Dr. Sidney Baker discusses how listening to patients' stories reveals hidden sensitivities that tests alone miss. In functional medicine, the patient's narrative guides diagnosis more than standard protocols, especially for chronic illness.
[Foiled] you have this quality which is very rare, which most doctors see what they believe, they don't believe what they see. And some people see things and actually don't ask the questions about what's going on underneath it. And that's really an extraordinary talent that has allowed so many of us like me and others in functional medicine to actually be able to sort of incorporate these ideas into our practice.
Well, thank you.
It is- It's like that quote, you know, you see what everybody else has seen, but think what nobody else has thought.
Yes.
And that's an amazing quality.
Well, some of the thoughts can be quite simple, but some of the guidance that I have gotten has all been from my patients, the stories that people tell me. We live in a world where we have meetings like this and people talk about double-blind, placebo-controlled scientific studies to prove this or that. But really, most of us have learned what we know from stories.
From our patients.
And when I left my full-time faculty job at the Yale Medical School, kept my appointment in medical computer sciences, but I was a part-time. But it went out to be a real doctor because that's what I figured I was quite good at. And I had a patient who was a serious guy, a regular businessman, who was, they wanted a family doctor and I was the appointed family doctor for this health care plan. And so I was going through a history with him, you know, have you had any operations or illnesses or allergies? And he said, yeah, I have an allergy. I said, what is it? egg. I said, oh, really? I wrote down egg allergy. And then we had pretty much time at that point in this beginning of this health plan to stop and chat a bit. I said, well, what happens if you eat eggs? He says, well, supposing I go to a dinner at somebody's house and I tell the cook, the lady or gentleman, whoever's making dinner, I can't have any egg at all. I'm very allergic to it. But it happens that the cook stirs something, a pot on the stove that has a little egg in it, and then uses the same fork to stir something else. And he has a taste of that when he's at the dinner table, and a few minutes later he ends up on the floor with violent vomiting and diarrhea and basically out of it. And I thought to myself, Holy, you know what? This is amazing. This is a real guy and he's telling me a real story. There's no doubt about it. And I think, well, what if there are other people out there who are so sensitive to eggs, but it doesn't quite produce the spectacular symptom that allowed him pretty soon in life to figure out what was the connection between what I just ate and where I am on the floor here. And so I thought, well, there must be people out there with sensitivities to things that are hidden. And that gave me the idea that if somebody is chronically ill, maybe there's something that they need to avoid. And if they did, then nature would do the healing. Yeah.
And, what a novel concept.
And because I thought, well, this is pretty rare. This doesn't happen very often, but it turns out it's almost always the case in people with chronic illness. I mean, to be able to spot what it is that they're sensitive to.
And it can be many things, right? It can be toxins, allergens, microbes, gut bacteria, stress, or diet.
It's a long list, but really, when it comes right down to it, it's not that difficult to even scope it out by having a conversation with somebody about, well, when does it happen and how often and get to be a little detective. Yeah. I mean, there are fancy blood tests and skin tests and things for all that, and I've done all those things, but really an intelligent conversation is a good place to start.
