Let’s talk about one of the biggest distractions in medicine: naming things.
You get a diagnosis—maybe multiple—and it comes with a neat little label. You walk out of the doctor’s office thinking, Finally! I know what I have! But here’s the thing:
🚨 The name of your condition is not the key to getting better. 🚨
What actually matters is why you have it. That’s the puzzle we need to solve.
The Diagnosis Distraction
I get it. Labels feel reassuring. They give you something to Google at 2 AM when your symptoms are acting up. But if we stop at the what and don’t ask the why, we end up playing a never-ending game of symptom whack-a-mole instead of addressing the real problem.
Because at the end of the day, the body doesn’t care what we call something. It only cares about why it’s struggling in the first place. That’s the information that leads to real healing.
You Are the Detective of Your Own Healing
Here’s where you come in. Healing isn’t something that’s done to you—it’s something you actively participate in. Your job? Be the boots-on-the-ground detective.
Doctors can guide the process, but we aren’t in your body every day. You are. And your observations about what’s working, what’s not, and what’s shifting are the most valuable data we have.
Which brings us to an important tool for this detective work:
Keep a Calendar, Not a Novel
Tracking your healing progress doesn’t mean writing a 300-page journal entry every day about how you feel. (Please don’t do this. You will burn out by Day 3.)
Instead, we need a basic monthly calendar where you log only the important stuff:
📝 What to Track:
✔️ Any changes in medications or supplements
✔️ New symptoms or major shifts
✔️ Flare-ups or improvements
That’s it. No need to track every tiny symptom or every single thing you took down to the milligram. This isn’t an IRS audit; it’s about seeing patterns over time.
📅 Why It Matters:
When you come in for an appointment, we can walk through the timeline together. If something is helping, we keep going. If something is making things worse, we adjust. The goal is not to chase every symptom but to use them as clues to fine-tune the bigger strategy.
Symptoms vs. Labs: Which One Wins?
I love labs. They give us great insight into what’s happening inside your body. But at the end of the day, your symptoms tell the real story.
⚡ Labs say one thing, but your body says another? We trust your body.
⚡ Symptom shifts show a clear trend, even if labs don’t? We go with the trend.
Numbers on a piece of paper are useful, but how you feel is always the deciding factor.
Be an Interested Observer, Not a Worried Hyper-Analyzer
Tracking symptoms is important—but let’s be real: it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.
🔹 DO take a few minutes each day to check in and see if anything has shifted.
🔹 DON’T spend your whole day hyper-analyzing every little sensation in your body.
🔹 DO use symptoms as clues to adjust your root cause interventions.
🔹 DON’T let every symptom make you panic or second-guess everything.
🔑 Mindset Shift: Become an interested observer, rather than an emotional investigator. I know, easier said than done, but trust me—this shift makes a massive difference in your healing process.
The Bottom Line: Healing is a Team Effort
This process works best when we work together. You bring your real-world data, and we bring the expertise to interpret it.
🚀 Your job: Track the shifts, keep an eye on the why, and trust that progress isn’t always linear.
🩺 Our job: Help you navigate the process, adjust interventions, and make sure we’re on the right track.
So next time you’re wondering, What’s wrong with me?—pause.
Instead, ask: "Why is my body struggling, and what do we need to do about it?"
That’s where the answers are. That’s where healing happens.