How to Find a Doctor

And when to know if you actually need one

One of the most common questions I get is from people desperate for doctor or practitioner recommendations.

I get DMs and emails every week begging me for a savior.

“How did you figure that out?”

“Who helped you with that?”

“Can you recommend a practitioner for X?”

And, to cut to the chase, I just can’t give recommendations like this.

Actually, I could, but I won’t.

You don’t need a doctor. You need yourself.

I used to give recommendations, sparingly, and while there are certainly doctors and practitioners I trust with various issues, I don’t work closely with any of them and I just can’t in good conscience make these kinds of recommendations anymore. And as much as I don’t know if a particular doctor is right for you, I don’t know if you are a good patient for them.

Because, first of all, I don’t know what you need a doctor for, I don’t know what you’re willing to do yourself, I don’t know your gaps in knowledge, I don’t know your expectations, and I don’t know what precisely you need out of a doctor/practitioner relationship.

Are you looking for labs? Diagnoses? Prescriptions?

Asking someone for a recommendation on a doctor implies all sorts of underlying understanding that, frankly, I by and large do not agree with.

And if you are approaching a doctor or practitioner with the attitude that they may finally heal you once and for all, you are very likely to be disappointed.

Because the person who healed me is me.

The Savior Problem

More importantly than a practitioner recommendation, I think most people with chronic illness need to get it out of their heads that a doctor is going to solve all their problems.

Doctors who operate in the realm of insurance have about 4 minutes to meet with you and treat you within the bounds of whatever specific ICD-10 code you fall under.

And if your labs are “normal,” well, God help you, because there is no place for you in the modern medical system.

I see it every day and I lived inside that hope for decades — cycling through specialists, waiting rooms, referrals that went nowhere, and the slow-burn infuriation of being told your labs are normal while your body is clearly not. Even on the holistic side — from bad reactions to acupuncture to practitioners who claim it’s all metals, or candida, or Epstein-Barr, or Lyme.

Here’s the truth that our culture doesn’t want to admit: a doctor is not designed to heal you.

That is not their role. That is not what they’re trained to do. Despite the way we’ve been conditioned — by hospitals, by pharmaceutical advertising, by the entire cultural mythology of the white coat — there is no precedent in the complex chronic illness world for one doctor becoming the source of all healing. (That’s the role of another Guy, one I am not discussing in this article but who obviously permeates the rest of my work.)

Most doctors are not brilliant saviors. They are not trained in root cause medicine. Most are not even educated in preventative medicine. They are not educated in the basic terrain-level factors that actually determine health: mineral status, mitochondrial function, nervous system regulation, gut ecology, connective tissue integrity. And there is absolutely no way they can cover any of that in their allotted time per patient. They are trained to identify acute disease, manage acute symptoms, and — in the chronic illness space — manage those symptoms indefinitely, often with medications that introduce new variables, creating new symptoms and syndromes, without ever addressing the underlying root cause issues.

If you’re approaching a doctor or practitioner with the attitude that they might finally heal you once and for all, you are probably going to be very disappointed.

There may be a brilliant specialist who finally gave you the diagnosis you’d been seeking for years, or who saved your grandmother’s life in an acute situation. I’m not saying doctors aren’t useful. They absolutely are — for very specific things.

But if you have complex chronic illness, a particular doctor is not going to heal you.

Anybody who DMs me asking me for a doctor or practitioner most likely has a much greater need: to take radical responsibility for healing themselves.

Radical Responsibility Is Not Optional

I know that’s not what you want to hear. I know it’s not what I wanted to hear either.

But our medical system was never built to do what you’re asking it to do. We’ve been trained since birth to hand our bodies to credentialed strangers and trust them to have answers that, in the chronic illness space specifically, they largely do not have.

Understanding and admitting that is the first step in getting better.