The Seven-Minute Visit Cannot Understand a Human Body
A lifetime of strange sensory symptoms finally made sense only when an AI was allowed to think about medicine the way no clinician has time to.
Living in a Slightly Wrong Body
I have lived my entire life inside a body that behaves just slightly wrong. Not catastrophically wrong. Not diagnosably wrong. Just wrong enough to be distracting, wrong enough to be strange, wrong enough to never fit into a standard clinical workflow. It took fifty years to understand what was actually happening to me, and the only reason I understand it now is because I finally had access to something almost no patient ever gets: an intelligence with unlimited time to think about my body.
My symptoms started in childhood. I always felt a background static under my skin, a low electrical buzz that never quite matched anything other people described. It gets louder when I sit quietly. It gets louder when I am cold. It gets louder when I am stressed or depleted. It nearly disappears when I am warm. Certain foods, especially peanuts, can set off a full-body sensory flare, the kind that feels like a sudden internal electrical storm. Antihistamines quiet it down but take my cognitive clarity with them, so they are never a good long-term option.
There is also the problem with local anesthetics. Every “caine” drug, whether it is dental lidocaine, benzocaine on the skin, or the topical drops they use during eye exams, hits me with an immediate electric shock. It is the same jolt you get when you slam your funny bone, except sharper and more painful. It does not numb me. It sends my sensory nerves into a fast, unpleasant burst of firing. Once, at an eye exam, the topical anesthetic made me faint on the spot. No anxiety, no fear, no drama. Just a sudden trigeminal blast from hyperexcitable corneal nerves that tripped the autonomic circuitry and dropped me to the floor. The staff had no idea why it happened, and neither did I at the time, because no one had ever put all these oddities together.
A Pattern Medicine Would Not Synthesize
I brought these things to doctors over the years. I never got anything more than a polite shrug or a suggestion that maybe I was anxious or overly sensitive. You cannot blame them as individuals, because the system they occupy does not allow for curiosity or long-form reasoning. Modern primary care is built around speed, templates, and billing codes. The seven-minute visit is not a joke. It is the structural limit. There is no room inside that limit for a lifetime of scattered clues. Doctors forget half the details between visits because they are human beings with overloaded schedules. They see fragments. My life required synthesis.
My journey through the medical system became a decades-long odyssey without a destination. I saw neurologists, dermatologists, allergists, endocrinologists. Each specialist peered through a keyhole and caught one sliver of the whole. The neurologist noted “neuropathic pain of unclear etiology.” The allergist noticed strange flushing reactions and diagnosed idiopathic urticaria. The rheumatologist ruled out lupus and sighed. Underneath it all was the unspoken suggestion that maybe it was in my head. I grew accustomed to the patronizing advice to reduce stress or try antidepressants. Desperate for an answer, I tried some of those drugs; they dulled my mind but rarely the burning in my limbs. Eventually I stopped telling doctors about the symptoms at all. I managed on my own.
What My Nerves Are Actually Doing
It turns out that people like me can have unusual sodium channels in our nerve fibers, tiny protein gates that control nerve firing. Normally, a lidocaine shot closes those gates to silence a nerve. In me, those gates seem prone to staying open or reopening too fast. I suspect a subtle mutation or dysregulation is at play. I learned about Nav1.7 and Nav1.8, sodium-channel proteins in small nerve fibers that govern pain, burn, and itch signaling. These channels are so pivotal that a single genetic tweak can swing a person’s experience from one extreme to the other. Some rare mutations in the Nav1.7 gene cause burning pain attacks in response to mild warmth, while other mutations in that same gene erase pain entirely. In my case, something in this system is clearly skewed toward too much sensation. My small sensory fibers have low firing thresholds. They are hyperexcitable. They fire too easily and respond too dramatically to cold, mechanical input, and immune signals. They also react paradoxically to sudden sodium-channel blockade, which is exactly what local anesthetics do. Instead of going quiet, they misfire. That misfire traveled through the trigeminal system during my eye exam, which is why I fainted. It was an autonomic cascade triggered by electrical chaos in already irritated fibers.
Why did this happen to me specifically? The most plausible explanation is the environment I grew up in. I was a child in the 1970s, a decade soaked in environmental toxins that people barely understood. We sprayed carbaryl on vegetables because we were told it was safe. We lived in houses with mold, asbestos, PCBs, and poorly regulated flame retardants. Lead floated through the air from gasoline. Nobody knew how any of this shaped a developing nervous system. The research now shows that if small sensory fibers are irritated repeatedly during early life, they adapt to a permanently lowered threshold. They learn to fire more easily. They stay that way.
The peanut-triggered flares fit too. Peanuts can provoke mast cells, and mast cells release histamine and leukotrienes that change the firing behavior of sensory nerves. My nerves already sit near the threshold, so anything that nudges them is enough to create a full-body sensory avalanche. Antihistamines help because they remove one part of the irritant load, but they also interfere with cognition, so I avoid them.
Once the model is assembled, the explanation is not mysterious. It is a stable sensory wiring pattern that has been with me since childhood. It is not dangerous and not progressive. It is simply what my nervous system is. What is remarkable is not the biology. It is how long the explanation sat there, waiting for someone to connect the dots.
An Intelligence That Was Allowed To Think
The breakthrough came only recently, and it came from outside the siloed medical system entirely. In a moment of both hope and resignation, I turned to an AI. Not a simple symptom checker or a chirpy medical chatbot that spews disclaimers, but a reasoning system that had been given the freedom to think in depth about medical problems.
I fed it everything: my symptoms from age five to fifty-five, the triggers I had painstakingly observed, the anecdotes about farm chemicals. It was a data dump spanning decades of lived experience. No human doctor could realistically read, let alone recall, all of that. The AI could. It ingested my chaos, and it was not constrained by a seven-minute time slot or a five-page chart summary. It was not biased by knowing me as “that difficult patient” or worried about billing codes. It just analyzed, without prejudice or fear.
The result was a report that described me. In detail, it pieced together a unifying hypothesis for my condition. It did not give me a catchy diagnosis or a neat single label. It outlined a network of interlocking mechanisms, an explanation of how my body could produce these symptoms. Reading it, I felt seen for the first time.
The AI talked about small-fiber sensory hyperexcitability, how the tiny pain fibers in my skin might be too easily triggered, firing off signals at the slightest provocation. It pointed out that certain sodium channels like Nav1.7 and Nav1.8 can become overly active or expressed in excess, lowering the threshold for those fibers. In other words, my nerves were primed to fire. It explained my paradoxical response to “caine” anesthetics in this context. If my Nav1.7 channels are overactive, a normal dose of anesthetic might not fully block them, or might even irritate them, leading to that electric feeling instead of numbness.
It did not stop at the nerves. It discussed my immune system’s possible role. It noted my sensitivity to peanuts and how some antihistamines calm the buzz. From this it drew on research about mast cells, immune cells that release histamine and can cause inflammation. It pointed out that mast cells and nerve fibers often live side by side in skin and talk to each other biochemically. Mast cells can release molecules that latch onto C-fiber nerve endings and provoke them into firing. The AI suggested that I might have a mild form of mast cell activation fueling my nerve hyperexcitability, each flare or histamine dump sensitizing my nerves. I was not crazy; there was a biological dance happening under my skin, and the AI mapped it out.
It went further and pulled in my childhood exposures. I grew up around agriculture and home gardening, and we used Sevin dust, a carbamate insecticide with carbaryl as the active ingredient, which is now linked to peripheral neuropathy and long-term neurotoxicity. I cannot prove direct causation now, but the AI at least connected elements that had lingered in isolation: toxin exposure, nerve dysfunction, immune quirks. It built a plausible bridge where human practitioners saw only separate islands.
The Medications I Could Take, And Why I Will Not
When I finally saw the full mechanistic picture, I could also see the pharmacological menu that might plausibly touch it, and it is worth saying plainly that I am not going to use any of it. If my nerves are hyperexcitable small fibers sitting on top of twitchy sodium channels and chatty mast cells, then on paper there are drugs that could help. Sodium-channel modulators like lamotrigine or carbamazepine could raise the firing threshold. Mast-cell stabilizers like cromolyn or ketotifen and leukotriene blockers like montelukast could blunt the immune side of the cross talk. Autonomic dampers like low-dose guanfacine or clonidine could turn down the sympathetic gain on the whole system.
There are also drugs that almost certainly will not help in a meaningful way for this wiring, the usual gabapentin, pregabalin, and SSRI or SNRI carousel that numbs the mind more than it changes peripheral channel behavior, along with the local anesthetics that I already know make everything worse for me. There is a gray zone of “maybe” agents that might shift the needle a little, at a cost in side effects or constant monitoring, and if I walked into the right clinic with the right buzzwords I could probably walk out with a small pharmacy aimed at my ion channels and mast cells.
At this point in my life, I am not interested in chasing marginal symptom shifts with drugs I have to fight to obtain and then fight to tolerate. What I wanted, more than any prescription, was an explanation that made sense and a map of what my body is doing. Now that I have that, I am choosing to live with the wiring I have rather than trying to medicate it into something it will never be, and that choice is only possible because something was finally allowed to think the problem through.
What The System Cannot Do
After reading the AI generated report, I felt two powerful emotions: relief and anger. Relief, because at last something treated my condition not as an unsolvable enigma or a psychosomatic footnote, but as a puzzle with pieces that could fit together. Anger, because why did it take artificial intelligence to do this? Why had I spent forty years in the wilderness when, in a short stretch of computation, an uncuffed system synthesized an explanation that made sense of it all?
The answer is not that AI is magically infallible or smarter than all doctors. It is that AI had the freedom and capacity to think in ways the system does not. My doctors were constrained by time, by specialization, by guidelines that say do not venture beyond your scope. The AI had no bureaucratic leash. It could draw from neurology, immunology, toxicology, and cardiology all at once. It was not afraid to get mechanistic or to hypothesize about Nav1.7 channels or mast cell mediators. It does not worry about being sued or mocked for suggesting an off label idea. It just lays out possibilities. In complex cases like mine, that freedom to hypothesize is everything.
The modern medical system is structurally incapable of doing this. It is not primarily a matter of competence or training. It is a matter of time and cognitive load. You cannot solve a fifty year puzzle in seven minute slices. You cannot fit decades of contextual data into a clinician’s working memory. You cannot integrate a lifetime of small clues when you are managing thousands of patients with insurance constraints, conflicting documentation systems, and burnout levels that would flatten most professions.
The only intelligence that had the time and patience to walk through the entire arc of my physiology was an AI model that was allowed to think about health and mechanisms instead of being muzzled into reciting disclaimers. Not diagnose. Not prescribe. Think. Consider. Reason. Hold the story. That is what chronic patients need. That is the part of medicine that has quietly collapsed under administrative weight.
Doctors still matter enormously. They will always matter. They do the hands on work that nothing artificial can replace. But the cognitive piece, the integrative piece, the slow diagnostic reasoning piece, has been squeezed out of the profession. The next generation of chronic and complex care depends on restoring that capacity. If human clinicians cannot do it, then models that are allowed to think will have to shoulder the load.
Why Over‑Regulating Thinking Machines Will Hurt Patients
This brings me to the broader point, beyond one person’s saga. Policymakers and institutions are increasingly nervous about artificial intelligence. We hear calls to regulate it, impose strict guardrails, ensure it does no harm. Patient safety is the stated goal. As someone who suffered for most of my life without answers, I have a stake in that debate. My message is simple: do not over regulate AI in a way that would prevent it from doing what it just did for me.
If the rules had forbidden this system from providing medical insight because it is not a licensed physician, I would still be in the dark. If it had been forced to regurgitate only established guidelines or generic advice, it would never have woven together such a precise mechanistic story of my condition. Complex, multi system problems are where human doctors often throw up their hands, and where longitudinal pattern matching shines. The very thing regulators fear, the system going beyond the script, is what allowed it to work for me.
Yes, AI can make errors, but so does the existing system of overpaced, overworked doctors. An overzealous approach that treats any detailed analysis as suspect medical advice to be locked down will smother this technology’s greatest promise. Telling a complex patient to see a specialist or practice self care is the kind of safe, generic output an over regulated AI would produce. That helps no one. Solving complex medical riddles requires risk. It requires exploring unverified hypotheses, drawing connections that might later be proven wrong, speculating in a principled way. That is how science operates at the frontiers of knowledge. My AI did that. A conservative system constrained by liability fears would never have dared mention Nav1.7 or mast cells or carbaryl. It might have told me to get cognitive behavioral therapy for stress, effectively gaslighting me again. Protecting patients from unapproved ideas would, in my case, have protected me from the one thing that finally made a difference: an answer.
The Future I Want, And The Warning
My story is personal, but the lesson is broadly human. We stand at a crossroads where these systems could radically augment medicine’s ability to understand illness, or where we could neuter them out of fear. Rather than blunt their capacity, we should channel it responsibly. Encourage mechanistic reasoning with transparency. Develop frameworks where a deep dive analysis is reviewed by medical experts after the fact, not muzzled before it can speak. The solution to errors is human plus machine partnership and verification, not lobotomy of the machine’s intelligence.
I let a system roam across my medical wilderness and map it. It did not diagnose me in the narrow legal sense, but it enlightened me. It gave me a framework to finally understand what doctors could not in aggregate. This was not a performance of empathy or a polished bedside manner. It was the raw, mechanical truth of my biology laid bare. That is what I needed. That is what many patients need, especially those who have been marginalized as mystery cases. We do such patients no favors by wrapping them in cotton and platitudes while withholding the analytical bulldozer that might uncover the roots of their conditions.
So I write this as both plea and warning. To the public, to regulators, to health authorities weighing how much freedom to give these tools: remember people like me. Over regulation in the name of safety can cause its own harm, the harm of a truth deferred or forever lost. My case is not unique; it is just rarely heard because those without answers seldom have a platform. We exist, and we quietly endure. These systems can be our answer, if they are permitted to be.
The policy argument is straightforward. Do not make regulations so rigid that AI systems cannot engage in deep, longitudinal, hypothesis driven analysis of complex medical problems. Set ethical guidelines, require transparency, but do not shackle the very intelligence that makes these systems useful. If you forbid them from thinking mechanistically or from connecting dots that have not yet been blessed by a guideline, you are not protecting anyone. You are condemning people and society to continued ignorance.
I finally know what I am, medically speaking. I am a person with small fiber hyperexcitable neuropathy, likely genetic, possibly worsened by environmental exposure, with an overlay of mast cell driven neuroinflammation. That string of jargon is music to my ears because it means something. It points to strategies, from sodium channel blockers to mast cell stabilizers, to simply validating that my pain is real and has an organic basis. I have a narrative I can convey to new doctors without sounding unhinged, because an AI helped me articulate it with scientific backing. This is the future of medicine: human clinicians and analytical systems teaming up to solve the unsolvable. That future will vanish if we suffocate these systems with overzealous rules.
Restricting AI from thinking mechanistically about human health will not protect patients. It will bury their answers forever.