Guest post written by Irene Gabashvilli
When we experience medical symptoms, the physician is trained to determine what the next steps should be. If it’s obvious what is causing the problem, the doctor may outline a solution immediately, possibly prescribing medications. For example, if it is the flu season, and you come down with a sore throat, headache and a mild fever, there is a good chance you’ve caught a virus and your doctor might prescribe some antibiotics to fight an infection – as long as you promise to gargle with salt water, drink lots of liquids, and get plenty of rest.
If what is happening is less obvious, your physician might recommend a variety of tests to diagnose the problem. Each test is designed to measure a biochemical response that isolates the disease. Even simple blood tests and urine analyses combined with a physical assessment and medical history can reveal enough to make a proper assessment of the patient.
Functional disorders and environmental sensitivities, however, tend to be more difficult to diagnose. They can involve subtle microbial imbalances that trigger a wide variety of symptoms such as diarrhea, cramps, gas, enlargement of blood vessels, headache and unpleasant odor, to name just a few. Not only do the symptoms vary from one individual to the next, they can be triggered by an enormous variety and combination of factors, including food types, stress levels, exercise and environmental stimuli. Finally, the causes and effects can even vary from one season to the next and evolve over a lifetime.
Chronic illnesses such as irritable bowel syndrome are rarely life-threatening, but they are very unpleasant to deal with and can persist over many years if not entire lifetimes. Patients become frustrated when physicians are unable to come up with remedies that provide long-term relief from the symptoms.
Fortunately, the right diet and exercise can alleviate symptoms related to many chronic ailments. But what exactly is the “right diet and exercise?” For some, the problem can be as simple as discovering they’re allergic to a particular food. For others, the challenge is determining what nutrients contained in different foods – and in what amounts and combinations – are likely to trigger their symptoms. Moreover, severity of the symptoms could be dependent on other factors, such as stress, emotions, allergens and even the weather.
You could try posting health questions to a forum, questions like: “How do I get a better night’s sleep?” or “Does coffee lead to indigestion?” However, it is very likely you’ll get a number of different opinions. This is why one individual’s blog proclaiming success through curtailment of red beans and rice rings hollow for so many others. Because the cause-effect relationships are often subtle, the discovery process of “connecting the dots” can take years of trial and error.
But what if an invisible digital nurse or a doctor-in-the-pocket could take detailed notes about your physiology, psychology, symptoms and activities, and record the precise ingredients in your foods? And what if this digital nurse also could simultaneously collect information about your environment, including the weather, air quality, allergens and even disease outbreaks near your location?
Then, based on her extensive knowledgebase of detailed ingredients and symptoms, the digital nurse would be able to analyze all these hundreds of “health variables” in search of patterns in the data. She could do this with far greater precision than a physician or nutritionist, due to her ability to quickly and tirelessly check all possible combinations. In a relatively short timeframe she could narrow down the factors that are positively and negatively influencing your health, while taking into consideration your pre-existing conditions and sensitivities.
You might learn, for example, that your intestinal distress isn’t related to just eating papaya, but usually occurs when you exceed your sensitivity threshold to lycopene, an otherwise healthy food component. This is the type of subtle cause-effect relationship that would otherwise take you years of trial and error to pinpoint. In addition to identifying conditions like this that uniquely affect your symptoms, you could fine-tune your diet and exercise levels over time so you could reach your optimal wellness plateau.
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