An aircraft checklist has two kinds of item on it, and pilots are taught to tell them apart. Some are true of the aircraft: this engine will not restart above that altitude. Others are true of the situation: do not do this in icing conditions. The first kind never changes. The second is a question about the day. A point warning works the same way, and reading one well starts with deciding which kind it is.
What is on the page
759 of the 773 points in this catalogue carry a warnings field. It is free text taken from the sources the point was catalogued from, not a computed safety score, and it is shown as written rather than summarised into a rating. That is deliberate: a caution compressed into a symbol loses the clause that says when it applies.
Anatomical cautions
The first kind names a structure under the needle. 74 points carry a caution about the lung, the pleura or pneumothorax – the points over the upper back, the chest and the supraclavicular fossa, where the pleural dome sits close to the surface. These do not depend on the patient. They are facts about where things are, they apply to every patient on every day, and they are the cautions that govern needling depth and angle rather than point selection.
AcuiQ does not publish depth or angle. That is a deliberate limit rather than an omission: depth is a function of the patient’s build and the practitioner’s training, and a number printed without either is worse than no number. The catalogue names the hazard and stops there.
Conditional cautions
The second kind names a condition the patient may or may not have: a bleeding disorder, epilepsy, an acute abdomen, uncontrolled hypertension. These are the ones that need the clause read in full. “Caution in hypertension” and “contraindicated in hypertension” are different instructions, and the catalogue keeps whichever the source used rather than levelling them to one word.
The failure to watch for
A point can warn against the very thing the same row says it treats. It happens because source catalogues print indications and contraindications in one block of text, and a parser that splits on the wrong delimiter files the second half as something the point is for. The result renders both blocks on the same page, and neither is marked as the wrong one.
This is the defect class that coverage metrics cannot see. An audit that counts empty fields scores such a row as complete, because every field is populated. Only a check that reads the two fields against each other finds it, which is why AcuiQ keeps that comparison as its own definition rather than as a line inside a report: seventeen condition rules, each pairing what a warning clause names against what an indication would have to look like for the two to be the same condition.
Bidirectional indications are normal and are not the defect. ST25 is used for constipation and for diarrhoea, and that is regulation rather than contradiction. Only a caution naming the treated condition counts.
What to do with one
Treat the warnings field as a pointer to the source, not as a verdict. Every entry on a point page says which kind of source it came from and carries the caveat that goes with that kind – a trial-reported prescription and a line from a website are labelled differently, and About & Method sets out what each label means. Where a caution matters to a decision, open the source and read the clause in place.
The one case where a contradiction has a real resolution rather than a parsing cause is pregnancy, and it has its own page.