In my humble opinion, one of the hardest parts of navigating chronic health issues through the medical system is that you don’t know what you don’t know. And not knowing can have heartbreaking consequences. But before I dive into my candid and hard-earned POV, I want to make something clear. I am not a doctor, and this is not medical advice. I am not telling anyone what tests or treatments to accept, reject, start, stop, or delay. I am sharing what I learned through my own experience about discernment and navigating the process without handing over your autonomy, whether over your body, your life, or your soul. Our modern medical system is important and can be life-saving. But you must know the game you are in to navigate it for your wellbeing.
Here is what I wish I understood long before I had a single symptom:
1. Early detection does NOT equal prevention
2. Diagnosis does NOT equal known cause or cure
3. Recommended treatments do NOT always equal cure
You might wonder why someone who works in soul healing is talking about the medical system. Every appointment, test, diagnosis, and treatment plan shapes how we feel about our own body, and the consequences can run deep. Physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Let me backtrack a little and explain where some of my instinct to question standard medical care comes from. I have a great deal of respect for doctors, nurses, and people working in medicine. A close family member was the dean of a prestigious medical and research school, and as a child he made a lasting impression on me. He also did two things that shaped how I understood the limits of modern medicine long before I ever needed to navigate chronic illness myself.
1. He went out of his way to give my parents information. He said he was privy to research that our doctors would not know, and if they did, they would not tell us. I spent my childhood watching my parents ask questions and sometimes decline recommended medical procedures, quietly knowing why and standing their ground when the pushback came, while still holding respect for the professionals involved. I feel incredibly blessed to have had that modeled for me.
2. One of his adult children was diagnosed with something most people had never heard of at the time: chronic fatigue syndrome. She had to leave a very successful, well-established career breaking glass ceilings for women in business. I remember hearing him explain, in a chastened way, that if he had not seen it happening to his own daughter with his own eyes, as a doctor he would have believed the problem was in people’s heads. I had to ask what chronic fatigue syndrome even was because I had never heard of it and, honestly, thought it sounded strange myself. I had no idea then how important it would become for me to hear him speculate about what might really be happening in the body, decades later, when I would suffer from the same issue.
Messaging, and the completeness of the information we are given, is where I find so much frustration. Whether intentional or not, medical messaging often rides on the back of ignorance. We don’t know what questions to ask, when something needs clarification, or that there may be other options. Then there is the white-coat phenomenon: we are culturally conditioned to treat medicine as sacrosanct. If the person saying it is wearing the white coat, we place our lives in their hands, believing they know best. And when you later suffer consequences you did not understand were possible, that trust can turn into a profound sense of betrayal. Until you start making these connections, it is super easy to make mistakes you did not know you were making.
And one more thing to get out of the way… Some don’t want to know. That’s a choice one can make. For those searching in earnest, the consequences of incomplete information can be devastating.
Early detection does NOT equal prevention:
You will see it everywhere, in ad campaigns, in messages from medical professionals, and out of the mouth of your own doctor, whom you trust: “screening = prevention.” Get tested, get screened, early detection saves lives. There is a measure of truth to the concept, but the ubiquitous subtext is that early detection equals prevention. Detecting disease early enough to interrupt progression is not the same thing as preventing the disease from developing in the first place. That distinction matters. The more complete and important truth is that prevention starts well before the screening, happens in between screenings, AND screening can be wrong, imprecise, and incomplete. Look… doctors need tests. Screening and testing are very important in relevant context. But saying detection is the same thing as prevention is misleading and severely lacking in what prevention actually looks like. I think there is a sense that when we get sick, it’s bad luck, and a good outcome from screening can quietly reinforce the idea: carry on as usual, your luck hasn’t run out yet.
What I have learned through my own experience, supported by some amount of research, is this:
1. What they are testing for and why they want the test is not always for your wellbeing. Sometimes its standard operating procedure for everyone having nothing to do with your unique circumstance and sometimes it’s recommended or required by the doctor’s insurance company for liability purposes.
2. Test results can be incomplete, inconclusive, or wrong, and the limits of the test may not be made clear.
3. Some tests carry health risks, and you may not be given the full context of those risks or possible consequences.
4. There may be tests you would want that are never mentioned because they are not standard practice, insurance does not cover them, or because the medical professional you are seeing is unfamiliar with or inexperienced in them.
I have personally encountered every one of these scenarios.
My biggest go-to questions, for myself and/or the medical professional, when considering a test are these: What is the (real) reason for the test recommendation, and how will it inform me and/or the doctor? In other words, is the test being recommended for liability reasons, because it is standard operating procedure for everyone, because it is potentially life or death, because it will help the doctor do their job better, or because it will help me make a more informed choice? What is the full range of possible consequences for my specific situation? What are the limits of the test? What won’t it tell me or the doctor that may be important? And the most important question for me to ask myself is this… Will the results of the test possibly change how I choose to move forward or not?
Diagnosis does NOT equal known cause or cure:
When the symptoms and struggles become big enough that we start talking to medical professionals, we are usually chasing a diagnosis. If we just knew what was wrong, then the doctor could fix it.
Figuring out what a diagnosis actually is, and what it would really give me, was a huge learning curve. Fun fact that has helped me in this category: only licensed medical professionals are legally allowed to diagnose. But diagnosis, even by a licensed professional, isn’t what I thought it was. I learned this well before I knew I was on the road to chronic health issues myself. My sister was experiencing the kinds of health problems that are becoming increasingly common and can seem ambiguous. She kept going to different doctors and reporting back to me things I found confusing. She would have tests done, but the doctors still could not tell her with certainty whether she had Lyme, lupus, MS, or even what exactly was happening.
I remember asking her, “But if they tested you, how come they can’t tell you what you have?” She explained that she was learning there often wasn’t one simple test that could hand over the answer. Doctors looked at symptoms, bloodwork, imaging, and other diagnostics and tried to determine which diagnosis best fit the overall picture. Sometimes they could not fit everything neatly into one. Sometimes different doctors had very different opinions about what she had.
This was in contrast to what I thought the medical system knew and how I believed diagnosis worked, and it took time for me to really process what that meant. Unfortunately, my sister passed well before she got answers.
Then I had mystery issues of my own: lots of doctors with lots of different opinions, and even more ways to try to help that did not help. Some made me worse.
Then came Medical Medium information. It explained EVERYTHING, the actual root cause AND how to heal. That contrast was huge, and it helped me process and bring context to years of cognitive confusion. I could see that many diagnoses are basically names for sets of symptoms whose root cause, or how to heal them, they don’t know. All those docs diagnosing, giving people THE ANSWER, making them feel finally seen and giving them hope for relief. Even if it’s something scary or life-threatening, we all think: now they can fix it.
Thank God for modern medicine in so many ways. But what they don’t know, and don’t say, leads me to the next category.
Recommended treatments do NOT always equal a known cure:
This last one took some work for me to understand. I made some truly regrettable choices before I got it, but once I did, it helped me feel confident in choices that others might find unusual or even scary. The treatments medical professionals recommend can have very different goals, and those goals are not always made clear to the patient. To make sense of it, I am going to group them very simply into two clarifying categories:
1. Curative treatment – the cause is known and the treatment is known to cure the problem.
2. Palliative treatment – the cause may or may not be known, and the treatment is intended to relieve symptoms, improve quality of life, and sometimes extend life. It is not intended to cure.
Medical Medium information gave me something different. Whether or not medical science can prove it, it gave me the root cause of my symptoms and a way to address that cause. That distinction changed how I thought about diagnosis, treatment, and what the word “cure” actually means.
Neither curative nor palliative treatment is necessarily an inappropriate choice to make. The problem is that people do not always understand which one they are being offered. Research has identified a real gap between what patients understand about their treatment and what it is meant to do. You get the diagnosis, then you are given a recommendation, and it is very easy to assume: this is the cure. Because of the authority we culturally give medicine, people may never even think to ask whether the treatment is actually intended to cure them, manage symptoms, improve quality of life, or try to extend life. There can also be an assumption that every recommendation is backed by solid science. In my experience, that is not always true, especially with advice on diet and lifestyle. These misunderstandings matter, with emotional and spiritual consequences beyond the physical side effects of the treatment itself. They can affect the choices we make, the hope we carry, and the way we understand what is happening to our own body.
In the absence of complete information, trust can break. and it can feel like betrayal. Then there is the phrase, “This is a lifelong condition.” I hear it in ads, from doctors, and from people I love who have been told this about their own health. That lands like a life sentence. It can strip away hope and shut down the instinct to keep asking questions, keep searching, and keep trying to understand what is really happening in the body. Given how many people I have watched heal from conditions they were told were lifelong, I hope there comes a day when removing hope from people in this way stops.
If you are new here, I am Eileen. I healed my own chronic health issues using Medical Medium information, and I am trained in soul healing. I help people navigate healing when it gets hard, messy, confusing, and scary, so they can take the reins back in their own life. Most people do not realize the soul is the foundation everything else is built on, and they need a bridge back to that foundation to navigate life with confidence and ease.
