Welcome to Healing the Split.

This is a newsletter for people whose labs are good and whose lives aren’t.

I’m a physician. I have spent the last fifteen years sitting across from patients whose bloodwork was reassuring and whose lives were, by any honest reading, in crisis. I have watched medicine, the profession I love, lose the language for that patient. We have been trained to read one half of her and discharge the other. The half we can measure, we treat. The half we cannot measure, we send home.

This newsletter is about the half we send home.

What I write about here

The body that remembers what the biography forgets.

The split between the biology you can measure and the life you are actually living.

Why so many people in their thirties, forties, and fifties feel like they are dying inside a body that is, technically, fine.

What functional medicine, integrative care, and the older wisdom traditions have been saying about this for a long time, and why the rest of medicine is now, slowly, beginning to listen.

The hormones, the gut, the vagus nerve, the circadian system, the stress physiology. But also the marriage, the job, the grief, the silence, the inheritance. Both halves. Always both halves.

Who I am

I am Dr. Shiv Kumar Goel. I am a board-certified physician trained in internal medicine, with a clinical practice in functional and aesthetic medicine in San Antonio, Texas. I founded Prime Vitality Wellness in 2020. I am at work on a book under contract called Healing the Split: When Your Biology Is Fighting Your Biography, of which this newsletter is the open studio.

Before I was a clinic owner I was an ICU physician. Before that I was a medical student in India who read the Upanishads in the same week he learned to read an EKG. I have spent my whole working life trying to put those two literacies in the same room, because the patients in front of me kept needing both and getting only one.

Who this is for

You, if you have been told your labs are normal and you do not feel normal.

You, if you are a physician who has felt the small uncomfortable shame of telling a patient everything looks good when nothing about her looks good.

You, if you are in midlife and the body you used to live in is no longer answering when you call.

You, if you have a faint suspicion that the symptom you keep medicating is, in fact, a sentence you have not yet read.

You, if you grew up between cultures, between traditions, between languages of healing, and you have wondered whether the split inside you is the same split inside medicine.

What you’ll get

One long-form Essay a month. Bi-weekly Case Notes from clinic. Weekly Practices — small, actionable things to do. Monthly Q&A.

All of it free. No paywall right now. There may be a paid tier eventually for early book chapters and live cohort access. You’ll know when there is.

Two practical notes

I write under my own name about my own clinical work. Patient stories are de-identified composites. Nothing here is personal medical advice for you specifically — I’m a writer here, not your physician. If something I write matches your life, talk to your own doctor about it, or, if you want to work with me directly, that happens through my clinic, not this newsletter.

You can write to me at hello@healingthesplit.com. I read everything. I cannot reply to everything.

A line I keep coming back to

The body had been telling the truth the whole time. We had just finally let it speak.

If that sentence does anything to you, you are in the right place.

Subscribe below. I’ll see you in your inbox.

— Shiv