My Daughter Saw 9 Specialists. They All Missed It.

Medgeeks with Andrew Reid

Medgeeks

Medicine, Health & Fitness, Education

4.8 • 996 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2026

⏱️ 36 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When my daughter was six months old, her platelet count dropped to 2,000. Over the next two years she was diagnosed with a mitochondrial disease (MELAS), lupus, and immune thrombocytopenia (ITP), and was seen by nine different specialists. Not one of them connected those findings to each other.

This is the story of what almost losing her taught me about chronic disease, why our current model of medicine keeps failing complex and chronically ill clients, and why I am back on the podcast after almost a decade away.

I am Andrew Reid, founder of Medgeeks. I trained as a Physician Assistant, spent five years in primary care, and have spent over a decade since educating clinicians. None of it prepared me for my own daughter. To help her, I had to go back and learn the biology underneath chronic disease: mitochondrial medicine, biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, metabolomics, and clinical nutrition. What I found changed how I think about every client I see.

Going forward, this show is about that biology and the clinical reasoning that follows from it. Mitochondrial function, the cell danger response, metabolic health, autoimmune disease, insulin resistance, and the systems-based, root-cause approach to chronic disease that conventional training leaves out. We also get into the other side of that same continuum: building muscle, exercise as medicine, sleep, nutrition, and the levers that move someone toward genuinely optimal health.

The goal is simple: better health, with better science.

Whether you are a clinician reasoning through complex clients, someone facing chronic illness in your own life or your family's, or you are already healthy and want to understand how to optimize and protect that health for the long run, this is the work I want to do in front of you.

Learn more here: medgeeks.co

If this resonated, the best thing you can do is follow the show wherever you listen and leave a review. It genuinely helps more clinicians and more families find this work. Thank you for being here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	So what I'm about to share with you right now is everything that I've learned over the last five years of my life.
0:06.1	I've spent over $100,000 out of my pocket and it changed how I think about every client that I'm working with now.
0:13.9	Now, the reasons for this change is because the old way of thinking almost cost me in my daughter's life.
0:20.5	This change is also the
0:21.8	reason why I decided to come back to YouTube, why I decided to do the podcast after being away
0:26.4	for almost a decade. My name is Andrew Reed. I founded Medgeeks in 2013. And in this video,
0:32.4	what I want to do is I want to share what happened and what is about to change with this channel.
0:37.3	Now, to tell it right, I want to take you back to when it about to change with this channel now to tell
0:37.8	it right I want to take you back to when it all started so it's 2013 I'm 24 years old
0:43.3	and I'm just out of PA school I'm working six days a week in a very busy primary care
0:48.4	OB-beying clinic on a slow day I'm seeing anywhere between 30 to 40 patients and on a busy day I'm seeing anywhere between 30 to 40 patients, and on a busy day, I'm seeing anywhere between 60 and 70 patients. Now, most of these patients are uninsured, which means by the time they're seeing me, they're sick, they're complex, because, well, frankly, they didn't have the proper preventative care, right? Now, at this point, I'm one year into my career, and I'm learning fast, mostly because, well, I have no other choice. But it's exciting. It's new, right? And so at that point, I also decided to do something else. I decided to start MedaGeeks. So being a PA was my day job. But before and after work, I would record podcasts. I would write for the
1:29.3	blog. I would do my research. I'd wake up at 4 in the morning every single day, do the research,
1:33.4	publish everything I've been reading, go to work, and then come home and stay up until midnight
1:37.6	writing and recording the podcast. There wasn't any specific plan for any of this, right? During
1:43.2	school, I spent a lot of time piecing
1:45.5	together, a lot of resources, a lot of study guides, prepping for exams, the boards, and I knew I wasn't
1:51.6	the only one. All of my classmates had the same problem. There wasn't any material that was of high
1:57.7	quality that would help us get through both our in-class exams, the end of
2:01.8	rotations, and the boards. And so this is part of the problem that I initially built Medgeeks
2:06.0	to solve. Now, for the first few years, that's what Medgeeks was. It was a platform to help
2:11.4	PAs and NPs pass their exams, their rotations, and their boards. Now, initially, it was just me and the microphone, but then 2017 came, and the business had
2:22.1	grown at that point, right?
	...

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