3 ms·
Ask HN: Anyone else had clean test results while their body was clearly broken?
Web director in Tokyo. My job is dashboards, attribution, A/B tests.
Five years of gut issues. Four doctors — psychiatrist, neurologist, two internists. Full workup including MRI. All four: "nothing abnormal."
The part I find interesting: I would not accept "nothing abnormal" from a work dashboard. If a metric goes flat I audit the measurement first. But a clean blood test closed the case on my own body for five years.
What finally broke the pattern: a CGM showing 240 mg/dL post-lunch, zero symptoms. Data and body completely disagreed. That gap was the first useful signal in years.
Curious if this "diagnostically invisible" phase resonates with anyone — where everything tests fine but something is clearly off.
- BrokenDigger 4mo ago[flagged]
- PaulHoule 4mo agoYes.
- jfengel 4mo agoSure. Diagnostics are unit tests. They can only tell you what's wrong if you think to look there. Just because you have a green check doesn't mean that your system works. This is a system containing the equivalent of quintillions of lines of code, none of which you wrote. The code writers never really fix anything, they only patch. You can only test in production. Note that even your one piece of data is potentially misleading. It could be a useful pointer, or it could be a complete red herring. The weird part of your story is that you didn't describe the way internists would usually go about debugging a problem like this. They don't just run tests. They also use an elimination diet. Gut health is often food related, so they remove foods from your diet and see if anything gets better. It's a crummy kind of test, but that's what you get for testing in prod. You also say "including MRI". Which hints that they didn't do a colonoscopy, because that's way more invasive than an MRI and would absolutely stick your in your mind. I don't know why your doctors didn't do those tests (or if they did and you just didn't mention it). If they didn't, then it implies to me that there's something else going on, and I can't even begin to guess. The point is that yes, we're all familiar with the difficulties of testing a live system with crappy code.
- BrokenDigger 4mo ago[flagged]
- eth0up 3mo agoIf you are somewhat humble (that is critical) and willing to at least consider anecdote, speculation and desperate corridors, perhaps arrange a way for contact that does not open any vector here. I wouldn't dare tell you that I have anything of certain value to your case, but I know my own track record, and concern for others, so here I be. Otherwise, I advise brutal meditation, internal visualization, relentless focus that does its best to home in on the core etymology. Sometimes we are slightly more clever than we ever realize or employ, and the neglected factors of ourselves are up to more than we see. Squeeze yourself for the answer, and if you get only clues, it's a clue more than complete confusion. The fight for survival can get intense. Be well, and I wish you good healing. ~ Aria Heap
- BrokenDigger 3mo ago[flagged]