Two months ago, I started feeling severe muscle pain in my arms, legs, hips, neck, and shoulders.
I’m not talking about an ache or occasional stab. I’m talking about acute, chronic pain, 24/7.
And it kept getting worse. It was hard to walk, impossible to sleep, and my arm was in too much pain to even pick up a full cup of coffee.
Yet I didn’t feel sick. I hadn’t suffered a recent injury.
But I was in so much agonizing pain that I couldn’t even pick something off the floor without getting down on one knee.
I’ve been blessed with good health my entire life – something we all tend to take for granted – and live a pretty healthy lifestyle.
This was something new. And entirely miserable.
I tried to see my general practitioner in July before I left for The Oxford Club’s tour of Switzerland.
But she was out so I saw a new doctor in her office instead.
Looking over past notes, he saw that I had an arthritic spine and a minor rotator cuff tear.
When I told him about my severe pain, he said that what I was feeling was “totally normal for someone your age and in your condition.”
“Normal?” I said, in disbelief. “You should spend 24 hours in my body.”
He asked me what I was taking for the pain.
“Nothing,” I told him truthfully. “I don’t want anything to prevent me from determining whether I’m getting better or worse.”
He told me I should take 4,000 mg of Tylenol a day.
I knew that wouldn’t fix the problem, but I thought it might dull the pain.
It did, a little. But I soon learned that it’s not safe to take that much long term… or even short-term if you’re a social drinker. He didn’t mention either.
He recommended a book called “Tell Me Where It Hurts: The Science of Pain and How to Heal” by Rachel Zoffness.
I read it on the flight to Switzerland. And while the book does a decent job of explaining how pain works, the overriding (and, frankly, insulting) message is that your problem is in your head.
The brain processes the pain you feel and – just as you can temporarily relieve boredom or worry by distracting yourself – the key, in the author’s view, is to get your mind off your pain.
That’s easier said than done when virtually every movement causes you to cringe or gasp.
I am not a hypochondriac or complainer about my health. If anything, I’m the opposite.
I’ve spent my adult life trying to eat healthy, exercise regularly, and stay as far away from doctors as possible.
(A favorite quote: An apple a day keeps the doctor away, especially if you throw it really hard.)
But this chronic pain was entirely new – and it kept getting worse.
I already had a pain specialist for my spine and rotator cuff, two long-time issues. He attributed what I was feeling to these – even though I told him it felt like something else entirely.
Since my pain kept getting worse – and my specialist was on vacation – I went back to my general practitioner (not her substitute).
I wanted to make sure that I didn’t undersell my symptoms. I was in agony. I said that if I were a pet, the humane thing to do would be to put me down. It was that bad.
She shook her head and ordered several blood tests. But when they came back, she didn’t see anything terribly abnormal and still didn’t know what was wrong with me.
She asked me to hobble back the next week for more tests.
At the end of my rope, I turned to the AI platform Claude, where I have a $100-a-month subscription.
I gave it all my symptoms, told it all about my preconditions, and shared all the things I had already told my doctors.
The answer came back immediately: this pattern is characteristic of polymyalgia rheumatica (PMR).
I had never heard of it.
PMR is an inflammatory condition, mostly in people over 50, that attacks the shoulders, neck and hips, causing intense discomfort.
Nobody is sure what causes it.
The good news? It responds well to low-dose prednisone, sometimes in as little as 24 hours.
I know. I know…
An AI platform is not a doctor. It has no license, no practice, and no ability to examine me.
Moreover, I’m well aware that AI platforms can make mistakes, and that they deliver a wrong answer in the same confident, reassuring tone they use for a right one.
But I was out of options.
Claude told me I needed my specialist to recommend specific labs: a comprehensive metabolic panel including ESR, CRP, CK, TSH, and CBC.
My specialist approved and I was giving blood at Quest within an hour. Yet when the results came back – with elevated CRP – he said he still couldn’t make a diagnosis. It wasn’t his field.
He wanted to refer me to a rheumatologist, who probably couldn’t see me for at least six months.
In desperation, I said, “Well, can’t you just put me on the prednisone and see what happens?”
He agreed. When I got to the pharmacy an hour later, I opened the bottle and downed a full day’s dose immediately.
Within a few hours, my pain began to abate. I slept through the night with no pain for the first time in two months.
And the next morning – after another half dose – I felt like I had been touched by the hand of Jesus himself.
I had no pain in my arms, legs, hips, back, or shoulders. Zero pain anywhere.
It was nothing short of miraculous. Thank you, Claude!
It may seem wrong to give the credit to an AI platform. But three doctors looked at this. And three doctors drew a blank.
Somewhere between despair and desperation, I typed my symptoms into Claude.
Bear in mind, a search engine would have handed me a list of everything from a pinched nerve to a Parkinson’s diagnosis, arranged by advertising spend.
Instead, I had an actual conversation, where I described what hurt, when it hurt, and how bad it hurt.
To his credit, my specialist did not get defensive or deliver a lecture on the perils of consulting a computer.
He also did not make me wait half a year to hear the same diagnosis from a rheumatologist. He wrote the prescription (even if it was at my suggestion).
Polymyalgia rheumatica is not obscure. Any competent rheumatologist would have landed on it in about 90 seconds, and would then have done the blood work and the physical exam that I, sitting with a chatbot, could not do.
The bottleneck in American medicine is not intelligence. It’s access.
A 15-minute appointment with a generalist – or even the wrong specialist – is an awfully brief period to describe a serious problem.
And what if you had to wait six months or longer for that appointment?
What the chatbot gave me was 24/7 availability, the patience to hear all the boring details, and a hypothesis specific enough to take into the exam room.
Claude didn’t literally save my life. But if you truly knew how I felt before and after, the result was nothing short of life-changing.
I’m keeping the rheumatology appointment, by the way. Feeling wonderful is not the same as being finished, and I want a specialist managing the taper.
(Prednisone for this ailment typically runs many months, sometimes a couple of years, and patients need to come off it slowly.)
There is a financial takeaway here. (And I’m not just talking about the Claude subscription, which ranks among the best money I’ve ever spent, for more reasons than I can even touch on here.)
In my book “The Secret of Shelter Island,” I talk about some of the most important things that money can buy:
It determines the neighborhood you live in and the kind of school your kids go to. It’s the difference between using a good doctor and an amazing doctor. If you need a lawyer, it’s the difference between an ambulance chaser and getting the best legal representation that money can buy.
After you reach a certain age, you should not refer to your doctor as someone who is “very professional” or “really nice.”
You should describe your doctor as “amazing.” Full stop.
I can’t do that. But my new mission is to find him or her.
In the meantime, at least I have Claude.