If you’ve just landed here, this is what this place is.
I’m a physician. I see, every week, the same patient. She is not always a woman. She is not always in her forties. But she is, increasingly, the most common patient in the modern American clinic. She walks in with three years of bloodwork in a folder. The bloodwork is unremarkable. She is not.
She has been told her thyroid is fine, her hormones are fine, her blood sugar is fine, her CBC is fine. She has been told, by good doctors who meant it kindly, that everything looks good. She has left their offices angrier than she came in. She does not know why. I know why.
She came to medicine with a split, and medicine handed her back her labs.
This newsletter is for her. It is also for the physicians who feel the small uncomfortable shame of telling her everything looks good when nothing about her looks good. It is for the people in midlife whose bodies have begun refusing the lives they thought they were living. It is for the readers who suspect that the symptom they keep medicating is in fact a sentence they have not yet learned how to read.
I write about the body that remembers what the biography forgets.
I write about the split between the life you can measure and the life you are actually living.
I write because I am at work on a book called Healing the Split: When Your Biology Is Fighting Your Biography, and this newsletter is the open studio where the book is being made in public.
If you want a longer version of who I am and what’s coming, the About page is here.
If you want to start with one piece, my first long essay — Good Labs, Bad Life: What Medicine Misses About the Body That Remembers — is on its way to a major outlet now and will appear here shortly after.
In the meantime, subscribe below if you haven’t, and tell me, if you’d like to, where you found me. I read everything that comes in to hello@healingthesplit.com, even when I cannot reply to it all.
Thank you for being here. I do not take it lightly.
— Dr. Shiv Kumar Goel