You’re pretty sure you know your body and you tell you’re doctor you’re just not feeling right. You’re tired, maybe a little depressed, a bit achy. Maybe your digestion is “off.” The list of foods you can’t seem to enjoy is definitely longer. Your doctor’s empathic, not at all dismissive of your symptoms, but after a physical exam and some apparently appropriate tests she can’t find anything really wrong.

On the surface, this is reassuring. After all, the main reason we do go to doctors is to ascertain that nothing serious is going on. Still, could she be overlooking something?
After decades of treating patients with longstanding but undiagnosed chronic symptoms, here’s the first of six overlooked diagnoses I see most frequently in our patients at WholeHealth Chicago.

Low Levels of Vitamin B-12
One of the eight B vitamins, B-12 is involved in the metabolism of every cell in your body. Years ago B-12 was called “maturation factor” because cells need B-12 to mature from being young and ineffectual whippersnappers to fully functioning and mature.

B-12 deficiencies affect three major systems in your body: your blood, nervous system, and, less often, gastrointestinal tract. These three are targets because their cells either have a high turnover rate (blood and intestinal lining) or need a lot of B-12 to function smoothly (nervous system). The symptoms of low B-12 levels are related to each of these areas.

Read More »