Health Mysteries

“In the beginning, disease is difficult to recognize but easy to cure.
In the end, disease is easy to recognize but difficult to cure.”

– Franz Mesmer, German Physician

I love this quote. It’s a lesson for patients in the value of prevention and long term health thinking, but also a reminder to doctors of the importance of not shying away from the hard diagnostic work of challenging cases.

Challenging cases are something every doctor gets, and we see our share. Every week, new patients arrive at StoneTree with health care dilemmas. And while each patient’s symptoms might be vastly different, at the heart of many cases there’s a common theme: they feel awful but conventional medicine says there is nothing wrong with them.

These patients are often angry and frustrated. Their lab tests have come back not showing anything significant. They’re being told, “It’s all in your head.” They feel like they might be malingering hypochondriacs.

Of course, they’re not malingering hypochondriacs. Their body is in that first stage of disease that Mesmer is talking about, the stage where it is very difficult to identify a problem, particularly by standard tests that are geared toward diagnosing disease, not subtle imbalances. And that leaves patients with a problem: they have a health mystery that no one seems interested in solving except them.

Well…we like the mysteries. The great thing for many of these patients who end up in our office is that although recognizing what is wrong with them has been frustrating and difficult, the fix can often be much easier.

Dealing with nutritional deficiencies, low grade toxicities, food intolerances, hormone imbalances or immune system issues in the early stages reap huge rewards. People have more energy, and get better sleep. Their moods balance. Their immune systems, which seemed to be betraying them, now behave properly and their detox systems are not overrun.

There’s a prize for solving the mystery, and that’s a faster, easier return to health. That’s why we like the mysteries. As Mesmer suggests, a hard problem to solve beats a hard disease to cure.