Normal Lab Results but Still Sick? Ask a Better Question

Normal lab results, but still sick

We had a young client who could barely stay awake in the chair. He wasn’t bored- he wanted to be there. His body simply had nothing to give. He ran out of energy long before the school day was over, his grades were sliding, and after more than twenty sessions of neurofeedback, we’d moved the needle only a little. Something wasn’t adding up.

A parent brought in his bloodwork. Everything sat inside the normal range. Normal lab results, but still sick. His iron was a touch low, so the doctor started an iron supplement, a fair read of the numbers on the page. But the question those numbers answered was “is anything out of range?” And by that measure, there was almost nothing to find.

So we asked the labs a different question, not “is he normal?” but “what would this body look like if it were actually thriving?” Run through the functional system we use, the same numbers told another story: signs of dehydration, and low thiamine, one of the B vitamins the brain depends on to make energy.

Nobody had done anything wrong. The first question just had a narrow answer, and this boy was living in the gap between “within range” and “well.” Once the nutrition was addressed, the neurofeedback finally had a brain with enough fuel to learn from, and it began to land. His energy came back. He finished his forty sessions. He started passing his tests.

I’ve thought about that boy a lot, because his story isn’t really about thiamine. It’s about a question, the same one that decides whether you get real answers from your own body, from a research headline, or from a person in a white coat:

Are we asking the right question?

The question under the question

I’ve had the same reflex since my early twenties. Someone tells me how it is, and a quiet voice asks: how do we know that’s true?

It started with my own body. I grew up in Illinois and moved out to New Mexico, then Colorado, and somewhere in that move to high, dry air, I started getting sinus infections. Not once. Over and over. The answer each time was another round of antibiotics. They’d clear it, and it would come back.

Eventually I asked my doctor the question that actually mattered to me: why does this keep happening? And he said something like, “this is common with some people.” He wasn’t being careless. That’s a perfectly ordinary answer. But I remember hearing it and thinking, that’s not an answer. That’s a shrug with a prescription attached.

It took me years to name what was going on. I’d been asking “what do I take for this?” when the real question was “why is my body doing this in the first place?” And the answer, once I went looking, wasn’t a disease. It was a place. My body hadn’t adjusted to high, dry air. The infections weren’t the problem; they were the smoke, and nobody had asked what was burning. What finally broke the cycle wasn’t another prescription. It was rinsing my sinuses every day to meet the dryness head-on, and supporting my immune system so my body could hold its own. Simple, once I was finally asking the right question.

That’s the whole thing. A diagnosis, a prescription, a “this is common”: each can be a way of ending a conversation that should have kept going. A label names something. It rarely explains it, and it almost never tells you what to do about the particular life you’re living inside.

So now, when someone tells me they need x, y, or z, I don’t argue. I get curious. How do we know that’s true?

The same skill, on a person

Watch what happens when you aim that question (how do we know that’s true?) at something as ordinary as “I can’t focus.”

“Trouble paying attention” sounds like one thing. It isn’t. Sit with two kids who both earned the label and you’ll find opposite engines under the hood. One drifts: the teacher’s voice goes soft and blurs into the grown-up from a Peanuts cartoon, wah wah wah, and he’s simply elsewhere, gone behind his own eyes. The other doesn’t drift, he ricochets: the teacher says “bologna,” and his mind has left the building, three towns over, deciding what’s for lunch. Same words on the report card. Two completely different brains.

And sometimes the root isn’t attention at all. Remember the boy from the start of this article, nodding off in the chair, grades slipping, the very picture of an “attention problem.” His attention wasn’t broken. His body was running on empty. Fatigue was just wearing an attention costume.

So the useful work never starts with confirming the label. It starts with the questions the label skips right over. How do you sleep, and do you wake up rested? What’s your energy like at two in the afternoon? What, and when, do you eat? And what does the not-focusing actually feel like from the inside: a fog you sink into, or a current that keeps dragging you downstream? Every one of those answers points somewhere different.

Because “difficulty paying attention” is a description, not an explanation. It tells you exactly what the trouble looks like from the outside, and nothing about what’s driving it. The real question was never “does he have an attention problem?” It’s “what is this attention problem actually made of?”

The same skill, on a study

Now aim the very same question at a headline: “Studies show neurofeedback doesn’t work for ADHD.” How do we know that’s true?

You look at the study behind it, a 2024 review in JAMA Psychiatry that gathered 38 trials and nearly 2,500 people and pooled them into one verdict. And the moment you ask what got poured into that pool, the verdict starts to wobble.

Those 38 trials weren’t testing the same thing. Some measured electrical brainwaves; others measured blood flow, which are about as alike as a thermometer and a scale. They trained different targets, in different places, for different numbers of sessions. They ran on everyone from five-year-olds to forty-year-olds, as though a kindergartner’s brain and a grown adult’s belong in the same experiment. All told, there are well over three hundred ways these studies differed from one another. Take just twenty of them as simple yes-or-no switches and you already have more than a million combinations. No pool of 2,500 people can average a million combinations into one honest number.

Picture a drug trial that threw stimulants, sedatives, and antidepressants into a single bucket labeled “brain medication,” ran the math, and announced that brain medication doesn’t work. Every drug in the bucket does something. They just do different things, to different people, and averaged together, they cancel to nothing or worse.

The tell is sitting in the study’s own data: when the researchers narrowed to trials using consistent, established protocols, a real effect appeared where the big pool had shown almost none. Protocol quality alone moved the answer. That’s not a verdict on neurofeedback. It’s a verdict on what happens when you average a thousand different situations wearing one name.

None of this means the study is bad. It’s careful, transparent work. It means the headline answered something far smaller than it got quoted for: does a scattershot mix of protocols, averaged across wildly different people, beat its controls? Not: could the right approach help the person actually reading this.

So the next time you meet “studies show it doesn’t work,” don’t reach for belief, and don’t reach for dismissal. Reach for the question. Which studies, of what, in whom, and what got quietly averaged away?

One skill, everywhere

Notice that nothing really changed between those three stories. A boy’s “normal” labs, my rounds of antibiotics, a headline about a brain study: different rooms, same move. Each time, someone had accepted a label and stopped, and each time the useful answer was hiding at least one question deeper.

That’s the quiet secret of this whole thing: it isn’t three skills. It’s one. Reading your own body, reading a research headline, reading the confident person across the desk: the move is identical. Don’t argue with the label. Don’t swallow it, either. Ask what’s underneath it. How do we know that’s true?

This isn’t distrust, and it isn’t a war on doctors or science. Some of the sharpest people I know are in the medical field, and good research is one of the more honest things humans do. Curiosity doesn’t make you anyone’s opponent; it makes you a better partner. A person who walks in asking real questions is far easier to actually help than one who wants to be handed a verdict and sent home.

But consider what’s at stake if you don’t. Every time you accept a label without asking what’s beneath it, you hand a piece of your health to whoever sounded most certain in the moment. Do that enough and you’re not steering anymore. You’re a passenger in your own body. The whole point is to keep the wheel. A diagnosis is a piece of information. It was never meant to be the last word, and it was never meant to be your destiny.

What to do with this today

You don’t need a medical degree to ask better questions. That’s the power in all of this: the most useful tool you own is your own curiosity, and you can start using it this afternoon.

The next time you’re handed an answer (a diagnosis, a lab result, a headline, a confident “you need X”), run it through these before you accept it:

Does this explain what’s happening, or only name it?
Is “normal” the same as “well,” for me specifically?
What’s underneath it: the cause, or just the symptom?
If it’s a study or a statistic: which people, tested how, and is that anything like my situation?
And beneath all of them: how do we know that’s true?

None of these make you difficult. They make you a participant. Bring them to your next appointment and watch how the conversation changes: a good professional will meet you there, and the ones who bristle at an honest question have told you something worth knowing.

So, one thing to do today: pick a single label you’ve been carrying (something you were told about your body, your brain, your kid, your labs) and ask it the first question. Does this explain what’s happening, or does it only name it? See where the answer takes you.

That’s not rebellion. It’s ownership. Your health was always yours to steer.

If you want to see this same thinking applied to your own brain, how a qEEG and neurofeedback actually work, and how to spot a careful practitioner, start with our guide, Neurofeedback and qEEG, Explained: What a Brain Map Actually Shows You.

This article is for education, not medical advice. Its aim is to help you ask sharper questions and partner more fully with the professionals who know your history, never to replace them. Any decision about your health belongs to you and your provider.

Are We Asking the Right Question? How to Read Your Own Health Without Getting Fooled