You Shouldn’t Trust Me.
Question me. Question your doctor. Question everyone. Then go learn enough to know who’s worth listening to.
Someone left this on one of my most-read posts:
“Why would I trust you, a random person on the internet, over my doctor?”
You shouldn’t.
You shouldn’t trust me blindly, you shouldn’t trust your doctor blindly, and you shouldn’t trust the loudest voice on your feed. Learn enough to ask better questions and walk into your next appointment as a partner instead of a passenger. That is the entire mission here.
Is it a doctor problem
Mostly it’s a system problem. Partly it isn’t.
The average visit is 15 minutes. In that window your physician has to take a history, listen, examine you, read your labs, diagnose, prescribe, document everything, and satisfy the insurance company. Nobody teaches nutrition in 15 minutes. Nobody teaches metabolic health in 15 minutes. The container is too small for the work, and that isn’t the fault of the person standing in it.
But some of them stopped learning the day they graduated. They treat what they memorized in medical school as the final word, and it isn’t. Medicine moved. The research moved. If a clinician hasn’t read anything new in twenty years, that isn’t the system’s fault. That’s a choice.
And follow the money on what they were taught in the first place. Pharmaceutical companies fund medical school programs, research, continuing education credits, and the conferences your doctor sits in every year. When an industry pays for a large share of the education, the education starts to look like the industry. You learn drugs. You learn which drug for which diagnosis. You do not learn what to do with a person whose labs are drifting and whose prescription isn’t written yet, so the pad becomes the answer to almost everything, because the pad is what got taught.
What they were never taught
Nutrition. Macros. What protein does. Supplements, dosing, interactions, quality.
How to reverse type 2 diabetes without a prescription pad. That one is possible for a lot of people, and most of them will never hear it from anyone in a white coat, because the person in the white coat was trained to manage the disease instead of reverse it.
None of that is in the curriculum in any serious way. It’s a few hours across four years, if that. Then residency, then a career built on treating what’s already broken.
So people go home and try to build their health out of podcast clips and whatever the algorithm serves them at 11pm.
Normal is not optimal, and the right labs aren’t even being run
When your doctor says your labs are normal, what they usually mean is that nothing on the page currently qualifies you for a diagnosis. That’s a much smaller statement than what most people hear.
Normal ranges come from a population average, and the average adult right now is tired, inflamed, and metabolically struggling. Normal describes what’s common. Healthy is a different thing entirely.
Here’s the part that gets less attention. The labs that would catch disease early are often not on the panel at all.
Fasting insulin. Cheap. Often covered. Cash price is low when it isn’t. It can flag a metabolic problem years before your glucose or your A1c ever move. Insulin resistance is upstream of type 2 diabetes, heart disease, fatty liver, PCOS, Alzheimer’s, and several cancers.
Almost nobody is running it.
Same story with vitamin D, homocysteine, ferritin, a full thyroid panel. Inexpensive tests that tell you something real, sitting off the standard order set while people get told they’re fine.
I read labs every single day
This is not a theory I picked up on the internet. I run a private practice and labs come across my desk daily. New patient, old patient, sick patient, well patient. Hundreds and hundreds of them.
And I struggle to find a set where primary care hasn’t missed something major. Not a rounding error. Not a subtle finding you’d need a specialist to catch. Major patterns. Disease processes already underway, sitting right there on a report that somebody stamped normal and filed.
Insulin resistance running for years while everyone watched the glucose. Iron deficiency in a woman told she’s fine because her hemoglobin held. Autoimmune thyroid antibodies climbing with nobody flagging them. Inflammation markers walking upward across three years of results that nobody ever put side by side.
The results were in the chart the whole time. Nobody looked at them together. And nobody looked at the trend, which is where the story lives.
That’s what I mean when I say the system is too small for the work. The information is there. The 15 minutes are not.
So question everyone
Including me. Look at who’s talking. Look at their training. Look at their story, and ask what it cost them to learn what they’re teaching.
Here’s mine.
Ten years in conventional emergency medicine. Another decade in integrative medicine. I’ve stood in both worlds and I know what each one does well and where each one runs out of road.
Then my daughter was diagnosed with cancer, and I spent eleven years inside that system as her mother and not as a clinician.
She died.
That stripped my ego down to the studs and made the math very clear. Time is short. There is one of me. I will never sit across from every person who needs someone to sit across from them.
But I can teach. And you can leave your next appointment understanding more than you did walking in.
What I’m here for
I used to think my mission was women’s health, or integrative oncology. Those are the rooms I work in. The mission is bigger than the rooms.
Teach people to read the information they already have. Help them ask sharper questions. Get them into the room as an active participant in their own care.
The best healthcare isn’t built on blind trust in anybody. It’s built on partnership, and partnership requires that both people in the room know something.
So, should you trust me?
No. I hope you trust yourself more than you did before you started reading.
And if you want to be somewhere I show up every day, answering questions and teaching people how to actually read their own labs, come join us inside Optimal Not Normal. That’s where the real work happens.
The most radical act in a sick society is to heal yourself — and then gently help others heal too.
— Dagmara
This post is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Please work with your own healthcare provider for personalized care.
I learned the hard way when iron deficiency went undiagnosed because my hemoglobin was just above normal- sad to say it, but luckily I became anemic and that’s when I hit the research hard. Not once did a doctor order a ferritin even though I was high risk as a runner and heavy periods. I’m also a dietitian but that training also falls short. Now I can read labs and often just order my own. Thanks for all you do. This is an amazing piece!
About 9 years ago I stopped taking statins and BP medicine. They were doing nothing. I was not overweight, exercising all the time, climbing hiking skiing but my bp and cholesterol were in the wrong place and staying there. I felt like crap and the last straw was skiing with my son and at the bottom of a tough run, his body had a hallucination halo around it. I changed my diet, started reading everything I could. My BP started to go down (still 145/85 but that is lower than before) after I read about and started taking capsaican. (There were some other changes I made but it feels like that was the main one). I have just become a subscriber because of the blood test information that you provided and this posting. "You shouldn't trust me". When someone in your position says this, the trust begins. Thank you.