Are You Getting the Help You Need?

Today I wanted to share a story of a new patient.

“Mary” is a brand new patient. She’s 29 years old and the mother of six. Yes, she started early – her eldest is 10 years old.

Of Mary’s six children, three are confirmed to have celiac disease and she’s very suspicious of a fourth.

Celiac disease is an inherited autoimmune disease that destroys the lining of the small intestine and is known to secondarily affect almost every organ and system in the human body. It’s a serious disease known to shorten your lifespan.

“Mary’s” symptoms are as follows:

Her family history is rife with autoimmune disease as well. Her mother has rheumatoid arthritis, thyroid disease, and lupus.

“Mary” has the gene for celiac disease.

Fast forward to “Mary’s” email to me – she begged me to help her figure out if she has celiac disease.

Note: she had done an endoscopy on three earlier occasions and was told it was normal. After much urging, complaining and, according to her, having to put up with a lot of “guff” from her doctor she begged him to do one more just a week prior to her reaching out to me.

Let’s build the case for “Mary”.

What are the criteria for diagnosing celiac disease? You need 4 of 5 criteria to be positive. They are:

Her doctor, however, was still on the fence…

Why? Based on what?

The criteria were created about 5 years ago by the best minds worldwide who studied celiac disease. The criteria are accepted globally. She has all 5 points positive! There’s no discussion: she HAS celiac disease.

Yet her doctor wouldn’t state it categorically.

Why didn’t “Mary” just stop eating gluten? Good question: like many who are sensitive to the protein, she’s addicted. She feels better when she doesn’t eat it; she keeps it away from 4 of her 6 children, but she and her husband eat it. [By the way, her husband has digestive issues as well.]

“Mary” promised herself that she’d stop eating gluten as soon as she got a definitive diagnosis, which it wasn’t hard to give her with all the criteria positive.

Now of course there is more we need to do for her but nothing good was ever going to happen as long as she continued to eat gluten.

Is “Mary” a unique case? I wish… Sadly, I hear such stories far too often. These are specialists who, frankly, should know better, yet they won’t make a definitive diagnosis when it’s completely obvious.

These moments speak to why we do what we do here at Root Cause Medical Clinic.
I’m tired of hearing from patients that their doctors tell them they’re fine because their blood tests are only “mildly” positive or show no obvious, serious disease. The response is frequently “we’ll watch it”. What’s to watch? Let’s DO something!

Do you think it’s fine to:

Does any of that sound “normal” to you?

Of course not! And it’s not normal.

Is it fair that when a doctor can’t find out what’s wrong with you, they tell you it’s all in your head and hand you a prescription for an anti-depressant or anti-anxiety medication?

No, it’s not.

We created Root Cause Medical because we know that symptoms are not normal and they ARE your body’s way of telling you to listen up and do something. Just because you don’t yet have a disease process it doesn’t make your symptoms normal.

Would you rather wait until you have a disease or “catch it early” before it’s gotten too serious and perhaps irreversible? Of course, earlier is better.

That is why after we have done traditional lab testing we have a large battery of specialty tests we can utilize to get to the root cause of where your symptom is coming from. We don’t give up until we find it.

We get the job done about 85% of the time, something we are quite proud of. But if we can’t figure it out we’ll try to find someone who can.