ICU NOTES: Born from the Challenges of Residency
ICU NOTES did not begin as a business idea !!. It began with a problem I kept seeing during residency.
While working in a busy district hospital, I was managing emergencies, wards, and intensive care alongside doctors from different specialties.
I noticed that for the same clinical situation, there could be completely different approaches. When I asked why a particular treatment was being given, the answer was often:”This is how we have always done it.”
I came across clinical practices that were not supported by current evidence, and sometimes were simply being repeated because someone senior had taught them that way. When I asked, “Why are we doing this?”, the answer was often:”My senior used to do the same thing.”
So I would ask another question:”Have we ever checked the evidence behind it?”The answer was usually:”We don’t have time.”
And honestly, I understood why.
Long working hours, emergencies, rounds, procedures, documentation, and night duties leave very little time to sit down and search through guidelines and research papers.The problem was not that doctors did not want to practice evidence-based medicine.
The problem was that finding and applying the evidence in the middle of a busy clinical day was difficult.
Guidelines were scattered across different websites. Important recommendations were buried inside hundreds of pages. Research papers were often difficult to interpret quickly. That made me think: What if the information we actually need in clinical practice could be organized in one place?
That is where ICU NOTES began.
I started building it with a simple goal: to make evidence-based critical care easier to find, understand, and apply.
The idea is not to replace clinical judgment, experience, or guidelines. Rather, it is to help bridge the gap between what we know exists in the evidence and what we actually do at the bedside.
Medicine keeps changing. What was accepted yesterday may not be recommended today. We owe it to our patients—and to ourselves—to keep asking: two simple questions:
“Why are we doing this?”
“What does the evidence say today?”
That is the idea behind ICU NOTES.
About me
Hi, I’m Dr. Harshit Aggarwal,Founder & Editor-in-Chief
I’m a doctor with a particular interest in Critical Care Medicine and Internal Medicine. I secured AIR 72 in NEET-SS 2025 (Critical Care Medicine)
Over time, I’ve developed a simple belief about learning medicine:
There is no point in knowing the advanced stuff if the fundamentals aren’t solid.
What is the point of knowing how to perform a transcranial Doppler if I don’t know how to recognise and manage a physiologically difficult airway?
What is the point of knowing advanced hemodynamic monitoring if I cannot properly assess a patient at the bedside?
That philosophy has shaped how I learn, practice, and teach medicine.
ICU NOTES is an extension of that approach — a place where I try to break down difficult clinical topics, connect physiology with bedside decisions, and keep learning along the way.
I don’t see this as a place where I have all the answers.
I’m learning too.
And ICU NOTES is my attempt to document, organise, and share that learning with other doctors who are trying to become better clinicians.
Welcome to ICU NOTES.
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