Plan

The ‘P’ in SOAP stands for the plan.  In medicine this usually includes further testing and temporary or definitive treatment.  Medicine has the obvious advantage that the problems bodies can have are actually quite finite.  It is well known what are the diagnoses to rule in or out for most presenting complaints.  Of course, the results from the plan will be folded back into our subjective and objective evaluations of the problem in order to refine our assessment and generate a new plan.

In our lives, plans will likely be even more iterative.  In many cases, the plan will likely be to gather more subjective and objective information from other stakeholders before committing to an assessment and plan for mitigation or management of the problem.

I cannot emphasize enough that if the assessment is not correct, the plan for addressing the problem will not work.  If you are overweight because of emotional eating, all the calorie counting and meal planning in the world will not work.   If your child is bored because they are coming down with a viral illness and therefore feeling listless and unable to concentrate, a brisk walk will not cure them.

Next Steps

I invite you to consider a problem facing you and chart it using the SOAP model.  Try to be as complete as you can in the subjective phase, trying to really understand all of the ways in which the problem interacts with your life, and what makes it better or worse.  Write this down, or record yourself talking with incredible detail about the problem.  Then, turn to the objective side and write down only what you can observe about the problem, trying to stay away from opinions and thoughts about what is causing it.  The next step is to make as broad a differential as you can for what is causing the problem.

Finally, create a plan which has three parts: The first should be investigations you can carry out to narrow down the differential; for example if you believe that your troubles with being overweight stem from not getting exercise in in the morning, commit to exercising in the morning for one month and reassessing your weight loss at the end of that time.  The second part of the plan should be to address something which you are confident is a real part of the problem; for example, if you have identified that lack of time to meal plan is causing you to eat food you would rather not, either order from a meal prep service, cook ahead and freeze portions or address this specific problem in a concrete fashion.  Third, commit to understanding your problem more thoroughly by taking time on a regular basis to write down your experience of, thoughts about and observations about your problem.

Comments

I would love for you to leave a comment about a problem you are working on understanding better and your thoughts on this series of posts.