Episode 254 – Beyond the Diagnosis: Healing in a Post-Diagnosis Era

About this episode

Dr. Deb Muth 0:03
There’s a quiet shift happening in healthcare right now, and most doctors aren’t talking about it yet. People aren’t chasing diagnoses anymore. They’re exhausted by them. I see it every single day in my clinic. People who come in with stacks of paperwork, portals full of results, and a list of diagnoses longer than their grocery receipt, yet they’re still not living their lives. And they’ll say to me, Dr. Deb, I don’t want another label.

Dr. Deb Muth 0:32
 I just want my life back. If you’ve ever been told this is just how your body is, if you’ve been diagnosed, rediagnosed, and then dismissed, if you’ve been handed labels but never handed a roadmap, today’s episode is for you. Because we are officially entering what I call the post diagnosis era and it’s changing everything about how healing actually happens. So grab your cup of coffee or tea and let’s settle in to let’s talk wellness. Now, before we dive in, we need to take a quick pause to thank today’s sponsor. And when we come back, we’re going to talk about why diagnoses are no longer the most important thing about you.

Dr. Deb Muth 1:17
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Dr. Deb Muth 0:47
It was three years ago Christmas that I received my Ms. Diagnosis. And I remember it very clearly. It was the day before, two days before Christmas Eve, that I got the call and I heard the words, you have white matter brain disease. That’s consistent with Ms. And I immediately stopped in my tracks and thought, okay, well, this is just the way it is. We’re gonna fight this. We’re gonna figure this out. And it led me down a deeper path of healing and spirituality and emotional growth. And there were some really difficult days ahead for me because I remember thinking, what am I gonna do? How am I gonna practice what’s going to happen in my life? And every year at this time, I reflect back to that day that I got the call that really changed my life. And not for the worse, but for the better. It changed the way I was thinking about life.

Dr. Deb Muth 3:01
It changed the way I was complaining about things being ungrateful for all the amazing things that I have in my life. Not intentionally, but just living the American life. Right.

Dr. Deb Muth 3:14
And striving for more and wanting more and chasing more and doing more, and never really having the opportunity to just be present and just really think about life and enjoy what the Lord has given us and enjoy what’s around me, the people in my life, the family that I have, the amazing practice that I have, and the amazing people I get to work with and change lives with. And it really changed me for the better. And I’ve watched diagnoses like this change people for the worse and for them to sink deep into a depression and give up and. And live to their label instead of living to their potential. And that’s why I think this episode is so important for us, because we all have a choice in life. When we get dealt something kind of difficult, we can let it consume us and let it take every ounce of life from us, or we can allow it to become the fuel that makes us better, makes us contribute to life maybe differently, but in a better way. So, you know, I know that this idea of letting diagnoses lose their power can be really uncomfortable for some people, because there’s people that are waiting for that diagnosis. I’m in some. Some social media groups, and I’m listening and reading to people who are saying, I’m so angry I didn’t get the Ms. Diagnosis today. I’m so angry I didn’t get the Lyme diagnosis today. I’m so upset that they can’t find anything wrong with me. And I understand.

Dr. Deb Muth 5:20
I know the feeling of wanting to put a name to what you’re feeling so that you have validation and you have power around this diagnosis, and you can prove to people that what you’re feeling is not in your head. I get all of that. But for many people, the original diagnosis is meant to help guide treatment in the conventional sense. It’s a created, shared language that we have, and it brings clarity. But for many people, you give that label and that name so much power and so much control over your life and who you are and what you’re being. And that’s not what the label is meant for. Somewhere along the line, medicine started confusing naming with healing. And today, we have more diagnoses than ever. We have more testing than ever. We have so many thousands of specialists, and yet people are sicker. They’re more inflamed, they’re more exhausted, they’re more confused than ever. And that’s not just a coincidence. That is how the system is meant to work. It’s meant to confuse you.

Dr. Deb Muth 6:44
It’s meant to keep you dependent on it. It’s meant to. Meant to keep you on medical management for the rest of your life. And by doing that, we enrich the pharmaceutical companies to the point where their whole role is to continue to create drugs that you need to be on for the rest of your life. And the hard truth about all of this that I’ve seen in my practice is for many patients, the diagnosis really becomes their identity. They own it, they gravitate to it. It’s who they are. It also becomes their prison because they only live confined inside the diagnosis. I can’t do this because I can’t do that, because if I do this, this will happen, because I have. They’ve capped their ceiling of life based on a couple of words that somebody gave them at a point in their life when they were so low and potentially so desperate that they needed that name to identify themselves and what was going on. And instead of asking, why is this happening?

Dr. Deb Muth 8:05
Why are these symptoms happening? What’s causing these symptoms? They’re told, this is what you have, and this is what you’re going to have to live with. And instead of restoring function, these people become managed. Like I said, they’re managed with drugs. They’re managed inside the system. And instead of healing, they’re monitored with this blood test and that blood test and this MRI and that mri. Instead of providing hope, they’re handed a lifelong prescription with expectations that do nothing but decline. So you walk out of that room with this expectation that your life is never going to be the same, that your function is going to decline, your neurological disease is going to take over eventually, you’re going to be put in a home, you’re going to lose everything you have because you’re not going to be able to afford the care that you need. And that’s the expectations of our healthcare system today. When you’re labeled with a chronic illness diagnosis, and for a woman, especially women, this is magnified because their symptoms are told to them as. It’s stress, it’s hormones, it’s anxiety, it’s aging, it’s motherhood, and then, of course, it’s perimenopause. Like that is some major traumatic thing that should disrupt your entire life. Yet it shouldn’t, and it does, and it doesn’t have to. And of course, my favorite is always, but your labs are normal. We don’t know what’s wrong with you. It must just be in your head.

Dr. Deb Muth 9:53
And this is why women are done being dismissed, why this shift is happening now that we are empowering women to take back Their lives, take back who they are and take back how they’re being treated in the healthcare system. And it is one of the most important things that we can do right now is to give women their power back so that they can stand strong in who they are and in their intuition and fight and say, no, this is not happening to me right now. I am not accepting this label. I’m not accepting this diagnosis. I will fight, I will find answers, and I will do what I need to do to be the woman that I want to be. So why is this conversation exploding right now? Well, there’s actually three big reasons, and first and foremost, it’s over. Diagnosis, burnout. People are collecting diagnoses without solutions. Autoimmune labels, syndromes, vague neurological names, but no one’s connecting the dots.

Dr. Deb Muth 11:02
You see, when you start to stack these labels on top of each other, one after the next after the next, you know, it’s celiac disease, it’s Hashimoto’s, it’s fibromyalgia, it’s autoimmune. You know, rheumatoid arthritis. It’s. Whatever it is, it’s long haul Covid. These days, no one is putting these connections together to say, why are you developing so many diseases that are so similar in nature, ones that just kind of domino after each other? Nobody’s looking at your immune system. Nobody’s measuring it, Nobody’s telling you how well it’s working. No one’s supporting it. They’re just throwing these biological drugs at you. And if there’s an autoimmune disease and sending you on your way and saying, this is what you have to look forward to for the rest of your life. But don’t worry, these side effects are rare, including cancer. It does not make sense to me that we are not looking at the root cause for all of these crazy diagnoses that we are labeling people with today. And I am guilty of it myself, because within the system that we work, we have to label something in order for you to receive the care that you need, for your insurance, to pay for the treatment, for the tests, for the visits. There has to be a label. And that’s what we call an ICD10 code. And if we don’t have the appropriate label, none of what we’re recommending gets covered for you. And that’s the label game began. The second thing is long haul Covid. And post viral illnesses.

Dr. Deb Muth 12:47
Millions of people were told, we don’t know why, and then we sent them home to figure it out by themselves. We don’t know why your immune system is failing, we don’t know why you’re having these clotting issues that are happening. But don’t worry, these clotting issues really are not that severe. They’re mild in nature. You’ll never have to worry about it. And we’re not going to treat it even though it’s four times the level that’s normal, because we’re going to wait until it’s 10 times the level of normal to even worry about it at this point.

Dr. Deb Muth 13:19
And it will take us 25 to 30 years before we understand any of the risks and barriers that have happened from these post viral illnesses that have occurred in our environment and the ones that are in the future to come. Because it takes time for us to study things, it takes time for us to figure it out, takes time for us to train the practitioners, and it takes time for us to accept something different than we thought was reality. And that is the problem that we have today with these post viral illnesses that are long acting, that are retriggering new viruses, retriggering old illnesses like Lyme, reactivating things like Epstein Barr virus. It will take decades before this becomes mainstream. And right now it’s fringe medicine and it’s not realistic. And those of us that are speaking about it are chastised and gone after, but by our medical communities and we are told that we are the crazy ones. And that is how medicine has always been. Way in the beginning, and I forget the doctor’s name, who started just observing that when medical students worked on cadavers and then came into the labor and delivery ward and delivered babies, these women were getting sick with infections and they were dying. And he said, what if we just washed our hands between the cadaver and the delivery? Would we save lives? And he did a small study and he was right. And over time he was made fun of and he was put into insane asylums and he was locked away. And now today we would never think of entering a room and working on a patient without washing our hands beforehand. But that took 30 years for that one concept of washing hands to be adopted. And it destroyed one man’s life because he simply asked the question, what if it’s a crazy society that we live in, It’s a crazy outlook that we have on medicine and asking questions. And sometimes I wonder, is it truly science or is it politically driven? And I think the answer is it’s both. And the third thing that we have is technology. And technology is outpacing wisdom by far. Hands down, AI, advanced labs and imaging can identify everything. Now using AI, but without context, it creates a fear.

Dr. Deb Muth 16:08
And instead of clarity, without context, using AI to interpret labs makes absolutely no sense. Without context and understanding and us actually training this LLM model, the AI doesn’t really know what it, what it means. And someday it will, I’m sure, but right now it doesn’t. So as everyone is taking to AI to treat themselves and create a protocol and diagnose themselves and understand their labs and know that it is without context that you are doing this, and research is wonderful, but without having somebody truly understand you and the art of healing and the art of medicine, this is going to get lost and you will not have the information that you truly need simply by using chat GPT. Now I’ve created my own version called Venari and I hope that this will be much better because it will have context. It will have 15,000 protocols that I have used for the last 25 years. It will have lots of research. It has all of the research databases that we can connect to. It has training that I have given it using my brain and how I see a client every single day in practice. So when you’re using our Venari app, you will be able to have that context. You will be able to have that pushback and that voice. And not only that, you will have the option then to work alongside someone to help you identify that context that you’re looking for. Does this make sense?

Dr. Deb Muth 17:53
I’ve seen this a lot in the peptide world, where in these Facebook groups, people are talking about the peptide stacks that they’re using and they’re telling people that it’s okay to use any peptide you want because they’re just small chain branch amino acids. And that can’t be farther from the truth because there are some peptides you would not want to use because they can stimulate the growth of cells. And if you have cancer or if you have a history of this, there are some peptides that we need to avoid. And unfortunately, AI doesn’t understand that yet and doesn’t know that yet. And it’s just creating stacks. And people are creating stacks without understanding what they’re doing. And I watched my best friend do this as she was learning peptides and she had cancer and it created an aggressive sarcoma. And I believe the peptides had a lot to do with that because it stimulated the growth of the cells. And it wasn’t until after she had passed away that we found this journal of hers that she was studying peptides and recognized that this could have contributed to her advanced cancer. And if you don’t have that context and you’re using AI to create these stacks for you, you can put yourself in harm’s way. And so AI technology, I think, is going to be fantastic in a lot of ways. It’s going to have its downfalls. And you’re going to need an expert when you’re using AI. You’re not going to just be able to treat yourself with this. You know, understanding that more data doesn’t always equal healing, and more data can be helpful. But again, you have to understand how to put those pieces together, how to ask the right question questions. And for that, you need somebody who has seen thousands and thousands of cases to find the missing pieces for you. Because AI is not going to do that unless it’s been trained to do that. Vanari has been trained to do that.

Dr. Deb Muth 20:01
It’s been trained to push back and look at lime and mold and toxins and chemicals and metals and all of those things. But there is no other AI bot out there, LLM that has been trained to do that using clinical data that I use every single day in my practice. And people are finally realizing that, you know, they’re understanding that although this world of AI and technology is amazing, it has its limitations, just like practitioners have their limitations. We don’t know everything. We are not perfect. We are human. And humans make errors and we miss things. With or without technology, we miss things. And part of it is because we just don’t know what we don’t know yet. And sometimes it’s because we have our blinders on, and sometimes it’s just simply because we don’t have the information today that we’re going to have five years from now. And here’s what I teach instead. I teach the seenet last. And that’s what we built it on. Restore and root. Rise and restore. Sorry, that is my methodology. And it’s in the scene at last book. And it starts with healing. It starts with asking better questions. So instead of asking, what do you have? We want to ask, what has your body been exposed to? What symptoms are underperforming? What’s driving the inflammation for you? When you have joint pain and you have muscle pain and you have achiness, that is not normal.

Dr. Deb Muth 21:38
I don’t care if you’re 20 or you’re 80, it is not normal. And yes, I did say 80, because we are not supposed to have that kind of inflammation at 80. And why are we underperforming? Why is our Brain not working correctly? Why is our mood not working? Why can’t my body push up a hill? Why can’t I lift 10 pounds? What’s going on? Why can’t I recover from that activity? What’s interfering with my ability to repair and heal after I’ve done some things that I need to do? What’s keeping your nervous system stuck in this survival mode, in this fight or flight mode? Why can’t I get past that? Sometimes that answer is really simple and sometimes that answer, it is so hard and so complicated and it is so many things that are causing this body to be stuck. And sometimes it’s a six month fix, and sometimes it’s a six year fix and sometimes it’s decades long. And it is one of the most challenging things as a practitioner to get clients to understand and to be on the other side of the table and not get you that quick fix. It is extremely difficult for us as well when we are not seeing the results that we think we should see. We need to focus on function over diagnosis, root cause over labels.

Dr. Deb Muth 23:09
What is driving all this inflammation and certainly restoration over resignation. Do not resign to the fact that you have this life altering disease that is never going to change. Because if we find the root and we restore the body, you don’t have to live in that death sentence that you’ve been given of a diagnosis, whether it’s fibromyalgia, MS, Alzheimer’s disease, celiac disease, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, it does not matter what that diagnosis is. We can change it, we can make it better, we can reduce the symptoms, we can improve your life. Maybe not in ways that you are absolutely looking for, maybe not in a perfect world, but we can change the trajectory of where your life is going. And it’s because you’re not an ICD9 code or an ICD10 code. You’re not a code, you’re not an MRI result, you’re not a lab result, you’re a human body asking support, not a name. And I say that with a little hesitation because so many people are looking for the name. So many people are angry that someone didn’t find the name. I have clients that come to me that are so angry that the conventional medicine system did not identify their Lyme disease, that they’re looking for someone to sue and there is no one to sue because they didn’t find it, because sometimes they just don’t know. You’re asking for conventional medicine, practitioner and system to provide for you a label that is not within their wheelhouse to do. Because the way they treat Lyme disease and the way an eyelads practitioner looks at Lyme disease and has. Has the ability to test differently are two very different things.

Dr. Deb Muth 25:27
You’re asking for a system to perform in a way that they are not trained and guided to do. Then you’re looking and asking for somebody to place blame for an illness that you have, that you have yet taken ownership for. And I know that sounds harsh, and I know there’s going to be a lot of people that are angry at me for saying that. But I sit in front of you as someone who had Lyme disease, who had mold mycotoxin illness, who had high viral titers, who had post Covid peripheral neuropathy, who had the diagnosis of ms, who has white matter brain disease, who treated all of it not in the conventional world, who has halted the white matter disease and regrew her brain by 1.5 standard deviations, which is unheard of in 18 months. So I can say this to you. There is no one to blame for your lack of diagnosis or your diagnosis. It is life. It is what happens to us. And you have a choice at the crossroad to either take the path of hatred and anger and bitterness and blame and never getting better a result of that, or you have the ability to take the path of curiosity and openness and willingness to change and willingness to walk down a path that is different than what the conventional medicine is telling you to do. And those are your choices and you get to make those choices. But what you don’t get to do is blame some someone else and try to destroy them for something that they are not able to do. That is not what we get to do in this life.

Dr. Deb Muth 27:29
It is not right and it is not fair. If someone has truly injured you, that’s different. That’s different. But this looking to blame somebody because they didn’t give you a label, Ridiculous in my opinion. And if you’re listening and thinking right now, I’ve been diagnosed, but I’m not better, I want you to hear this clearly. You are not broken. You are not crazy, and you are not done. Sometimes the most healing moment isn’t getting that diagnosis. It’s realizing that the diagnosis was never the whole story. And that’s where the real healing begins. When we look at the entire story, we look at your entire life from the beginning to where you are now and what has happened to get you there. And once we get that, then we can put you back together. Not in the old way, in a new way in an amazing way, in a way that you would cherish your life for every moment that you have of it. Good, bad and ugly. A diagnosis should not be the doorway. It’s not a dead end. It is just the beginning. Remember, you don’t need another diagnosis. You need your life back. And that’s what’s important.

Dr. Deb Muth 29:19
We are living in a moment where medicine is being forced to evolve not because systems want to, but because patients are demanding better. This post diagnosis era isn’t about rejecting science, it’s about using it wisely. It’s about restoring function, dignity and hope. And I hope that if this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who’s been labeled but not yet helped. Because sometimes the most powerful healing starts when someone finally feels seen. Thank you for being with me here today. If you haven’t already, make sure you subscribe and follow. Let’s talk Wellness now on YouTube, Spotify or wherever you’re listening and I’ll see you next time. Until then, keep asking better questions, trusting your body and remembering you are more than a diagnosis.

The post Episode 254 – Beyond the Diagnosis: Healing in a Post-Diagnosis Era first appeared on Let's Talk Wellness Now.