The Whole Pizza is Rotten: An Open Letter from the Lab Rat Downriver
To the doctors, the pharmacists, and the architects of our healthcare system:
I have spent the last few years being an accidental scientist. I didn’t want the job, and I certainly didn't train for it, but I had to take it because the "experts" were failing the experiment. I am standing downriver now, looking back at the wreckage of the last forty years of my life, realizing that I’ve been treated like a series of disconnected problems rather than a human being.
My most recent revelation came after weaning off a massive, 350 mg dose of Venlafaxine. For years, I suffered from drenching night sweats and a body locked in a permanent "fight or flight" loop. Now that I am off the drug, the symptoms have vanished. I had to be the one to find the data you should have known: that at such high doses, this medication floods the brain with norepinephrine and effectively breaks the body’s internal thermostat. But this isn't just about one bad prescription; it’s about a fundamental flaw in the philosophy of Western medicine.
The problem is that you only ever look at one slice of the pizza. You look at a single symptom, a single test result, or a single body part in isolation. You try to determine the health of a human being by looking at one tiny triangle of data—meanwhile, the rest of the pizza is rotten. Because you cannot see the whole pie, you assume the "mystery" is all in the patient's head.
This is why women, in particular, are failing in your system. Our bodies and brains are not static; we live in a constant flux of hormonal shifts that the "standard" medical model—built on the consistency of men—simply isn't designed to handle. Because I didn't fit the machinery, I was labeled as "anxious" or "difficult." I spent a year bleeding 21 days a month and was told it was "normal" for my age, only to have to demand the ultrasound that finally found the tumor you missed. I was put on birth control for aura migraines that were clearly hormonal, despite the red flags I was waving.
Most devastatingly, I was fed anxiety and depression medication by every doctor I saw since I was a preteen. Not one of them looked deeper. It took forty years to finally see a female specialist who recognized one of the clearest cases of ADHD she had ever seen. Now that my neurodivergent brain is actually being supported, the "anxiety" and "depression" have vanished. I didn't have a broken mood; I had a system that refused to see the whole picture.
But here is the part that haunts me: not everyone has the capacity or the ability to become an armchair physician like I’ve had to. I literally had to leave my work and my career to find the time to do the research and the labor needed to heal myself. I had to advocate for myself with a ferocity that most people simply don't have the energy for when they are already suffering. If I hadn't done that work—if I hadn't fought, researched, and questioned everything—I’m not even sure I would be alive right now.
To the healthcare workers still listening: a lot of us aren't being cared for. We are just surviving the treatments being given to us like Band-Aids over bullet holes. Stop looking at the slice. Start looking at the person. We shouldn't have to quit our lives just to convince you to save them.