I spent fourteen years as a registered nurse, most of them in internal medicine and cardiology, and then six years in hospital case management, which is the job where you sit at the center of a patient’s entire healthcare experience and try to keep the pieces from flying apart. I left nursing in 2003. Not because I stopped caring about what happened to patients. Because I had spent fourteen years watching them leave hospitals without understanding what had just happened to them, and I thought I might be able to do something about that in a different way.
I went back to school for health communication. My degree took two and a half years of evenings and weekends. I enrolled because I was reading a patient education brochure in the break room one afternoon and thought: whoever wrote this has never spoken to a patient in their life. That is still, twenty-three years later, the cleanest description of why I do this work.
I have been writing a health column called “What Nobody Tells You” since 2018. The name is not a hook. It is a mission statement. After twenty-three years of nursing and then two decades of health journalism, I have a fairly precise list of what the medical system reliably fails to tell you, and the column works through that list with as much accuracy and as little alarm as I can manage. The column has run in a small national health magazine with a serious readership and has twice won awards from a major national organization of health journalists.
Some things I have strong opinions about and will tell you directly: the supplement industry is forty-five billion dollars of mostly unregulated product, and your liver does not need help from a capsule that costs forty dollars. The average primary care appointment is seventeen minutes, which means you need to show up with a list in priority order because the human brain, including your doctor’s, loses track after three items. Walking thirty minutes five days a week does more measurable good for the bodies and minds of people over sixty than almost anything else I can name. These are not soft opinions. They are the findings of a body of research I will cite specifically.
My mother died in 2019 from a stroke I had seen coming three months earlier and could not get her physician to take seriously. I have written about this twice in seven years. Both times, it was the column with the most reader mail that year. I do not use it as a motif. I mention it here because it is accurate and because it explains the specific quality of patience I try to bring to the question of what the medical system does and does not do well.
I run three miles every morning. I eat real food, including a glass of wine most evenings, and I do not feel guilty about it. I take vitamin D in winter because I live in Wisconsin and my bloodwork shows my levels are low. I do not take a multivitamin. I have a primary care physician I have seen for six years, and I consider this my single most important health decision. I mention all of this not as a program but as data. What I actually do is part of what I write about.
I live in Madison, Wisconsin. I write at a desk facing a window with two old maples on the street below. I edit on paper with a red pen.
I am not going to tell you to love your body. What I will tell you is that your body is doing something remarkable right now. It has been adapting and compensating for sixty or seventy years, and it is still at it. Understanding what it is compensating for, and helping it do that more effectively, is what this column is about.