diff --git a/README.md b/README.md
index 23d736aa..92fa410d 100644
--- a/README.md
+++ b/README.md
@@ -134,8 +134,8 @@ Healthchecks reads configuration from the following environment variables:
 | PUSHOVER_EMERGENCY_EXPIRATION | `86400`
 | PUSHOVER_EMERGENCY_RETRY_DELAY | `300`
 | PUSHOVER_SUBSCRIPTION_URL | `None`
-| REMOTE_USER_HEADER | `AUTH_USER` | An incoming HTTP header that will be used to identify the user in place of authentication (e.g., for identity-aware proxies). See [the django docs](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/auth-remote-user/) for more details.
-| REMOTE_USER_HEADER_TYPE | `""` | If set to `EMAIL`, the application will log users in by the email present in the specified header. If set to `ID`, it will treat the header as their UUID. If unset or set to any other value, header-based authentication will be disabled.
+| REMOTE_USER_HEADER | `AUTH_USER` | See [External Authentication](#external-authentication) for details.
+| REMOTE_USER_HEADER_TYPE | `None` | See [External Authentication](#external-authentication) for details.
 | SHELL_ENABLED | `"False"`
 | SLACK_CLIENT_ID | `None`
 | SLACK_CLIENT_SECRET | `None`
@@ -330,6 +330,14 @@ Note that WebAuthn requires HTTPS, even if running on localhost. To test WebAuth
 locally with a self-signed certificate, you can use the `runsslserver` command
 from the `django-sslserver` package.
 
+## External Authentication
+
+HealthChecks supports external authentication by means of HTTP headers set by reverse proxies or the WSGI server. This allows you to integrate it into your existing authentication system (e.g., LDAP or OAuth) via an authenticating proxy. When this option is enabled, *healtchecks will trust the header's value implicitly*, so it is *very important* to ensure that attackers cannot set the value themselves (and thus impersonate any user). How to do this varies by your chosen proxy, but generally involves configuring it to strip out headers that normalize to the same name as the chosen identity header. More information about configuring this can be found in the [Django documentation](https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.1/howto/auth-remote-user/).
+
+To enable this feature, set the following environment variables:
+
+1. `REMOTE_USER_HEADER` — set this to the header you wish to authenticate with. HTTP headers will be prefixed with `HTTP_` and have any dashes converted to underscores. Headers without that prefix can be set by the WSGI server itself only, which is more secure.
+2. `REMOTE_USER_HEADER_TYPE` — If set to `EMAIL`, the specified header will be treated as the user's email. If set to `ID`, the specified header will be set to the user's UUID. Any other value (including empty, the default) disables header-based authentication.
 
 ## Integrations