I solved my mystery fatigue with AI

Beside ferritin, hemoglobin shouldn't be overlooked as the determinant of iron status. Hemoglobin is a part of the CBC (Complete Blood Count) test.

Iron supplements are notorious for irritating the stomach, worsening gastritis and acid reflux. Even iron bisglycinate, while fully effective, is a significant stomach irritant. Ferric pyrophosphate might be safer, and I'm trying it now, but I have to take it twice a day because once wasn't sufficient.

With regard to addressing anemia, active B12 (hydroxo/methyl/adenosyl), methylfolate e.g. Quatrefolic, copper, and vitamin A also matter.

One can also simultaneously be low or suboptimal in many other vitamins and minerals unrelated to anemia, e.g. vitamin D. Fixing only one of them is no guarantee of a sustained solution.

With regard to blood tests, it can take many iterations of doing them to find anything useful. Doctors are ridiculous to work with in this regard, so I bypass them and get the tests myself. Doctors work for the insurance firm, not for you.

Have you tried supplementing iron every other day instead?

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12372323/

There is a lot of authoritative sounding text here but no real explanation of how this huge process solved the mystery fatigue. In fact she says in the middle that the specialist she saw was more valuable. Toward the end she mentions experiments that were run, but the heavy hitters appear to be from specialists adjusting the medication related to her tumor treatment and a real person reviewing her food diary and noticing she was in a caloric deficit.

For all of the writing about collecting data and using AI, she never explains what the AI did for her. Maybe it suggested trying iron supplements because her ferritin was slightly low on a blood test? I hope it explained that these blood tests can have transient highs and lows and that excess iron from supplements can have major negative health effects if not monitored.

For all of the lead up about using AI, there was never really a delivery where the AI was used to solve the mystery fatigue.

I’m glad this person is feeling better, but this post reminds me of those LinkedIn posts where someone is trying really hard to show their AI skills but used an example where the AI didn’t contribute to or accelerate the outcome.

My gut as a physician says AI will revolutionize primary care the most and the premise of AI having more specialized knowledge than a PCP holds water - I think the future of primary care is AI equipped midlevel providers - so I was very excited by the intro only to be let down. A lot of buzz about nothing sadly.

The only takeaway here is logging helps detect patterns, we already knew that.

But where does that happen in the article?

Even for the part where she discovers she was in a caloric deficit and that carbs helped, the AI didn't seem to have a role:

> Figuring out what to track is an iterative process. At first, I logged only daily calories. But when I noticed that a small amount of carbs sometimes helped me recover faster mid-episode, I tracked carbs on the same spreadsheet.

The carb realization happened before tracking carbs. And why did it take a specialist to notice she was in a 300 calorie deficit? That seems like something that any AI process would trivially notice.

I don't know. This article is puzzling. I think using AI to analyze health records is interesting, but this article didn't really have anything supporting that other than to mention that she put everything into Claude on the side.