Harvard Doctor: Why You're Still Sick Even When Your Blood Tests Are Normal | Dr. Lucy McBride | #173

**Lucy McBride** (0:00)
There's data to show that doctors interrupt patients within 11 seconds.

**Vonda Wright** (0:04)
Oh, 11 now, not 17 anymore. We're half as patient as we once were.

**Lucy McBride** (0:08)
You got six more seconds to get it out. If you don't define health for you, the medical system will define it for you.

**Vonda Wright** (0:14)
Dr. Lucy McBride, she is a Harvard-trained physician, master's degree in pharmacology.

**Lucy McBride** (0:19)
You have a huge repository of information in your own body waiting for you to tap into and apply to the way you approach your own health. This is not about becoming your own doctor. It's about becoming an empowered patient, the CEO of your own health. Some people I would call the doctor-pleaser. They want to win their appointment or they tell sort of half truths because they don't want to worry me because worrying me means they have to work.

**Vonda Wright** (0:43)
Women are inculturated to tolerate suffering. They do not report things that they're just thought, I'm just getting old.

**Lucy McBride** (0:51)
Menopause is such a perfect example of that. I think we deprived women that agency over their sexual health or mental health or hormonal health because we are used to suffering. We are like, oh yeah, that hot flash, that dry vagina, that's just me. Try to give yourself a little grace as you navigate this medical system that is not designed for you.

**Vonda Wright** (1:13)
I just want to take the time to thank you all for being here with us at the Dr. Vonda podcast. You are smart, you are curious, you are generous, and you have turned this sleepy podcast into consistently ranking in the top five, six, seven of all medicine podcasts across the world. And we are currently in the top 100 of all health and wellness podcasts across the world. And I'm thankful. I want you to keep sharing with everybody you love, with everybody who needs to hear our guests. And I want you to subscribe every single month, more than 135,000 people listen to this podcast. And we have educated millions of people over time.
I want you to subscribe so you never miss an episode. I want you to follow this podcast on all the platforms. And if you want to see the videos, you need to subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thanks for being here on the Dr. Vonda podcast. The best is yet to come. I know you well enough to know that sometimes, even with your best exploration of medicine, that you are sometimes confused.
And it's not because you aren't trying and it's not because you're not smart. It's because medicine can be confusing. I mean, the very language of medicine is Latin, right? So today I am thrilled to have Dr. Lucy McBride with us. She is a Harvard-trained physician. She's an internist with special education, a master's degree in pharmacology, and impressively a Fulbright scholar who practices right now in Washington, DC, where, as you guys know, I'm about to send off my youngest daughter. So I'm going to plop down in your office, Dr. McBride, just to say hi to you.

**Lucy McBride** (3:06)
Home-cooked meal at my house.

**Vonda Wright** (3:08)
I love it. I love it. So you have a very exciting upcoming event. Not that your career hasn't already been exciting, but you're about to publish a book called Beyond the Prescription.
And I really want to start with this statement I just made, which is actually your statement. In the seeking of information, it's meant to help us gain confidence, but often what it does is leave us more confused. Can you walk us through your experience as a clinician, as a person in society? Why is it so hard?

**Lucy McBride** (3:46)
First of all, Vonda, thank you for having me on this podcast. It's such a delight. Just to be part of your movement, helping empower women with fact-based information and nuances is awesome. So to answer your question, I'm a patient too. When I was in my 20s, I got sick.
And I was treated through no fault of the physicians that I was seeing as a bag of organs, a set of symptoms, you know, not as a whole person. And I got every test in the world. I got brain MRIs, I got GI testing, and no one ever asked me, are you okay? How are you? What's going on in your life? The title of my sub stack that's now reaching 40,000 people is called Are You Okay? For that reason, it's a question I, I mean, no one is really okay, let's be honest. But the point of the question is to query the person's interiority, their actual life. So I realize as a patient and then as a doctor in training, how well the medical establishment treats illness and how poorly we treat the patients who have them.