Here are two examples from about 5,000 that I have accumulated since medical school: JG061210        m         AP Abscess I&D     “Pus Volcano” AR090808       f           Fever Cellulitis US-guided IV   in IVDU            Forgot to listen for murmur

every patient I see gets two or three lines in a pocket journal. The first line lists the patient’s initials, gender, date seen, and chief complaint or diagnosis. On the second line, I’ll note a learning point, any procedure I performed, and one other piece of the patient’s story. The more random the better—captured correctly, a strange component of the interaction can jog my memory of the entire encounter.

SOAP only dictates an order of information, not content or style. The writing task’s transition from labored struggle (for students) to automatic function (for senior residents) is accompanied by improved readability.

Was it not too much, to combine the vaccines for three different illnesses at once? Was there a chance Tobie could get these diseases from the vaccines themselves? Given that he was premature, given that he was so tiny, wouldn’t the vaccines be even harder for him to take than they’d be for a full-term baby? Why immunize him against diseases that we no longer see? If vaccines were as good as doctors seemed to think they were, why were there so many websites warning against them?

From addiction and weight-loss psychologists, he borrowed a technique called motivational interviewing, in which a counselor asks questions, like a less abrasive Socrates, helping the counseled examine their own uncertainties. From his French pediatrician colleagues, he borrowed the notion of staging such conversations in the maternity ward, within a day of a baby’s birth.

“Telling people how to be more healthy usually doesn’t work, you have to give them ownership over those decisions.”

“Often the first question that I address with parents is: What’s your opinion about vaccines for your baby?” he said. “What do you think?”

“Parents appreciate not being told, ‘This is what you have to do, this is what will be good for your kids,’” said Dr. Danielle Auger, who leads the program at Québec’s ministry of health and social services. “It’s more of a dialogue.”

Vaccination counselors, the new employees were called. In 2017 and 2018, over 50 of them were stationed in more than a dozen of the province’s largest maternity wards, with plans to hire one or more at every last Québec hospital where mothers give birth by 2021. The counselors are themselves a kind of prophylaxis. Their job is to ask about parents’ worries long before anyone’s trying to vaccinate their kids at 2 months of age, to answer whatever questions come up — in other words, to inoculate against the misconceptions that might infect them online.

As a neonatologist from the north of France, an M.D.-Ph.D., and a speaker of clipped European French in a province of slurred consonants, he might’ve come across as slightly snooty. His attitude, though, was anything but. As he prepared to talk vaccines with Étienne-Rousseau — a hardliner, he’d been told — he purposefully set his expert opinions aside. Too often, he felt, doctors try to think on behalf of their patients and alienate them in the process. He hoped he could avoid that trap. “I didn’t want to put any pressure on her,” he said.

To prompt this kind of revolution in your own life, Rose and Ogas suggest creating a micromotive, or a goal tailored to an extremely specific activity that truly inspires you. For example, when Korinne Belock left her job as a political aide to form Urban Simplicity, a firm that declutters and redesigns homes and offices, her micromotive was “organizing physical space.” Note that she didn’t say “doing something creative” or “starting my own business.” Those declarations are too general and fuzzy to be acted on. Instead, she identified a task that sparked within her an outsized amount of curiosity and pleasure and used it as her guide.

According to the journalist David Epstein, author of Range, our obsession with specialization has infiltrated the ranks of youth sports coaches and helicopter parents, and it defies logic. Unless your job requires repetitive, routine tasks, being a specialist isn’t an asset. Having a wide range of skills and experiences is more beneficial because it allows you to be nimble and creative.