A short conversational transcript (YouTube) featuring Wendie Trubow, MD, MBA, IFMCP and another speaker discussing the period of life before and after a medical diagnosis. The speakers emphasize that much of life can be spent in a phase of suffering and suboptimal health prior to formal diagnosis, and that warning signs—often subtle and masked when someone is metabolically unhealthy—can appear before diagnostic thresholds are reached.
Chapters
There's the period of time before you get a diagnosis where you're just doing your thing, and then there's the period of time where you have your diagnosis. And if it's what leads to your death, that's what I'll call the period of time where you're suffering. And what you really highlighted was that there's so much time of our lives spent in that phase, right? We spend a lot of time not being optimized, suffering, having our friends and family and ourselves not feeling well. And that's what was so striking, because not only does it cause us to die, but it causes us to suffer. And that's the part that I think is really important to remember, is that it's not just like, you're fine, then you die, you suffer.
I wholeheartedly agree. And I think the suffering is actually more than people realize. So to your point, when you get diagnosed with one of these diseases, then you are suffering because usually you have some symptoms. That's when you go to the doctor and you realize it. But actually, what a lot of people don't realize is even suffering, even before you have these diagnosis, there are warning signs if you tune in and listen to your body at the same time. What I've come to realize through this is it's often difficult to see those warning signs when you are, I would say, metabolically unhealthy, because our bodies are amazing. They adapt to the modern world.
