My Daughter Saw 9 Specialists. They All Missed It.

When my daughter was six months old, her platelet count dropped to 2,000. Over the next two years she was diagnosed with a mitochondrial disease (MELAS), lupus, and immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), and was seen by nine different specialists. Not one of them connected those findings to each other. Free course (resilient health): https://medgeeks.co/get-started/metabolic-health/ This is the story of what almost losing her taught me about chronic disease, why our current model of medicine keeps failing complex and chronically ill clients, and why I am back on the podcast after almost a decade away. I am Andrew Reid, founder of Medgeeks. I trained as a Physician Assistant, spent five years in primary care, and have spent over a decade since educating clinicians. None of it prepared me for my own daughter. To help her, I had to go back and learn the biology underneath chronic disease: mitochondrial medicine, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, metabolomics, and clinical nutrition. What I found changed how I think about every client I see. Going forward, this show is about that biology and the clinical reasoning that follows from it. Mitochondrial function, the cell danger response, metabolic health, autoimmune disease, insulin resistance, and the systems-based, root-cause approach to chronic disease that conventional training leaves out. We also get into the other side of that same continuum: building muscle, exercise as medicine, sleep, nutrition, and the levers that move someone toward genuinely optimal health. The goal is simple: better health, with better science. Whether you are a clinician reasoning through complex clients, someone facing chronic illness in your own life or your family's, or you are already healthy and want to understand how to optimize and protect that health for the long run, this is the work I want to do in front of you. If this resonated, the best thing you can do is follow the show wherever you listen and leave a review. It genuinely helps more clinicians and more families find this work. Thank you for being here.