When Human Experience and Scientific Evidence Collide
As someone who has spent decades studying biology, nutrition, physiology, etc., I have great respect for science. But I have even greater respect for people: science exists to serve humanity, humanity does not exist to serve science.
Some may disagree with that statement, but it’s shaped the way I’ve practiced for years. I’ve never believed that laboratory values, published studies, or expert opinions should automatically outweigh the lived experiences of the person sitting across from me.
Scientific studies are designed to answer an important question: What tends to happen across groups of people? They identify averages, probabilities, and trends that help guide medical decisions. That information is valuable, but it has limitations. The patient sitting in front of a practitioner is not an average. They are an individual with a unique history, unique physiology, unique exposures, and a unique response to illness.
Even the best studies have outliers—people whose experiences don't fit the overall results. In research, those individuals are often treated as statistical noise because they don't significantly influence the average. But in clinical practice, those outliers matter. They are real people with real lives.
Every study has outliers. In research, they may be treated as statistical exceptions. In real life, they are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, and patients looking for answers. The question is: What if you're an outlier?
What if your symptoms don't follow the expected pattern? What if you experience something uncommon? What if the treatment that benefits most people harms you? Should your experience simply be dismissed because it wasn't common enough to change the statistics?
Science also depends on the questions we ask and the definitions we choose. Researchers determine who is included in a study, who is excluded, which outcomes are measured, how long participants are followed, and even what is considered "normal." Those decisions shape the conclusions long before the results are published. Reference ranges, diagnostic cutoffs, and clinical guidelines are valuable tools, but they are not immutable laws of biology.
The Family Story That Changed Me
My perspective on this issue is not simply academic. Like many families, mine has lived through an experience that changed the way we view medicine. Watching someone you love struggle with a condition you believe followed a medical intervention changes you. Whether or not others agree with your conclusions, the experience itself is real.
Vaccination was supposed to be good for us, public health told us all the shots ever manufactured were safe and effective. I disagree. Thanks to people like Drs. Andrew Wakefield and Sherry Tenpenny, and so many others, I have been anti-vax for almost 3 decades. I could not, however, stop others from doing what mainstream public health told them was “safe and effective.”
It leaves you asking questions that never fully go away. Most difficult of all, you realize that even if you could somehow prove what you believe happened, it would not restore what was lost.
Autism: A Question That Continues to Matter
There is no dispute that diagnoses of autism spectrum disorder have increased dramatically over the past several decades. Current surveillance estimates from the CDC report that approximately 1 in 31 eight-year-old children now meet criteria for autism spectrum disorder.
Researchers continue to study multiple possible explanations for this increase, including changes in diagnostic criteria, greater awareness, broader screening, environmental influences, and other factors, and according to “the science”: no single explanation has been shown to account for the entire increase. But the outliers....
When the Medical Model Becomes More Important Than the Person
Perhaps nowhere is this question more important than in the ongoing discussion surrounding autism.
When scientific models become the standard by which every individual experience is judged, observations that don't fit those models are often dismissed rather than investigated. Families who believe they witnessed a profound change in their child are frequently told that what they observed couldn't have happened because the current evidence doesn't support it.
What Happens When Medicine Stops Asking Why?
The vaccine debate is only one example of a much larger issue. Whether we're talking about autism, autoimmune disease, diabetes, depression, chronic fatigue, or digestive disorders, too often modern medicine arrives at the diagnosis before asking why the body lost health in the first place.
Medicine wasn't always centered on diagnosing and managing disease. Earlier generations of practitioners spent far more time trying to understand what had disrupted the body's normal physiology and how health might be restored. In my opinion, much of that philosophy was gradually displaced during the transformation of medical education in the early twentieth century. If you're interested in that history—including the influence of the Flexner Report and the role of large philanthropic organizations in reshaping American medicine—I encourage you to explore it for yourself. The following documentary provides one perspective on that history:
https://youtu.be/1wSbBGOUJ5g?si=y_v-qDNhOe9zuY3c
The Question Modern Medicine Should Ask More Often
Why I don't start with diagnoses. I start with the body.
“Health is the body's natural state. Disease is what happens when that state can no longer be maintained.”
Somewhere along the way, medicine became more interested in naming diseases than understanding why they developed. We became experts at classification while, in many cases, moving further away from understanding physiology.
When I look at someone with chronic illness, I'm not asking, "What disease do they have?" I'm asking, "What changed?" What interfered with their ability to produce energy, to repair, adapt, and tolerate the world around them? What caused the body to lose the resilience it was designed to have?
That question has led me to study mitochondria, mineral balance, toxicants, nervous system regulation, thyroid physiology, digestion, inflammation, and countless other pieces of human biology. And I’ve discovered they're not separate systems; they're different windows into the same question.
“The diagnosis tells me where the person is.
Physiology helps me understand how they got there.”
