THE MOMENT I REALIZED I'D BEEN SOLVING THE WRONG PROBLEM
8 months ago, I had a patient named Carol Briggs. 63 years old, retired school principal from Westerville, Ohio.
She'd been gluten-free for 2 years. She took a probiotic every morning with her 7 AM glass of water. She walked 4 miles every other day, slept 8 hours, and hadn't touched alcohol since her daughter's wedding in 2022.
By every measure, Carol was doing everything right.
And she still looked 6 months pregnant every evening. Still woke up at 3 AM unable to get back to sleep, still dragged herself through every afternoon with brain fog and poor memory, forgetting people’s names.
"Sandra," she said, sliding a CVS bag across my desk. It was stuffed with empty supplement bottles — a half-used tub of Garden of Life probiotics, 2 boxes of digestive enzymes, a parasite cleanse kit from Amazon, oregano oil capsules with the cotton still in the top. "I've spent over $2,000 in the last 18 months. Nothing has worked. Not one thing."
She wasn't being dramatic. I'd seen her food diary… color-coded, printed out, every meal logged. I'd reviewed every supplement she'd taken. She had done everything I, and 3 other practitioners before me had told her to do.
And Carol was still suffering! But what made it worse was that I recognized that CVS bag. Because I had one just like it sitting under my bathroom sink.