Medical Disclaimer for HeliosCheck.com

HeliosCheck.com publishes health information written by consultant gynecologists and checked against published guidance. That is worth something — but it is worth something specific, and this page sets out exactly what. Read it alongside our Terms of Service, our editorial policy and our Privacy Policy.

1. Our content is general information, not personal medical advice

Every article, condition page, checklist and downloadable resource on helioscheck.com is written for a general readership. It describes how a condition usually behaves, what the evidence generally supports, and what a clinician would usually consider. It cannot account for your age, your history, your medicines, your pregnancy status, your test results, your family history or the examination findings nobody has yet taken.

Medicine is a field of individual judgement applied to individual circumstances. Two people with the same symptom often need different investigations and different answers, and the reason is rarely visible from the symptom alone. Reading a page that describes your symptom is therefore not the same as being assessed, and the closer a description seems to fit you, the more carefully that distinction is worth holding.

Nothing on this site should be used to diagnose yourself, to rule a condition out, to start, stop or change a medicine, to delay seeking care, or to overrule advice given to you by a clinician who has actually examined you.

2. Reading HeliosCheck.com does not create a doctor–patient relationship

Browsing this site, reading an article, downloading a resource, subscribing to updates or sending a general enquiry does not make us your doctors and does not create a doctor–patient or clinician–patient relationship.

That relationship begins only when you attend a paid consultation, and it is bounded in scope and in time — it covers the question you brought, the written plan issued for it, and the 14-day follow-up window described on our how it works page. It is not an on-call arrangement, it does not make us responsible for your continuing care, and it does not replace the clinician who holds your full medical record. The legal expression of all this is in section 7 of the Terms of Service.

Please do not send clinical details, test results or images through the general contact form expecting an assessment. We cannot give personal medical advice outside a booked consultation, and an unanswered message is not a clinical opinion that nothing is wrong.

3. Always consult a qualified clinician about your own health

If something about your body has changed, take it to a clinician who can assess you properly — your own doctor, a gynecologist, a midwife, or an urgent care service where the symptom warrants it. Do that in addition to reading, not instead of it. Where our pages are most useful is in helping you arrive at that appointment with better questions: the pattern of your symptom, what you have already tried, what you most want answered.

Delay is the risk this page exists to reduce. If you find yourself using an article to reassure yourself out of an appointment you were about to make, treat that as a reason to make the appointment. Our conditions pages state, for each condition, the point at which reading should stop and assessment should start.

4. What an online consultation can — and cannot — do

A HeliosCheck.com consultation is a genuine specialist appointment, and for a great many gynecological questions a careful history is the larger part of the answer. But remote care has hard limits, and we would rather state them here than discover them with you at the appointment.

We cannot, online:

• perform a physical, abdominal, pelvic, speculum, bimanual or breast examination, or take a smear;
• perform or interpret an ultrasound scan in real time;
• take blood, swabs or tissue samples, or fit or remove a coil or implant;
• see, feel or measure anything that requires being in the room — and some diagnoses depend entirely on that;
• provide emergency, urgent or same-day care of any kind;
• provide booked maternity care, antenatal scanning or intrapartum care.

Because of those limits, a working impression formed remotely is exactly that: an impression, offered with its uncertainty stated, and often accompanied by a request for an examination or a test before anything is concluded. Where a question cannot be answered safely without hands or imaging, your clinician will say so during the appointment and tell you where to go instead. If that judgement is reached early, the fee is refunded — the arrangement is set out in section 5 of the Terms of Service.

5. No guarantee of outcomes

We do not promise cures, recoveries, diagnoses, pregnancies, symptom relief or any other outcome, and no page on helioscheck.com should be read as promising one. What we commit to is a defined standard of care: a specialist who has read your history before you meet, an appointment long enough to take that history properly, advice traceable to published guidance, a written plan you keep, and honesty about uncertainty.

Outcomes in medicine depend on biology, timing, adherence, access to onward care and chance. Two people given identical, entirely correct advice can end up in different places. Any clinician or service promising you a guaranteed result in women’s health is telling you something the evidence does not support.

A diagnosis will not be offered without the assessment needed to support it. Where something can only responsibly be described as a possibility, that is how we will describe it, and we will tell you what would change the picture.

6. Medicines, doses and prescriptions

Where an article mentions a treatment, a drug class or a typical dose, it is describing general practice, not prescribing for you. Doses vary with weight, age, kidney and liver function, pregnancy and breastfeeding status, and every other medicine you take. Do not start, stop, change or re-purpose a medicine on the strength of anything you read here.

Always read the patient information leaflet supplied with a medicine, take it as prescribed, and speak to your prescriber or pharmacist before changing anything. Report suspected side effects to your clinician and to your national medicines regulator [regulator and reporting scheme to be named for each territory before launch].

A prescription from a HeliosCheck.com clinician is never automatic. It is issued only where it is clinically appropriate, lawful in your territory and safe without a physical examination — and part of a specialist opinion may well be that a medicine is not the right answer. Controlled drugs are not prescribed remotely. The limits are set out in section 6 of the Terms of Service and in our FAQ.

7. Third-party and contributed content

Some material on helioscheck.com quotes, summarises or links to work produced by others — clinical guidelines, patient leaflets, research summaries, or comments and questions sent in by readers. Summaries are ours and any error in one is ours, not the original author’s. Where a guideline is paraphrased, the linked source is authoritative and our paraphrase is not.

Views expressed by guest contributors or quoted third parties are their own. Reader comments and questions, where published, are personal accounts and carry no clinical authority whatsoever. Photography on this site is licensed stock imagery used illustratively; the people shown are models, not patients, and no image depicts a real consultation, a real patient or a real clinical finding.

8. Accuracy, sourcing and review dates

Our pages are written by clinicians and checked against guidance from bodies including ACOG , RCOG , WHO , NICE , NHS and CDC . Each clinical page carries the date it was last reviewed, and our editorial policy explains who writes, who reviews, how sources are chosen and how often pages are revisited.

Even so, guidance changes, evidence is superseded, and a page accurate on its review date can drift. Check the review date before relying on anything, follow the source link where currency matters, and treat the original guideline as authoritative if it now says something different. We do not warrant that every page is complete, current in every particular, or applicable to your circumstances.

Our content is written in English for readers in [PERMITTED TERRITORIES]. Drug names, licensed indications, screening intervals and referral pathways differ between countries, and a recommendation correct in one may not be correct in another.

9. External links

We link outward deliberately, so that you can check what we say against the source rather than take it on trust. Traceability is the point. But we do not control those sites, we are not responsible for their content, accuracy, availability or privacy practices, and a link is not an endorsement of every view expressed there or of any product, service or provider mentioned on it. External guidance is also revised on its own schedule; the version you open may be newer than the one we read. Section 10 of the Terms of Service covers this in legal terms.

10. Testimonials and case examples

Where patient feedback appears on helioscheck.com it is published with consent and describes one person’s individual experience. It is not evidence of typical results, it is not a clinical claim, and it does not predict what will happen for you. People who write in about their experience are, by definition, people who chose to write in.

Case examples used to illustrate a clinical point are composites or anonymised scenarios constructed for teaching. They are not real identifiable patients, and no detail in them should be read as belonging to a particular person. No statistic appears on this site as a research finding unless it is linked to the source it came from.

11. Where this applies

HeliosCheck.com consultations are available only to adults aged 18 or over who are located in a territory we serve at the time of the appointment, because a clinician must be licensed to practise where the patient is. Our clinicians hold specialist registration in obstetrics and gynecology [GMC number or equivalent registration number to be added for each clinician before launch] and hold professional indemnity cover as their regulator requires [insurer and policy details to be added]. Eligibility is set out in full in section 2 of the Terms of Service.

12. Found an error? Tell us

If you believe something on this site is wrong, out of date or capable of being misunderstood in a way that could cause harm, please write to hello@helioschecks.com or use the contact page. Corrections are reviewed by a clinician, and substantive changes are logged on the page itself. We would rather be corrected than be confidently wrong in public.

By using helioscheck.com you confirm that you have read and accepted this disclaimer together with our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. If you do not accept it, please do not rely on the information published here.