About

Over the years I've accumulated a substantial volume of clinical notes, half-read articles, and half-formed ideas scattered across my Notes app (entries often titled "thyroid??" or "follow up re: ankle issue"), a desktop folder optimistically labelled STUDY, assorted papers in the glovebox, and an ever-expanding collection of browser tabs I fully intended to revisit. The habit of capturing things was sound. The filing system was not.

At some point the volume became its own problem. Notes from a Monday clinic were indistinguishable from notes from six months ago; useful references were buried under layers of slightly less useful ones; and the glovebox situation had gotten out of hand. Something needed to change.

To address this, I set about building a personal CME resource: one place to consolidate, refine, and actually retrieve things when I needed them. The goal was a working knowledge base organised around the topics that come up repeatedly in general practice - not a textbook, and not a guidelines repository, but something closer to a well-organised personal reference that reflects how a working GP actually thinks about clinical problems.

Working Diagnosis is what came out of that effort, written mostly on a laptop between clinics. It started as a private resource and became public on the reasonable assumption that if I was looking for something like this, someone else probably was too.

Some pages are finished and reasonably polished. Others are placeholders. It updates when something in clinic prompts a rethink, when a better reference surfaces, or when I realise I have been wrong about something for an embarrassingly long time.

Browse the topic index and use what's useful.

- an independent New Zealand GP