How to Listen to That “I Don’t Feel Good”

As we care for patients, we hear all kinds of stories, and it’s a rare time when somebody comes up with a symptom we’ve never heard of before.  So often, on top of everything else, patients say, “I just don’t feel good.” It’s not pain, it’s not dizziness, it’s not upset stomach, it’s not anything that they can really put into words.

I want to help you understand your body so you can figure out what that “I don’t feel good” feeling means.  When you just don’t feel good, you just feel off and can’t explain it. So, we have to then dig and ask questions. And as we always are trying to do, we are helping patients understand their body’s language.

First Step

First, we have to understand why you feel off and then help you understand it, so that we can work together to get rid of that feeling. Two experts, you on your own body and us on your medical health, come together to help you get better. We have to understand and that can be a challenge when you just feel off. So we look at the other clues.

If there are other things, like, “I have a pain here and I feel off,” or, “Oh, I have nausea and queasiness after I eat these foods and I feel off,” we can often use those as the primary clue, but sometimes someone just comes and says, “I feel off,” full stop. Or the other situation can be that they come in and say, “Oh, I know there’s just something not right with my child. They’re not complaining about specific things, but there’s something different about my child’s behavior, their health, how they’re responding, that just doesn’t feel right.”

Intuition or Gut Feeling

So we have an intuition, a gut feeling. Different fancy words and not so fancy words describe the idea, but the feeling itself is not hard to describe. What does it mean? We want to help you understand your health. We’re going to look for those other clues like I mentioned a moment ago, but we’re also going to try to help you learn the language of your body to know if it’s really in trouble.

Because, just like everything else, sometimes those feelings and sensations are danger signals, and sometimes they’re just, “Say, hey, you just kind of hit a bump in the road and everything’s fine,” or “The wind blew a little way to the side on the road and your car leaned a little way and then it was better.”

Taking You Seriously

We’re going to help you figure that, but we’re going to take it seriously because a lot of our patients will say, “Yeah, I told that to my conventional doctor and they just blew me off and told me to ‘not worry about it’ and ‘You’re fine.’”

We’re not going to do that. We’re going to go through things step-by-step, take a thorough history and physical, sometimes do tests, depending on what the other clues are, and try to get you an answer. Sometimes, yes, at the end of the day we have say, “Okay, well, we’ve checked through these things. We can at least say it’s not these things,” but that much progress at least is solid.

So we’re going to be able to help you have some sense that it’s not cancer, it’s not a heart attack, and give you some sense of rest over that, some sense of peace. But we’ll also say, “Hey, here are some warning signs,” “Here’s some other things to look for. I know we haven’t had an answer for you, but since you still feel off, here’s some things to look out for. If you have any changing symptoms, we’re willing to go back and re-examine the situation, re-examine you, go through the history again, readdress that to keep our eyes and ears open for when things do come up that explains it.”

Sometimes the Answer is Delayed

Because we’ll have a lot of patients who’ll come back to us a month, three months, six months later, with a new symptom, a new finding, whatever, that tells us what caused this off feeling all those weeks and months prior. Often we’ll even use natural band-aids in the meantime, things that help in the short run to lessen symptoms.

But ultimately, we want to know what’s causing that symptom. So we’re going to keep our eyes and ears open and help you understand how to listen to your body so that way you can convey that to us and then we can help you get better and have that healthier, more abundant life that we’re all hoping you get.  So hopefully that kind of helps you understand how we approach things, and gives you one more way that you can listen to your body effectively.

Check out our whole Listening to Your Body series.

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Sanctuary Functional Medicine, under the direction of Dr Eric Potter, IFMCP MD, provides functional medicine services to Nashville, Middle Tennessee and beyond. We frequently treat patients from Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and more... offering the hope of healthier more abundant lives to those with chronic illness.