the values you enter. They cannot detect a mistyped weight, a wrong unit, or a clinically inappropriate indication. A calculator result is only as correct as its input, and it is never a substitute for checking the answer against what you expect.
The AI assistant
The "Ask" feature answers only from passages retrieved from this site's own content, and cites the passages it used. That design substantially reduces invention, but it does not eliminate it: a retrieved passage can be misread, and a summary can lose a caveat that mattered. Treat every AI answer as a pointer to the underlying chapter, and read the chapter.
Limitation of liability
ICU Decoded is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any warranty of accuracy, completeness, or fitness for a particular purpose. To the fullest extent permitted by law, the author and maintainers accept no liability for clinical outcomes, adverse drug events, injury, loss or damage arising from the use of, or reliance on, this material.
By using this site you accept that responsibility for patient care remains entirely with the treating clinician.
Reporting an error
If you believe something here is wrong, please tell me — clinical corrections are the most valuable thing anyone can send. Email contact@icudecodedd.com with the page and what you think is incorrect. Errors are corrected as a priority.