Terms of use

No medical advice, and no clinical relationship

The guides, glossary, symptom navigator and summaries on this site are patient education. They describe conditions in general terms, drawn from named clinical sources, for people trying to understand a diagnosis and prepare for appointments.

They are not a diagnosis, a treatment plan, a triage decision, or a second opinion. Reading them does not make anyone at AURORA your clinician, and we have no way to know your history, your imaging, or your examination findings.

If something is severe, sudden, or getting worse quickly, contact your care team or emergency services. Do not wait to finish reading, and do not let anything here delay care.

What the symptom navigator does and doesn't do

The navigator records what you report and organises it into a written summary. That is the whole function. It has no model, no scoring algorithm, and no clinical logic that ranks your risk.

Specifically, it does not:

• Diagnose Chiari malformation or anything else.
• Tell you whether you need surgery, imaging, or a referral.
• Decide whether your symptoms are urgent — the urgent-symptom list is a fixed reminder of what clinicians want to hear about promptly, not an assessment of you.
• Send anything to a clinician, a hospital, or us.

How you may use this site

Read it, print it, take it to appointments, share it with family, quote it to your clinician. Translate it for someone who needs it. Use it in a patient support group or a waiting room.

Two limits: don't present our material as your own clinical guidance, and don't republish it in a way that strips the medical limitations above. Those limitations exist to protect readers, and removing them causes real harm.

Accuracy, and what we do when we're wrong

We write from named, checkable sources and list them at the end of each guide. Medicine changes, sources conflict, and pilot-stage material carries mistakes. Content marked as pending clinical review has not yet been signed off by a clinician.

If you find an error, tell us and we will correct it and note the correction. We do not warrant that everything here is complete, current, or applicable to your situation, because no general educational text can be.

The software is separate from this site

AURORA's disease modules are research software, distributed under MIT at public alpha. Nothing here is a certified medical device, and none of it is cleared by the FDA, MHRA, EMA or any other regulator for clinical decision-making.

Institutions deploying AURORA are responsible for their own validation, governance, ethics approval, and regulatory position. In a federated install, patient data stays inside the institution and the institution is its controller. We never receive it.

If you contribute

Code contributions are licensed under MIT. Written contributions — guides, corrections, translations — are licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 so they stay open and attributable.

Never submit identifiable patient information in an issue, an RFC, or a pull request, even with good intentions. If you do, we will delete it rather than redact it.

Liability, stated honestly

This site is provided as-is, without warranties of any kind. To the fullest extent the law allows, the AURORA Collective and its contributors are not liable for decisions made on the basis of what you read here.

Nothing in these terms limits liability where the law does not permit it — including for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud. Consumer rights you hold under your local law survive this document.

Changes

We will update these terms as the project moves from pilot to public alpha, and will date material changes. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the current version. The medical limitations will never be weakened.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the law of the jurisdiction in which the AURORA Collective is established, which will be named here before public alpha. Nothing here removes your right to bring a claim where your local law entitles you to.