A closing thought

The unifying principle in all of this is that you are a source of medical facts, not the decision-maker. The employer decides what’s reasonable. The insurer decides what’s covered. Social Security decides who’s disabled. The court decides who’s excused. The landlord decides about the dog. Once you genuinely believe that, the paperwork stops feeling like a judgment on your patient’s life and starts feeling like what it is: a form.

Save your templates. Fill them out with the patient in the room. Send the ones that aren’t yours back where they belong. And never sign anything you couldn’t defend out loud.

In the coming years, large language models will be doing much of this work. If you have the patience, you can use one now to help you.