Here’s one example. Jeff Wood had been suffering from ME/CFS for a while, and found that his head started sinking one day, and a lot of his symptoms would get worse depending on the position of his head/neck. This led to his diagnosis of CCI/AAI and he was able to get the right surgeries and is now in remission. Of course, most of us are not as lucky as he is in having something that so dramatically and immediately changes symptoms. But I think it’s one way to solve such medical mysteries, and is basically what you say about tracking backwards from symptoms to causes.
Here’s another example, although this one hasn’t led to any actual cures yet. Robert Phair used his knowledge of biochemistry pathways to come up with a hypothesis of how the citric acid cycle gets shunted, which has the immediate effect of lowering ATP production but also some other crazy downstream effects like neurotransmitters being stolen to fuel an alternative cyclic reactions (which possibly is what one type of brainfog is caused by). So this approach is more top-down: start with a bunch of “textbook” knowledge and theory, try to come up with a hypothesis of how that could lead to problems, and how those problems might explain symptoms.
Here’s one example. Jeff Wood had been suffering from ME/CFS for a while, and found that his head started sinking one day, and a lot of his symptoms would get worse depending on the position of his head/neck. This led to his diagnosis of CCI/AAI and he was able to get the right surgeries and is now in remission. Of course, most of us are not as lucky as he is in having something that so dramatically and immediately changes symptoms. But I think it’s one way to solve such medical mysteries, and is basically what you say about tracking backwards from symptoms to causes.
Here’s another example, although this one hasn’t led to any actual cures yet. Robert Phair used his knowledge of biochemistry pathways to come up with a hypothesis of how the citric acid cycle gets shunted, which has the immediate effect of lowering ATP production but also some other crazy downstream effects like neurotransmitters being stolen to fuel an alternative cyclic reactions (which possibly is what one type of brainfog is caused by). So this approach is more top-down: start with a bunch of “textbook” knowledge and theory, try to come up with a hypothesis of how that could lead to problems, and how those problems might explain symptoms.
I’m sure there are many other approaches.