One of the biggest challenges in treating complex chronic illness is not making a diagnosis—it's figuring out whether the treatments we're using are actually helping.
As patients move through their healing journey, medications change, supplements are added, infections flare, environmental exposures occur, diets evolve, and symptoms rise and fall. Over time, it becomes incredibly difficult to remember exactly what happened, when it happened, and what may have contributed to it.
As a physician, the single most valuable piece of information I can use to guide treatment decisions is understanding how a patient's symptoms change over time in relation to the interventions we are using.
This is why I recommend Cerewell.
Why I Recommend Cerewell
Cerewell is much more than a symptom tracker.
It creates a long-term timeline of your health journey that allows both you and your provider to visualize how symptoms change over time alongside medications, supplements, infections, environmental exposures, and other treatment interventions.
This is important because treatment decisions should not be based solely on how you feel on the day of your appointment.
Instead, we want to identify trends.
For example:
- Did fatigue improve after starting a treatment?
- Did headaches worsen after a medication change?
- Did sleep improve after addressing mold exposure?
- Did cognitive symptoms improve after treating a vector-borne infection?
- Did symptoms flare after a specific environmental exposure?
These patterns are often difficult to identify from memory alone, especially when months have passed between visits.
The more clearly we can see the relationship between symptoms and interventions, the better decisions we can make moving forward.
In many cases, this information becomes more valuable than any individual laboratory result because it helps answer the question that matters most:
"Is this treatment actually helping?"
Sometimes patients become understandably focused on individual symptoms, laboratory values, or day-to-day fluctuations. While those details matter, they are only part of the story. What ultimately guides treatment decisions is understanding how symptoms change in relation to the interventions we are using. The goal is not simply to track symptoms. The goal is to understand what is driving them and whether our treatments are moving you in the right direction.
By connecting your account with mine, I am able to review and analyze these trends in a much more organized and visual way than is possible through traditional office visits alone.
My hope is that tools like Cerewell will help us make better treatment decisions, avoid unnecessary treatments, identify what is working more quickly, and ultimately help patients heal more efficiently.
How to Get the Most Out of Cerewell
Like any tool, Cerewell works best when used consistently and thoughtfully.
The goal is not to track everything.
The goal is to track the things that matter most.
A quick practical tip: If you're setting up Cerewell for the first time, I highly recommend using a computer rather than a phone. There is quite a bit of information to enter initially, and navigating the setup process is much easier on a larger screen. Once your account is established, the mobile app works great for quick check-ins and ongoing symptom tracking.
Focus on Your Most Important Symptoms
One of the most common mistakes patients make is trying to track every symptom they have ever experienced.
For most people, this quickly becomes overwhelming.
Instead, I recommend focusing on approximately 5–20 of your most relevant symptoms.
These should be the symptoms that most significantly impact your quality of life or best reflect how your overall health is changing.
You can always modify this list over time as your condition evolves.
In general, less is often more.
Consistent tracking of a smaller number of meaningful symptoms is usually far more valuable than inconsistent tracking of dozens of symptoms.
Enter Your Major Diagnoses
One of the most useful features of Cerewell is the ability to organize symptoms around underlying diagnoses and root causes.
When applicable, I encourage patients to enter major diagnoses that may be contributing to their symptoms, including:
- Candidiasis
- Aspergillosis
- Bartonellosis
- Babesiosis
- Borreliosis
- Mycotoxicosis
If you are unsure which diagnoses apply to you, we can review and update them together at your next appointment.
The goal is not perfection. The goal is to create a framework that helps us understand where symptoms may be coming from and how they change over time.
Track Interventions as They Happen
The true power of Cerewell comes from connecting symptoms to treatments and exposures.
Whenever possible, record major changes such as:
- New medications
- New supplements
- Dietary changes
- Treatment protocols
- Infections
- Environmental exposures
- Significant life events
This creates the timeline that allows us to determine what may be helping and what may not.
Without this information, symptom tracking is helpful.
With this information, symptom tracking becomes actionable.
Consistency Matters More Than Perfection
You do not need to spend hours entering data.
You do not need to record every symptom every day.
What matters most is consistency.
Even brief, regular updates can provide tremendous insight over time.
The goal is not to create perfect data.
The goal is to create enough information to identify meaningful trends.
The Bottom Line
The most important data in complex chronic illness is not a laboratory value or imaging study.
It is understanding how a patient's symptoms change over time in response to treatment.
That information helps guide nearly every important decision we make.
Cerewell provides a way to organize that information into a meaningful timeline that allows both patients and providers to see patterns that would otherwise be missed.
The better we understand those patterns, the better we can identify what is helping, what is hurting, and what should happen next.
Healing is often a process of following the clues. Cerewell helps us keep track of them.