Stories of Recovery:
Finding the Why

Sarah is the kind of person who figures things out. She runs her own accounting business, manages her clients' complexity with ease, and is not someone who sits with a problem without trying to solve it. So, when her body started failing her, she did what she always does: she researched, she adjusted, she tried harder. She cut out gluten, dairy, soy, alcohol, and caffeine. She bought supplements. She went to specialists and had tests done. She followed every piece of advice she was given.

None of it worked. And after months of that — of doing everything right and still feeling terrible — she was left with something harder to treat than the symptoms themselves: the quiet suspicion that maybe this was just how things were going to be.

It had started suddenly — severe abdominal cramping in the middle of the night that escalated quickly enough to land her in the emergency department within days. The acute crisis eventually settled, but what replaced it was something more insidious: a low-grade, constant misery that wouldn't go away. The bloating came and went without any obvious pattern. The abdominal pain made it hard to sit on her bike for any length of time, and the constipation and unpredictable weight fluctuations of up to ten pounds left her feeling like she was living in a body she no longer recognized or trusted.

Sarah is a serious endurance athlete. Long-distance cycling is not a hobby for her — she had completed multiple Ironman races. For months, she could not even ride her bike comfortably. That loss, on specialized of everything else, made an already difficult situation feel genuinely defeating.

The specialists had found nothing structurally wrong. The tests had come back normal. She had been put on strong steroids just to see if they helped, but saw no improvement, and had been taken off them without a good explanation. When someone like Sarah — thorough, persistent, willing to do the work — goes through that process and still has no answers, the problem is not with her effort. The problem is that nobody has asked the right questions yet.

What became clear, once the full history was on the table, was that this was not a mystery. It was a story that made complete sense — it just required someone to actually read it. Sarah had grown up with lifelong constipation. She had spent years in childhood and college on repeated rounds of antibiotics and steroids for recurrent respiratory infections, disrupting her gut microbiome in ways that had never been addressed. She had been on hormonal birth control continuously since her early twenties because she was told her body couldn't produce adequate estrogen on its own, and every previous attempt to stop had triggered painful ovarian cysts. The stress of running her own business was significant and constant. She was exercising at a volume that, for her body in its current state, was depleting rather than restorative.

None of these pieces had ever been looked at together. Conventional medicine had been treating the acute episodes as they came up — the infections, the pain, the hormonal symptoms — without ever stepping back to ask what was driving all of them. The gut had been the missing piece all along. Functional testing confirmed significant microbial imbalance, the kind that standard scopes and panels simply don't look for. That was the starting point for actually getting her well.

"She came in with a body she didn't understand and a set of symptoms that nobody had been able to explain. What she left with was something that had been missing from every appointment before this one: an actual answer."

Sarah's name and identifying details have been changed to protect her privacy.

Emma was 26 when she first came in — just out of graduate school, starting her first real job, and operating under the assumption that the way she felt was simply the way she felt. She had been dealing with intermittent abdominal pain, recurring scalp rashes, and chronic yeast infections for years. She had seen doctors. She had had tests done. Nobody had found a cause, and she had gradually stopped expecting one.

That slow lowering of expectations is one of the most common things seen in patients who have been moving through the conventional medical system with symptoms that don't fit neatly into a diagnosis. You stop asking why and you just start dealing with it. You reorganize your life around the discomfort and tell yourself this is just your normal. Emma had been doing that for so long she didn't fully register how much it was costing her.

"I definitely am noticing a big change in how I feel! My hormones seem to have evened out, my acne is clearing up, and I haven't had any severe side pains since the last time I spoke to you! I had a slight one last night, but I knew it wouldn't last until the morning, and have yet to get an ultrasound because it seems to be fading away! Oh and I am losing some weight at a more healthy rate as well!"

"I have to tell you, I had a moment the other day where I just started crying because I felt so good. And I realized just how bad it really was all those years. It's really astonishing how long I lived thinking how I felt was just my normal."

That last sentence is the one that matters most. She had spent years adapting to a body that wasn't working well, calibrating her expectations downward so gradually that she had stopped noticing the loss. What the gut-skin work gave her was not just the resolution of specific symptoms — it was the recovery of a better baseline that she hadn't even known she was missing.

Emma's name has been changed to protect her privacy. Her story and quotes are shared with her permission.