I received a copy of this book from the author to facilitate my review.  As always, all opinions expressed here are entirely my own.

How many of you have wrestled with a niggling health issue that you just couldn’t seem to pinpoint?  The doctor probably had you in and out of his office within ten minutes, asking some cursory questions, and either sent you on your way with no answers at all or (more likely) gave you a prescription of some kind for the symptoms.  But you knew that what you really needed was to find out why you were experiencing symptoms and eliminate the problem at its root.

I’m guessing most of you have been there at some point.  It’s pretty typical of our modern medical system.

That’s not how it worked “in the old days.” It used to be that doctors would take an extensive history, and ultimately make a diagnosis based primarily on your history together with your symptoms (and their personal observations).  But as lab tests have become more readily available — and broader in scope — and because these are concrete, measurable numbers, over the years we’ve come to rely on the tests and not our own observations.  When, really, the tests should be tools used to help gather a little more information when necessary, not the main thing.

If You Want it Done Right, You’ve Got to Do It Yourself

“If you want something done right, you’ve got to do it yourself.”  So the saying goes.  Chances are, if you want to really dig into the roots of a health problem, and ask all the right questions, you’re going to have to ask them yourself.

(Don’t freak out on me.  No one is saying you have to cut your doctor out of the picture!  You can definitely take the information you uncover to your doctor.  Although depending on what you’re dealing with and what you uncover, you may or may not need to.  One of Mr. Jenner’s examples is a gentleman who needed to add better filters near his woodstove.  No need to go to the doctor for that!)

The difficulty for most people is they don’t know what to ask.  That’s where Diagnose Yourself comes in.  It provides the questions you need to ask, to systematically examine the problem and its origins and identify the trigger.

The Process

Mr. Jenner begins by taking the reader back to the basics, and asking him to clearly define the troubling condition.  (This doesn’t mean you need to have a name for it.  It just means you need to be able to be specific about it.)

Then he walks you through identifying the relevant details, like who else is (or isn’t) experiencing the same problem, what is particularly descriptive of the symptoms suffered, and what has or hasn’t changed.

For every question asked, there are examples — not only of the kinds of things you might consider, but also of actual case studies.

This isn’t guaranteed to produce a perfect answer.  Occasionally different people’s bodies respond to the same stimulus in different ways, and that could confuse matters.  Or you might lack some specialized knowledge necessary to make the critical connections between the pieces of data you uncover.  (This is where completing the process and then taking the resultant information to your doctor can be beneficial.)

But this systematic approach is virtually guaranteed to get you closer to an answer than the hit-or-miss approach typically taken.  It will often be sufficient in itself to uncover the answer.  And it has the definite advantage of accounting for “non-medical” causes (like soot from an insufficiently filtered woodstove) that most doctors won’t even think about.

The end of the book even talks about how to decide what to look for in a primary care physician and how to take responsibility for a healthy lifestyle that makes good health a lot more likely in the first place!  (One caveat: the author recommends Quackwatch as a resource for helping weed out the, well, quacks.  I do not care for Quackwatch, myself.  It has been my experience that any practitioner who is unconventional and on the site owner’s radar will automatically be counted as a “quack.” I just don’t see the site as balanced.)

I definitely would recommend this book as a useful tool to add to any home health library.  And if you’re a practitioner of some kind you may also want to pick up a copy, as it provides a “done-for-you” methodology for asking questions of your patients/clients.

For some reason, Amazon hasn’t gotten around to linking the Kindle and paperback versions to each other on their website, so here are the links:
Buy the paperback.
Buy for Kindle.