Obsidian

Why “too many notes” and “no notes” are the same thing Let me start with a rule I decided on early and haven’t changed since: in my note vault, there can only be one note per topic. It’s not about being a neat freak. It’s because if the same thing is covered in five different places, I have to open five files when I look something up, and figure out which version actually counts. That organization work didn’t disappear, it was just left intact for my future self. And my future self is usually seeing patients in clinic or rushing to finish slides, with no time to do this. The chaos caused by too much information is the exact same pain as not having enough information. ...

Origin I’ve loved taking notes since medical school and have accumulated thousands of medical notes over the years. But honestly, with information so easy to get and so much to learn now, it’s become hard to keep every note at the same quality using my own structure. On the other hand, in an era of ever-increasing information, trustworthy, high-quality sources have ironically become precious, which makes textbooks a great source of information. However, there are over forty designated reference books for the physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) board examination, and the same concept might be scattered across different chapters in several books. Actually reading through all of them is almost impossible. ...

A minor annoyance that bothered me for a long time I’m a heavy Obsidian user, with thousands of notes sitting in my vault. But there’s one really inconvenient thing: Obsidian’s built-in search only looks for the exact words you type. The problem is, how would I remember what words I used back then for a note written three years ago? I’m thinking “how to manage a flaccid bladder,” but the note says Neurogenic Bladder → flaccid type → intermittent catheterization. The words don’t match, so the search returns a blank page. The worst part is, there were several times when I thought I hadn’t written about it, so I rewrote the whole thing, only to find out later that a more complete version had been lying there all along 😅 ...

Background: What I was already using When studying for the board examination, I set up a RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) pipeline for myself. Using semantic search to look at similarity, I turned hundreds of physical medicine and rehabilitation (PM&R) textbooks and my own notes into something I could search and query. I use it for reading in Obsidian, while also letting Claude find what I need via MCP. Its weakest point right now is connecting knowledge across different documents. So a few days ago, when I saw someone share a newly published paper, SAG (SQL-Retrieval Augmented Generation), claiming that adding SQL and graph concepts on top of semantic search makes cross-document search easier—with effects similar to GraphRAG but easier to build and maintain—my eyes lit up. ...