Five minutes, a piece of paper, and three lines you write for nobody but yourself
I don’t open the chart first anymore. I ask two questions, and most of what I need is usually sitting inside the answers. Here’s how to ask them at your own kitchen table.
Five minutes. Something to write with. Do it alone.
Write one line naming the thing that’s been bothering your body lately. Not the diagnosis, if you have one.
The sensation itself, in whatever words you’d use if nobody medical were listening.
Where it sits. What it feels like when it’s worst.
Write a second line answering this. What was happening in your life in the months before it started.
Don’t reach for the dramatic answer if the true one is quieter.
A promotion counts, and so does a move, and so does the year where nothing happened on paper while everything was happening underneath.
Most people start by saying nothing, and then keep talking for a while. Let yourself keep talking.
Write a third line answering this one. Where have you felt this exact bracing before.
Whose reaction does yours remind you of.
Let whatever name or face shows up, show up. You don’t have to do anything with it.
Then read the three lines once, out loud if you’re alone, and put the paper down.
That’s the whole practice.
It should feel unfinished. The patient I wrote about last week answered the third question with one sentence about her mother and the phone ringing at dinner, and that sentence turned out to be the eight months.
Two things before you try it.
This doesn’t replace a workup, and it isn’t meant to.
A symptom that’s new or changing or getting worse belongs in front of a doctor first.
And if what surfaces on that third line is bigger than five minutes, that isn’t the exercise failing. That’s real, and it belongs with someone trained to sit with it.
Keep the paper. Bring it to your next appointment and put it in your pocket.
Hand it over or don’t. Most patients already know. Almost nobody gets asked.
Subscribe below if you want the next one, and write back if you actually try this, because I read those.
Dr. Shiv Kumar Goel, MD, is an internal and functional medicine physician in San Antonio. Founder of Prime Vitality Care and author of the forthcoming Healing the Split: When Your Biology Is Fighting Your Biography.