The Truth about Mystery Illness
If you feel that you’ve been searching for health answers for far too long, you’re not alone.
On average, a client comes to me after ten years of doctor shopping, having visited 20 different practitioners. Sometimes it’s more like 50 to 100 doctors in that timeframe. One woman I spoke with had gone to almost 400 doctors in seven years.
These people may have gotten labels for their conditions—lupus, for example, or fibromyalgia, Lyme disease, multiple sclerosis (MS), chronic fatigue syndrome, migraines, thyroid disorder, rheumatoid arthritis, colitis, irritable bowel syndrome, celiac disease, insomnia, depression, and many others—yet they couldn’t get better.
Or maybe doctors couldn’t find tags for the symptoms these people had and doled out that old, misbegotten chestnut of a diagnosis, “It’s all in your head.”
What these clients were really dealing with was mystery illness.
A mystery illness isn’t just an unidentified disease, and it’s not just the news story about eight kids in the Midwest who are hospitalized for sudden, unexplained symptoms. I’ve certainly had clients come to me for answers in those situations, yet it’s a fraction of what I see day in and day out, a tiny subset of the much larger category of mystery illness.
Limiting the definition of mystery illness to rare, acute diseases is not helpful. It tricks the public. It makes people think that the medical cases that stump doctors are minimal and affect only a minute portion of the population.
Truth is, millions of people suffer from mystery illness. A mystery illness is any ailment that leaves anyone perplexed for any reason. It can be a mystery because there isn’t a name for a given set of symptoms—and so it’s written off as a sign of mental imbalance. A mystery illness can also be an established, chronic condition for which there’s no effective treatment of the root cause (because medical communities don’t yet understand it), or a condition that’s frequently misdiagnosed.
We’re talking not just about the conditions I listed above, but also type 2 diabetes, hypoglycemia, TMJ, Candida, menopause complications, ADHD, PTSD, Bell’s palsy, shingles, leaky gut syndrome, and more. These are merely labels, with no meaning behind them besides confusion and suffering. That makes them mystery illnesses.
And what about autoimmune disease—the mistaken theory that the body, in certain circumstances, attacks itself? Not true. (More on that in later chapters.) It’s another label that diverts from the truth that medical science has not yet figured out why people are in chronic pain. Autoimmune disease is mystery illness.
If you visit a physician and complain of elbow pain, then hear that you have rheumatoid arthritis (RA), that’s just a tag—not an answer. You may receive prescriptions for medications and physical therapy, yet no explanation of why you have it, or how you can heal from it. The doctor may say that RA is the body attacking itself—that is, the immune system mistaking parts of your body for invaders and trying to destroy them.
That’s misguided. The body doesn’t attack itself.
The truth? RA is just a name for one particular mystery illness. The tag joint hurting disease would be more accurate—it reveals as much as medical research has so far uncovered about the disorder.
There’s a real explanation for RA, though. The answer is in this book.
Mystery illness is at an all-time high. With each new decade to come, the number of people suffering from autoimmune disorders and other chronic mystery illnesses will double or triple. It’s time to expand the definition of mystery illness, to wake up to the fact that millions of people need answers.
In the chapters that follow, I’ll reveal the true nature of dozens of these ailments, and I’ll tell you what steps you need to take to heal or protect yourself.
The mystery will be revealed.
HEALING MERRY-GO-ROUND
When people present their mystery symptoms to doctor after doctor with no progress, I call that the healing merry-go-round. As hard as you try to get off the ride, you just keep going in circles.
In most professions, the job is black-and-white. That’s not to say that people such as plumbers, mechanics, accountants, and lawyers have easy occupations. They don’t. Yet they operate within sets of rules. The accountant who can’t get her columns to balance will eventually figure out the mistake in the ledger and post a correcting journal entry. The plumber who comes to fix a malfunctioning dishwasher will, even if the source of the problem is confusing at first, eventually figure out that a certain part needs to be replaced—or if that doesn’t work, he’ll install a new appliance.
Even some aspects of medicine are clear-cut. When someone gets into a skiing accident, for example, there’s no mystery about what caused the broken leg—and no mystery about how to fix it. With something like a bone fracture—where cause, effect, and treatment are well-defined—it’s like a ferry ride: there’s an end to the trip, and it’s somewhere different from where you started. Perhaps there’s fog along the way that complicates the journey—a patient’s fractures are splintered, or she gets a pen cap stuck in her cast—but there’s an established Point A and Point B, and medical personnel are trained to carry the patient from one place to the other.
Medical science is incredibly advanced at physical body repair. It’s developed lifesaving technology that allows patients to make radical recoveries from car accidents, broken bones, heart transplants, and so much more. Where would we be without the dedicated people who perform routine procedures and revolutionary surgeries every day?
In the 20th century, medical science made great breakthroughs in virology, too . . . but it all got swept under the carpet. Because there was no funding to take these discoveries to the next level, these amazing doctors were left in the lurch as their findings about certain viruses went largely ignored.
With mystery illness, the causes of symptoms often aren’t evident. There’s no clear trigger, no clear explanation of someone’s suffering. Doctors’ training doesn’t map out Point A and Point B. There’s no rule book for them to follow. A skeptical physician may not even see a clear indication that someone is suffering—and so launch the patient on a continual search for validation that her or his condition is even real.
So many people with chronic illnesses aren’t getting better. Sometimes it doesn’t feel so much like a merry-go-round as a glum-go-round.
It’s time for that to change.
I’m here to tell you that the fact that there’s no rule book for mystery illness doesn’t have to be a bad thing. Take the legal profession, for example. Countless people become lawyers because they’re drawn to justice. They enroll in law school, get jobs . . . and then the realization hits that the justice they can bring to their clients is limited. It’s all within the confines of human-devised, and sometimes unjust, laws. Having rule books isn’t always a good thing.
Because there’s no rule book for mystery illness, there are also no limits to recovery—if you plug in to the secrets I reveal in the pages to come. Healing is one of the greatest freedoms God offers us. Healing is the law of the universe, the light, or whatever you choose to call the higher source—not the law of humans—and so it grants true justice. Untethered by statute, healing from mystery illness can exceed imagination.
ADDICTED TO ANSWERS
The medical establishment is a bit of an addict—one that gets its fix from being the authority on health. So what can happen when neither alternative nor conventional doctors have the answers? Denial.
This denial may come in the form of mislabeling a condition instead of saying, “I don’t know.” It may come in the form of prescribing drugs or diets that hinder instead of heal. Or sometimes a physician may express that denial as dismissal—and refer a patient to a psychiatrist to “help” the patient with symptoms the physician insists are psychosomatic.
As with any addiction, the first step is for medical communities to admit they have a problem.
Whether conventional or alternative, traditional or nontraditional, if medical communities don’t admit that the epidemic of women flattened by fatigue and muscle pain is real and that no one knows the true root cause, how are researchers ever going to find adequate funding to uncover the real cause of fibromyalgia? The same goes for every other mystery illness.
If you’re ill, do you feel like you have decades to suffer before solutions surface in medical communities?
Many mothers come to me explaining that 20 years earlier, they came down with mystery symptoms and were diagnosed with thyroid disorder, migraines, hormone imbalances, or MS. Now they’re watching their daughters go through the same exact thing. When they first got their diagnoses, these women say to me, they never would have thought that after two decades, medicine wouldn’t have cures for their conditions, or even adequate explanations. They couldn’t have guessed that medical advances regarding chronic conditions would have moved at such a glacial pace. They couldn’t have imagined they’d have to watch their daughters suffer just as they did.
It shouldn’t take ages to discover the true reason for a person’s aches and pains or to discern a reliable treatment for those underlying issues. Patients shouldn’t feel like they are fumbling in the dark for answers.
It’s time for medical communities to be honest and open, to accept that the medical model needs to adapt and move forward, to make the same leaps and bounds regarding chronic illness that it’s made in other areas, such as life-saving surgeries. If we’re to avoid several more decades of nonsense names for disorders, then it’s time for medicine to admit that diagnostic tests are sometimes inadequate or fallible, that doctors’ training sometimes leaves them operating on guesswork alone.
It’s time for the medical establishment to seek out the answers we’ll explore in this book.
Mystery illness falls into three categories.
The first type is unnamed illness. A person may go from doctor to doctor describing her or his symptoms, withstand test after test, and hear that nothing is wrong. The blood work, MRIs, ultrasounds, and other imaging and exams don’t raise any red flags. Often the only explanation the patient receives for the aches and pains is that it’s all in the patient’s head—that she or he is a hypochondriac, anxious, depressed, overworked, or bored. This can be crazy-making to someone suffering from a legitimate disorder. And if a doctor does believe the patient’s pain is real yet can’t explain its cause, she or he may call it idiopathic—which is just a fancy word for “unknown.”
Ineffective treatment is the second category of mystery illness. In this scenario, the medical establishment does have a name for a given set of symptoms, but no viable avenue for recovery. The prescribed treatment makes no difference in the patient’s health, or it worsens the condition, or the patient is told that she or he is simply stuck with feeling this way for life. At best, a patient will receive medications that manage the symptoms—such as those of MS—but don’t make the condition itself any better.
With the third type of mystery illness, misdiagnosis, the patient also receives a name for what ails her—except it’s wrong. Sometimes diagnostic trends are responsible. For example, hormones have taken the blame for any number of women’s ailments that have nothing to do with menopause, perimenopause, or even just hormonal imbalance. Practitioners want to help their patients, though, so if they hear of others giving certain labels to certain sets of symptoms, they may follow the movement. In fact, alternative doctors have recently gone down the hormone path, taking their cue from the past decades’ hormone movement in conventional medicine. This is an example of how trends can cross over and blur the lines between alternative and conventional.
On the journey to find answers, people might find themselves in all three of these categories at one point or another. At the first doctor, a patient may hear that her or his symptoms are psychosomatic and that she or he should take up a hobby as a new focus and mood booster. The next practitioner may validate that there is a true problem, slap a name like lupus on it, then offer an ineffective course of treatment. Still not feeling well, the patient may turn to a third health professional, only to get a new diagnosis—this time incorrect—along with “remedies” that take her or him in the opposite direction from healing.
FADS AREN’T THE FUTURE
Fads in medicine don’t become popular because they work.
Maybe a particular car or phone or clothing brand becomes trendy because of its quality and usefulness, or because it’s fun, but diagnoses and treatments don’t gather steam because of their healing benefits. The theory or thought process or catchphrase behind a medical trend has far more power over someone’s consciousness than the results or benefits.
Health trends are a bait-and-switch. They attract people with the allure of vibrant well-being, meanwhile offering only time-wasting techniques and leading people to question their own commitment and capabilities. If they could just have stayed longer with that workout regimen, they tell themselves—or that protein powder routine or that diet that eliminated fruit—they could have achieved the results that were promised.
To understand how medical trends work, imagine a restaurant that always serves a special turkey dinner the week of Thanksgiving. The dinner has gotten so much hype over the years that the buzz trumps the meal itself. No one notices that the restaurant has never actually served turkey—the kitchen has secretly been cooking goose instead. If the meat tastes different from what one diner expected, he won’t say anything and will just figure his own perception is off. It’s a classic bait-and-switch, just like many medical trends.
Health trends are like the emperor with no clothes. They try to distract from what they lack with false confidence and denial. That’s because health trends can have a life force all their own. If a belief system finds some followers who market it heavily and catchily, then as the decades pass, it can become a grizzly bear of power over common sense. This fad process is behind the mistaken belief that a no-carb diet will solve Candida issues, the incorrect conviction that Hashimoto’s disease is a condition in which the body’s own immune system attacks the thyroid, and the misguided attempts to treat Lyme disease with antibiotics.
Some trends aren’t all bad. Let’s look at what’s going on with hypothyroidism. So many women are walking around with this condition, suffering, whether diagnostic tests have spotted it or not. A recent trend among sensitive integrative medical doctors is to recognize these women’s symptoms as real, to validate that these women are neither hypochondriacs nor bored housewives. Such doctors will usually say, “It’s not showing up on tests, but I think your thyroid is off,” and then treat the disease with a combination of medication and diet.
This is progress for women who have felt continually disregarded. At the same time, hypothyroidism is still in its mystery phase—because the doctors still haven’t pointed to the underlying cause of the thyroid disease. The patients’ hypothyroidism isn’t going away, regardless of the medication they’re taking. Many patients don’t know that the thyroid medicine does nothing for the thyroid itself, nor was it originally prescribed for the thyroid. It doesn’t eliminate the hypothyroidism. The thyroid stays underactive; the medication only helps curb the symptoms.
The same goes for any number of conditions. Take the ones I listed at the beginning of this chapter: fibromyalgia, lupus, Lyme disease, MS, chronic fatigue syndrome, migraines, colitis, rheumatoid arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, celiac disease, insomnia, depression . . . It may seem like medical communities are addressing these illnesses because they have names, or because compelling theories surface about them, or because popular treatments are available. Yet it’s important to understand that medicine is still in the Dark Ages when it comes to aches and pains and mystery disorders. You also have to know that misdiagnoses are rampant. There’s still a lot of confusion in the medical world about what’s causing what.
Which is all to say: trends aren’t answers.
IT’S NOT IN YOUR HEAD
It’s an all-too-common phenomenon, particularly for women: an actual, valid illness meets with skepticism, disregard, or misinformation from the establishment that’s meant to have the answers. Doctors can’t help that they don’t know the causes of these debilitating mystery symptoms—or that they have the wrong culprit pegged for a particular disorder. In some cases the funding just isn’t there for the research that’s needed, or fads take studies in the wrong direction. In other cases, it’s only a matter of time (though sometimes decades) before the right diagnostic technology will be available.
Physicians are often taught that in the absence of explanations, it’s a genuine help to tell patients that their conditions are psychosomatic. The health-care establishment believes this will give patients some sort of wake-up call, which would be true . . . if the illnesses were just in people’s heads.
Most of the time, there’s an actual, physical root to a chronic mystery condition; medical communities just haven’t named it yet or figured out what makes it better. It can take years and thousands of dollars before people dealing with mystery illness find me. Friends and family may have begged them to stop the search, urged them to accept their diagnoses and the hands they’ve been dealt. Still, something has pushed them forward: the primal will to survive, the determination to make the most of life, the instinct that they deserve to be healthy.
There aren’t any words for the relief these clients find, or how empowered they become, once they understand what was really behind their suffering.
Now it’s your turn to learn: You are not to blame for your illness. It’s not something you manifested or attracted. It’s not your fault. You certainly don’t deserve to feel unwell. You have a God-given right to heal.
If you’ve dealt with chronic illness, then I’m sure you’ve dealt with the people who say, “But you look perfectly healthy.” You’ve no doubt stopped giving an honest answer to, “How are you?” because you can’t bear to hear, “You’re still not better?” It’s less emotionally damaging to pretend you’re fine than to listen as someone insists that a particular therapy will solve all your problems—as though you haven’t already gone to the ends of the earth trying to find answers. You’ve probably listened as countless people have described their family members’ struggles with illness—as though those experiences trump your own.
When you’re healthy, it’s easy to spout theories about how those who are sick just need to change their mind-sets. When you don’t understand the true nature of illness, it’s easy to think it’s because a person is holding herself or himself back with a fear of healing, or that she or he is a malingerer who secretly enjoys the attention this malady brings.
Anyone who’s told you these are the reasons for your illness hasn’t been there. These ideas make things so much worse for those who suffer from mystery illness. They cause people to feel ashamed of their problems and avoid asking for help—to feel like they have to hide their suffering out of worry they’ll be called out as fakes.
Let’s make it crystal clear: Nobody wants to be sick or compromised. Nobody has a fear of healing.
What people fear is being ill, and that’s what causes healthy people to utter insensitive remarks. What they’re really saying is, “I’ll never have to go through what you’re going through, right?”
What you need them to say is, “I hear you, I see you, I believe you, and I believe in you. What you’re going through is valid, and there must be some way to triumph over it. I’ll hang in there with you for the long haul.”
In the process of healing, knowing the cause of your condition (and knowing what isn’t the cause) is half the battle. The next step is learning how to make it better. If you follow the guidelines for how to use the chapters ahead that I laid out in the introduction, this book will help you do both.
Spirit has the answers. He wants you to learn the secrets behind mystery illness. He wants you and your loved ones to get better, to have a clear sense of direction on how to move forward, to have control over your life.
Spirit understands, with the utmost compassion, what people suffer on this earth.
God granted me the ability to access vast, highly advanced healing information through Spirit. Because of this, countless men, women, and children who’ve come to me have found the solutions to their chronic mystery illnesses and regained control over their health, achieving complete recovery. In the chapters that follow, you can find solutions, too.
The Real Heal
Lila* was a 34-year-old real estate agent when she started to experience mental fogginess, weakness, fatigue, pressure in her ears, and numbness in her extremities. Her symptoms soon got in the way of her job. She could tell that her fellow agents had noticed she was dropping the ball with some of her clients—forgetting appointments and staging second-rate open houses. Lila frequently failed to recall addresses and names and found herself so fatigued after a day at work that the next morning, she would sleep through her alarm. At property closings, she was on edge, unable to think through the mortgage details coherently, and fuzzy on the numbers, which had once been her strength.
Finally, Lila had to admit to herself and her employer that she was sick. She sat down with her supervisor, who recommended a doctor. At her first appointment, Lila listed her symptoms, but after an exam, the physician couldn’t pinpoint a physical cause and declared her perfectly healthy. Depression, he said, was probably behind her ailments.
Lila tried to work with this. Determined to ward off her tiredness, mental fog, and other complaints with a sunny disposition, she returned to her job. Anything that felt like a symptom, she told herself, was a manifestation of her frame of mind. Maybe she’d just been craving attention.
But she started missing more house showings because she was unable to rise from bed, her hands felt too numb to drive, or she was embarrassed that she’d been too weak to bathe. It soon became apparent to Lila and those at her office that no matter her outlook, she was unable to do her job and needed to take a leave of absence. She dragged herself back to the doctor and reiterated her plight. He examined her again and once more concluded that she was perfectly fine. “I’m not going to be the doctor who lets you collect disability,” he said.
Devastated and now in survival mode, Lila sought out a second opinion. She submitted to a battery of tests, only to have her new M.D. play it safe and back up the first doctor’s ruling. He, too, refused to provide the documentation she needed to receive disability benefits.
This was just the beginning of Lila’s years-long journey through the conventional and alternative medical worlds, searching for explanations of her mystery illness. Along the way, she had a few glimpses of hope, but every time she thought she’d found a name for her condition or a shot at getting better, she found herself right back where she’d started—or worse.
That is, until she came to me. Spirit provided the long-awaited insights that Lila knew existed, including the underlying cause of her downward spiral and instructions to regain her health. Before long, Lila felt better than she had since she could remember. Her renewed energy brought her renewed trust and delight in life, and she was able to devote herself to her job once more—as well as explore passions she’d neglected for years.
In this book, you’ll read about many cases such as Lila’s. You might notice a pattern, and you may identify with it: the years of being ill with no validation, the doctor-shopping journey, the isolation, confusion, and frustration. You may resonate with the stories where someone does get validation for her or his illness—but it’s a misleading validation, either in the form of a misdiagnosis or a prescribed path of healing that leads nowhere fast.
None of the stories end there. You don’t have to get stuck in the endless cycle of guesswork. Just like Lila, you can solve the mystery—and real healing can happen.
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* Names and other select client details throughout have been changed to protect client privacy.