A letter to patients, practitioners, and anyone still searching for answers.
Here's something I don't say lightly, and something I wish someone had said to me earlier in my career:
Medicine does not have all the answers. And some of what it thinks it knows may one day be revised.
I've been a physician for over 30 years. I was trained the way most practitioners are trained: textbooks, research papers, board exams, and clinical protocols. The slow and careful accumulation of what science has so far deduced.
And for a long time, I handed that information out as though it were complete. Final. Settled.
It wasn't until my own health began to unravel and conventional medicine ran out of answers for me that I started asking a different kind of question: What if there is more to understand than what's currently in the textbooks?
Medicine has always evolved. So why do we speak in absolutes?
Bloodletting was once the standard of care. Hormone replacement therapy has been reversed and revised more than once. Our understanding of fat, salt, statins, and sun exposure has shifted, some of it significantly, during my career.
Yet in exam rooms across the world, patients are still hearing:
"Your thyroid numbers are normal."
"There's nothing more we can do."
"That symptom isn't related to this condition."
"Science doesn't support that."
And people, exhausted, vulnerable, often having tried everything the system has to offer, nod and accept these statements as verdicts. Because they trust us. And because researching your own complex illness is practically a full-time job most people don't have the capacity for.
That power dynamic deserves our humility.
What if there's more to the story?
What if there is more to blood sugar than we currently understand? More to menopause, to multiple sclerosis, to thyroid function? What if some of what drives chronic illness, viral burden, toxic accumulation, years of nutritional depletion, the physiological weight of unrelenting stress, hasn't fully made its way into the mainstream clinical conversation yet?
Chronic illness is rising. Autoimmune conditions are rising. We cannot keep applying the same frameworks to new and growing problems and expect different results.
I say this not to frighten you, and not to dismiss the very real value of evidence-based medicine. I say it because I've watched too many patients give up on their own intuition because a doctor was certain — and certainty, as it turns out, has a long history of being revised.
My ask of you — patients and practitioners alike
When you hear an absolute, pause. Not to reject it outright, but to stay curious.
Ask: Is this the full picture? Is there something more here to understand? Does this actually match what I'm experiencing in my body?
If something doesn't make sense to you, that doesn't make you difficult or uninformed. It might mean you're standing at the edge of what's currently known, and that is exactly where healing so often begins.
Belief systems in conventional medicine and in alternative medicine will hold us back... every time. The moment we stop asking questions is the moment progress stalls.
You are not just a patient. You are not just a practitioner following a protocol. You are a thinking, feeling, intuitive human being — and that matters enormously in healing.
Pause at the absolutes. Stay curious. You are wiser than your studies.... or your diagnosis suggests.
With care,
Dr. Sherri
