Can AI Connect the Mind, Body, and Root Causes of Chronic Illness? with Haresh Patel

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When Symptoms Don’t Tell the Whole Story

What happens when medical tests, specialists, and symptom-based treatments never explain why someone is sick? Haresh Patel joins Dr. Michael Haley to discuss his 55-year diagnostic journey, the possible influence of stress and unresolved grief on physical health, and how artificial intelligence can help organize a patient’s complete story for more productive conversations with healthcare practitioners.

About This Episode

For decades, Haresh Patel lived with symptoms that doctors could identify and manage but could not fully explain. His journey included suspected food allergies, chronic urticaria, sleep and oxygenation concerns, repeated specialist visits, and treatments that controlled his symptoms without answering his most important question: Why was this happening?

A turning point came when practitioners spent more time asking about his entire life rather than focusing only on his current symptoms. Questions about childhood stress, the traumatic death of his mother, emotional expression, medical history, and major life events revealed patterns that had never been considered together.

In this episode, Haresh explains why he believes a patient’s story can contain important diagnostic clues. He and Dr. Haley discuss the relationship between the mind and body, the limitations of brief medical appointments, and the importance of recognizing that physical, emotional, environmental, nutritional, and spiritual factors may overlap.

Haresh also introduces Sanare Health, an AI-assisted platform designed to help people organize symptoms, medical records, treatments, life events, and health timelines into a practitioner-ready summary. The platform is not intended to diagnose or prescribe treatment. Its purpose is to help patients communicate a more complete history and help practitioners see connections that might otherwise remain hidden.

The conversation also explores tinnitus triggers, pattern recognition, hidden ingredients in processed products, alternative approaches to healing, emotional expression, and why patients may benefit from becoming more active participants in their own care.

Key Ideas From This Episode

  • Complex health problems can be difficult to understand when medical records, symptoms, treatments, and life events are viewed separately.
  • Stress, trauma, grief, and emotional patterns may be relevant parts of a health history, although this does not mean that every illness is psychological or emotionally caused.
  • Artificial intelligence may help organize a patient’s story, but it should not replace qualified healthcare professionals or emergency medical care.
  • Patients may receive more productive care when they understand their history, recognize patterns, and communicate their complete story clearly.
  • Managing symptoms can be valuable, but Haresh encourages patients and practitioners to continue asking why the symptoms developed.

Resources

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Timestamps

00:00 – Why modern symptom checkers may miss the mind-body connection
00:42 – Introducing Haresh Patel and his 55-year health journey
02:23 – Chai, green tea, black tea, and an early-morning conversation
04:26 – Why complex health problems are so difficult to diagnose
06:12 – The limitations of a 13-minute medical appointment
09:18 – Building and carrying your complete health story
10:08 – A suspected food allergy becomes a diagnosis of urticaria
13:10 – Meeting an Ayurvedic doctor in Costa Rica
14:23 – Gathering decades of scattered medical records
15:04 – Asking when stress first began
17:32 – Childhood bullying, emotional disconnection, and losing his mother
18:51 – A spiritual explanation for Haresh’s physical symptoms
19:58 – The recommendation to travel to Bodh Gaya
21:28 – A disappointing ritual and an unexpected result
23:13 – Three and a half years without another injection
23:57 – Physical, emotional, and spiritual components of health
26:02 – How Sanare Health uses AI to organize a patient’s story
28:15 – Connecting fragmented medical data
28:57 – The doctor who looked at the whole person
30:52 – Is Sanare Health designed for patients or practitioners?
31:17 – Why asking the right AI questions matters
32:01 – Different ways patients can build their histories
33:16 – Helping practitioners identify appropriate patients
34:01 – Where to find Sanare Health and Haresh Patel
34:32 – Can health-related AI remain open to alternative approaches?
36:28 – Tinnitus as an example of root-cause investigation
38:22 – Injury, stress, displacement, and the development of tinnitus
40:09 – Dr. Haley’s Diet Coke and artificial-sweetener experience
43:10 – Using pattern recognition to identify symptom triggers
43:32 – Why ingredient labels may not reveal every processing aid
45:21 – Aloe vera, natural products, and plant-based healing
46:27 – Addressing causes while supporting the body
47:26 – The long-term cost of managing chronic disease
49:53 – Haresh’s call to become the CEO of your own health
51:16 – Building your story when memories and emotions are buried
52:43 – Learning to express emotion later in life
54:03 – Laughter yoga and training yourself to laugh
55:16 – Final thoughts

Full Transcript

Below is the full transcript of Episode 144 of The Dr. Haley Show. Dr. Michael Haley speaks with Haresh Patel about Patel’s 55-year search for health answers, chronic urticaria, the possible roles of stress and unresolved grief in physical symptoms, and how Sanare Health uses AI to organize a patient’s history before a medical appointment. The conversation also explores the limitations of brief medical visits, tinnitus triggers, alternative medicine, pattern recognition, and why artificial intelligence should support rather than replace qualified health professionals.

Haresh Patel: That’s the biggest myth of modern medicine. Even ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude—all the symptom checkers—they’re just repeating the same mistake. They are not connecting mind and body.

Narrator: You are listening to The Dr. Haley Show, the podcast dedicated to helping you optimize your health. Each episode, there will be an interview or a message to help you discover better health. We will be featuring health radicals on the show to bring new ideas to the table, as well as doubling down on key fundamentals to support you in living your best life.

Your host is none other than the founder of Haley Nutrition, Dr. Michael Haley.

Dr. Michael Haley: This is The Dr. Haley Show podcast. I’m Dr. Michael Haley, your show host. Today, we are going to be exploring one of my favorite topics, AI, in a unique way as it pertains to healthcare.

Today’s guest is Haresh Patel, the founder and CEO of Sanare Health, an AI-powered platform connecting patients who have been failed by conventional medicine with root-cause practitioners who can actually find answers.

He built it because he lived it: 55 years of suffering through a complex constellation of symptoms that the conventional system could never explain or resolve, until root-cause medicine finally gave him his life back.

Before Sanare Health, Haresh spent 40 years in Silicon Valley building technology companies that changed industries, including Mercatus, a private-markets fintech platform that scaled to $1.5 trillion in assets under management before being acquired by State Street in 2021.

His memoir, The Ghost in My Body, documents the 55-year diagnostic journey that inspired it all.

Haresh, welcome to the show. This is a fun discussion and a fun time to do it. I understand that it’s 5:00 a.m. where you are and 8:00 a.m. where I am, so this is great. We have two early birds. The only thing I’m missing is my cup of coffee. Do you drink coffee?

Haresh Patel: More chai. Being Indian, more chai.

Dr. Michael Haley: What is chai?

Haresh Patel: Chai is tea.

Dr. Michael Haley: Like green tea?

Haresh Patel: No. It’s black tea boiled with water, ginger, and milk altogether. It’s a big concoction.

Dr. Michael Haley: That’s interesting, because one of my favorite concentrates that I like to make is fresh-squeezed ginger with lemon. I put a little stevia in it, and we leave that concentrate in the refrigerator and pour it into things. I like pouring it into my green tea to give it a little spice and a little health boost.

Haresh Patel: I didn’t realize green tea and black tea are from the exact same plant, by the way.

Dr. Michael Haley: I didn’t know that either.

Haresh Patel: We were visiting a plantation in Sri Lanka. We saw the tea plant and stayed on the tea plantation. At the top of the tree are the youngest leaves. That’s green tea.

Dr. Michael Haley: No way. We learn something new every day. That is interesting, especially when you consider the different health benefits from it.

When we think of green tea, we think of all the catechins, or however you want to pronounce it, that are so good for things like dental health. We have different focuses on the benefits of black tea. There may be a little more caffeine, but it’s the same plant.

Haresh Patel: It’s the same plant.

Dr. Michael Haley: Interesting. I want to dig into your AI platform, but not yet, because a lot of people have had an experience like yours. They have a health challenge and no one can figure it out.

A lot of times, people come to me after they’ve been to a dozen doctors, and no one can figure out the cause of their symptoms. A lot of people have the wrong diagnoses, and they’re spinning their wheels and going nowhere. They’re spending their money and not getting results.

From what I understand, you had a similar experience. Years later, you received a more accurate diagnosis, figured out the root cause, and were able to do something about it.

Let’s go way, way back. Tell us a little about your story.

Haresh Patel: I’ll tell you the story, but just to echo what you said, there are 133 million of us in the same boat. We have an average seven- to ten-year journey, ten to twelve doctors, and no answers.

Those are around five clusters of symptoms. It’s 5:00 in the morning, so you’ll have to excuse me if I can’t remember all five, but they include sleep issues, fatigue, chronic pain, and headaches. Those are the main areas. The other one is inflammatory and autoimmune diseases. There aren’t any good answers.

I built this platform, Sanare Health, because there are answers, and the answer is in your story. It’s as simple as that.

The reason we don’t get to the bottom of it is time deprivation. Thirteen and a half minutes is all you get with a doctor. It’s not his fault. It’s not their fault or her fault. It’s just the way the system is set up. They have to see a lot of patients.

You can’t diagnose something in 13 and a half minutes that probably started decades ago. Somewhere in that story, something happened that created a butterfly effect. If you can figure out what that story is and share that story, the doctor is going to have a lot more lights at the ends of different tunnels to explore. That’s the problem.

Dr. Michael Haley: Can I jump in just to drive that point home?

When I got out of school in 1995, I didn’t jump right into private practice because I needed to do an internship. Before starting my practice, I worked for a few different doctors, number one, to learn.

One was an internship. Then I tried something on my own, which failed miserably. I realized that I had learned how to be a doctor, but I didn’t yet know how to run a business. I worked for a couple of other people.

Early in that experience, I remember spending 15 minutes with a patient. When I got out of the room, the person I was working for said, “What the hell are you doing? Why were you in there so long? Get them in and get them out. We get six dollars for that visit because of their insurance.”

I said, “Six dollars for that visit? Why are we even seeing patients on that insurance plan?”

The answer was, “Because their insurance might change, and someday they might have better insurance. But get them in and get them out. We’re losing money after you spend more than a minute with them.”

What you are saying is exactly true. To survive in business, doctors cannot spend time with you in the current health-insurance model. I wanted to drive that home.

Haresh Patel: Doctors are burning out too. They didn’t join the industry for that. They joined because of passion, right? They wanted to heal people, and they’re frustrated because they can’t.

That’s the dilemma we’re trying to solve at Sanare Health: How do you make the 13-and-a-half-minute visit into two hours? We’re not going to change the system, but you can build your story and carry it with you.

That requires you to become the CEO of your own health. It’s not easy to build that story. It’s not easy to pull all of that data together. Without that, you’re shooting in the dark, and your doctor is shooting in the dark.

They look like heroes if they’ve seen a patient with the same problem before, but the likelihood of that happening is very low.

I’ll tell you my story. I got lucky, some of it serendipitously, because I got two hours with two doctors. Actually, I should say one doctor for one hour, and then two doctors in a row for two hours each. That just doesn’t happen.

Dr. Michael Haley: Sometimes it does. How did they get paid for the visit? Were they doing it out of passion and love, or was there some kind of compensation outside regular insurance?

Haresh Patel: The first doctor was an immunologist. I had a terrible rash. For over ten years, it had been diagnosed as an allergy to paprika, which is in almost everything in Indian food.

Dr. Michael Haley: It’s in American food too, by the way. Those golden French fries are soaked in paprika water to make them golden.

Haresh Patel: I like paprika. Luckily, I don’t have to avoid it. It’s basically food coloring. It’s not even the spicy stuff.

She spent an hour with me, and the art is in the questioning. Sometimes it isn’t that the patient doesn’t want to say something. You have to ask them.

At the very end of the hour, I looked like the Elephant Man. I was suffering because she had taken me off antihistamines, which were the only things controlling the rash, because they needed to do the allergy test.

At the end of the hour, she finally said, “Haresh, I forgot to play doctor. I didn’t look at your nostrils, eyes, or ears. Let me do that quickly.”

She said, “Small nostrils. You might have an oxygenation problem. That might be one of your root causes.” Let’s remember that point.

Then she said one more thing: “I forgot to listen to your heart.”

I said, “Dr. Choy, I forgot to tell you. When I unbutton my shirt, all my hair stands up. I get goosebumps.”

She slammed the table and ripped the tissue paper. She said, “You are not allergic to anything. You’ve been misdiagnosed. You have urticaria, which is an autoimmune disease.”

For your listeners, urticaria is a mast-cell disease. Mast cells float under the skin, and when the hatch breaks, all the antihistamines escape. You don’t have the ability to fight inflammation, so anything can trigger it. That’s why it camouflages itself as an allergy.

Dr. Michael Haley: Is it histamines or antihistamines that escape?

Haresh Patel: Histamines. I’m sorry. Histamines. The antihistamines help offset that. My mistake. I’m showing that I’m not a doctor.

That was the start of understanding what I had correctly. The question of why I had it was not answered.

The why is the most important part. When you’re looking for a root cause, you can’t fix something unless you know why it happened. These 133 million people are floating around without knowing why.

Getting to why requires you to be curious. It requires you to remain open-minded. Those are two important things. You need time, curiosity, the ability to be open-minded, and an understanding of your whole story. You have to be able to tell your whole story. Those are the ingredients for getting to how you cure yourself.

The two doctors I got two hours with were doctors I paid. It was very nominal because it was outside the country.

The first time was in Costa Rica. It was a random trip to a random wellness center. Dr. Vinod was praised by everybody as if he walked on water.

I said to my wife, Veena, “We’re this Indian couple. There’s this Ayurvedic doctor from India running the wellness center. Let’s at least have chai together.”

We did, and he piqued my interest. I had no knowledge of what he did. As I said, it was a random selection of a wellness resort. He piqued my interest, and now I was curious. I said, “I’ve got to get to why.”

I was living on these shots that cost $3,000 apiece. The only two solutions for urticaria were to suppress it. You could take steroids, which are very bad for you, or take Xolair, which was invented for asthma patients. You have to take it every four weeks, and it is very temperamental.

There was only one place in the world where I could receive it because they knew how to administer it. I was living on that. Luckily, insurance was covering it. Otherwise, it was $3,000 per shot every four weeks.

Dr. Michael Haley: Wow.

Haresh Patel: I was tethered to coming back every four weeks.

We met Dr. Vinod, and he piqued my interest. I said, “I’ll sign up for your program.” It was very nominal. I could afford it, and I wanted to find out.

He made me do a couple of things. He scheduled two hours, from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. It was the only time slot he had, ten days away. He said, “I want you to gather all of your health records.”

That was clue number two. I found out, first, that I didn’t have them centralized. It was also really hard to get them.

I was arguing with doctors’ offices. They were saying, “HIPAA says we have to fax them to you.”

I said, “I’m in a hotel. How is sending a fax to the lobby more private than sending it to my own email?”

They said, “Okay, we’ll make a one-time exception. Don’t do it again.”

Painfully, I would get my records and email them to him. By the time I met with him, clue number three was that he had manually plotted everything on a chart.

He spent one hour examining all the records, and then another hour asking the same questions differently. Just a slight twist.

Everybody always asked, “Are you stressed now?”

What’s the answer? Yes. Life happens. I’m the CEO of a company. Once in a while, we run out of cash. I get stressed over payroll. I have a wife and kids. We have our own squabbles.

But he asked a different question: “When was the first time in your life that you were stressed?”

I said, “Middle school. That’s easy.”

I was in New Hampshire, the only brown kid among 2,000 students, with a little smelly lunchbox. I got picked on a lot.

Dr. Michael Haley: The lunchbox was smelly because it had flavor?

Haresh Patel: No, it was just different food. Nobody was used to curries and things like that. It probably smelled different and looked different. It wasn’t rotting or anything.

Dr. Michael Haley: Essentially, what you’re saying is that you grew up with real food and flavor.

I grew up with a very bland standard American diet and a lot of fast food. Now I understand what real food is. It sounds like you actually got a lunchbox of real food, and that was probably what was unusual.

Haresh Patel: Probably. Regardless, I was going to get picked on. My name was different. Everything about me was different.

The doctor said, “You probably had dry skin and dandruff.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “Let’s go back further.”

Now I was in a psychologist’s chair for about an hour, and he took me back to age six. He asked, “Tell me about your emotional levels.”

I said, “That’s the joke in the family. My dad says I’m like my mom. I have no emotions. I can’t laugh during a movie. I can’t cry during a movie. When my mom’s brother passed away, she didn’t shed a tear.”

He said, “Tell me about your mom.”

I said, “She passed away in a car accident.”

He didn’t express any sympathy. I explained that we were in a single-car accident. We were going east while everybody else was going west. My dad had gotten his first job after college, so we were moving to New Hampshire. He was a professor at Saint Anselm College.

The doctor didn’t give me the usual, “I’m so sorry.” He stoically continued. He asked, “Did you bury her? Did you cremate her? What kind of final rites did you perform? Was it Hindu? Was it Catholic?”

He wanted to know all the details.

Then he closed his book at the end of the two hours and said, “Bad news. I have no cure for you medically.”

I wasn’t surprised. I had heard that from the last 12 doctors.

But he said, “I do have a prescription that I think will heal you.”

This is where things get weird.

He said, “People who die tragically have a high propensity for their souls to become stuck. In your case, your mom is holding on to you so tightly that you can’t breathe.”

Remember what I told you about the immunologist and allergy specialist? She said I had small nostrils and that something might be affecting my oxygenation.

The other 12 doctors had also connected things to low iron, low oxygenation, or sleep apnea. Somewhere, there was not enough oxygen coming into the body. It was the same diagnosis, but from a different angle.

He said, “We’ve all watched the movie Ghost with Whoopi Goldberg and Patrick Swayze.”

Dr. Michael Haley: Yes.

Haresh Patel: Remember, he hangs around for a long time. In my case, she had hung around for 55 years, holding on so tightly that I couldn’t breathe. That was the source. That was the why.

Being an engineer, a Notre Dame electrical-engineering graduate, a Silicon Valley technology executive, and the son of a physics professor, I wasn’t ready to believe it.

He did hit me on the head. I saw stars floating around. He opened a wound involving buried grief and trauma, but I wasn’t ready to believe.

He said, “You have to go to India. You have to go to this place called Bodh Gaya, where Buddha attained enlightenment under the tree. Hindus built a temple on top of that place. You have to go there and perform this particular prayer. Your mom’s soul will be released, and you will be cured.”

I said, “Okay,” while rolling my eyes.

But there were two Hareshes. One was saying, “Okay,” and rolling his eyes. The other was saying, “What if?”

That’s the story. I ignored it for three years.

Then I finally had a chance because I sold the company, and we were having my going-away party. We had about 60 employees in India, and they held a nice celebration for me leaving.

Afterward, I was noodling around in the hotel room and looking at a travel website.

Veena, my wife, knew the story. She said, “Do you want to go to Bodh Gaya?”

I knew she was supportive but not ready to believe it.

I said, “Yes. We’ve tried everything else. I’m going to remain open-minded. It’s a one-hour flight and relatively inexpensive.”

Domestic flights in India are very cheap. We could spend two nights. There was only one flight going in and one flight going out.

She said, “Okay, I’ll take care of it.”

She worked with our travel agent, who found a priest and negotiated how much money we would have to pay.

We went there, and nothing spiritual happened. I can guarantee that no clouds parted. There was no rain and no rainbow. It was not a pleasant experience.

We finished the rituals and left feeling bummed out.

Dr. Michael Haley: Can I jump in?

I understand how that would feel if you were expecting something. You used a rainbow as an example. You wanted a visual sign or something.

At that point, were you thinking nothing had happened, or was there a small question in your mind: “I wonder if anything is different?”

Haresh Patel: It was the overall experience. The town was dirty. The temple was dirty. The priests were crooks.

We had pre-negotiated a price, and then you had to visit seven smaller sub-temples. The money was supposed to cover all the individual priests in those smaller temples.

There were arguments about the whole thing. They would ask, “Where’s my money?”

I would say, “I already paid.”

They would say, “Yes, but they don’t pay us.”

It was not a fun experience. When you go to a church, you expect tranquility and spirituality, and none of that happened.

That was the disappointment. I was thinking, “How is this supposed to let my mother’s soul rise?”

We still had two more weeks left. We took our trip to Sri Lanka, where I learned about green tea and where it comes from. Then we went to London to visit my daughter, who was doing a semester abroad.

We went home. Precisely three and a half weeks later, I did not feel the urge to make my appointment.

I called and asked, “Can I delay it?”

They said, “Sure. We have it frozen here. You just need to call us half an hour before. There’s a default rate because people get stuck in traffic. Call us, and we’ll put it back in the refrigerator.”

I never went back. It has been three and a half years.

Dr. Michael Haley: Interesting.

Haresh Patel: In my book, The Ghost in My Body, where 12 doctors couldn’t find an answer, I still say that I don’t know whether it was a placebo effect. I don’t know whether it was just timing. Will it ever come back?

But my epigraph says it all. It’s from Einstein. I forget the exact words, but it says that we have to believe in the mysterious.

If one of the smartest people in the world could say that, I can believe in the mysterious. We all can.

We’ll leave it at that. That’s the journey. That’s the story.

Dr. Michael Haley: I like that. It’s also interesting coming from a Hindu perspective because there is recognition that our health is based on more than what we eat, how we sleep, or whether we exercise properly.

It recognizes a mental, emotional, and spiritual component to health. When people address that, there may be a different level of healing.

The question becomes: Could the spiritual component be involved in my cancer, my weakened immune system, my autoimmune disease, my skin rash, or my gut problem? When I eat something and my gut and skin flare up, could that be healed emotionally?

We know there is a mind-body connection. Going from mental and emotional to mysterious and spiritual is one of the things I love about this discussion.

In response to your experience, and recognizing that a doctor who spent time with you was able to figure things out, you’re looking to compress time and get more done in less time. Now you’re bringing that alternative approach into it using AI. Is that correct?

Haresh Patel: Absolutely. Let me explain that.

The compression of time, as we said, is the root cause of why we can’t get to the bottom of these problems. The story is the answer.

The homework is done before you see the doctor. AI allows us to understand more than one modality, and no modality is completely right or wrong.

We’re stuck in our beliefs. Some people say, “I’m only going to believe in acupuncture and Chinese medicine.” A billion of us may say, “I’m going to believe in Ayurveda.” The Western world says, “I’m going to believe in conventional medicine.”

The answer is all of the above. They’re all right. It depends on the story.

The story is no different from a matching engine. It matches you to the right modality, and it’s up to you to decide: Door A, Door B, Door C, or Door D. Which door do I want to explore?

Remember what I told you: Remain open-minded and curious. Open all the doors and look at all of them.

That’s what Sanare is. Sanare is a place where you build your story. AI helps put lights at the ends of the tunnels where there are doors for you to explore. We don’t try to push you through any one door.

Think about the time before we had the internet. We had libraries. People would go to the library and find some unique therapy because they were stuck.

When the internet came along, it made things easier. AI makes it infinitely easier to identify those options.

We’re a two-sided marketplace. We help people build their stories to find the appropriate practitioners rather than shooting in the dark. They can have multiple door options and conversations to explore.

That didn’t happen until I had my aha moment about a month before my final doctor visit. I also had to go through my business journey.

My prior company, Mercatus, had the assets under management that you mentioned and was sold to State Street. I had to go through that journey to connect the dots here because what we did was connect data.

Our customers were investors in assets such as airports, bridges, toll roads, supertankers, and many other things. They couldn’t make heads or tails out of something they had owned for 20 years because the data was scattered everywhere. Financial models were everywhere. They couldn’t perform scenario analysis. They were flying blind.

They wouldn’t admit it publicly, but privately, some of the largest fund managers would say, “We’re flying blind.”

It was because they couldn’t see the whole story. They couldn’t see the whole film.

When I saw the last doctor, Dr. Reddy in Sacramento, he did something very unconventional.

It began with the same process: the lobby, the forms, the nurse, the vital signs, and the folder at the door that he brought into the room.

But he said, “I don’t want to open that folder. I don’t want to know why you’re here. I want to know you. Tell me from the beginning.”

Again, he was building a story and traveling through time.

When I told him everything about my mom and that journey, he simplified it. He went to the whiteboard and said, “I’ve been quizzing you for a couple of hours and peppering you with questions because every doctor you saw was right, but they were also wrong. Each doctor reached behind the curtain and felt only one part of the elephant. I’m taking the whole curtain off. I’m taking a Sherlock Holmes approach. It’s all interconnected.”

Everything I told him about my mom—call it whatever you want—could be called energy or mind.

That is the biggest myth of modern medicine. Even ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and all the symptom checkers, are repeating the same mistake. They are not connecting mind and body.

That’s not to say everything starts with the mind, but it certainly can’t be missed.

Then there is the interconnection. When he drew those eight quadrants, I said, “My God, this is exactly what Mercatus did. I can solve this with technology.”

It’s a systematic diagnostic methodology that connects mind and body with all the functional parts that are interconnected: the gut, brain, pancreas, and liver.

They have to be interconnected.

That aha moment occurred a month before I went to Bodh Gaya. The light went off: I can solve this at scale.

That became my mission and passion. This whole 55-year journey, and the 12 years of painfully building a business that ran like a roller coaster and had a couple of near crashes, were all worth it because all the dots connected.

I said, “I can solve this at scale, and if I can help one person truncate that journey, it will all be worth it.”

Dr. Michael Haley: Is the end user of Sanare Health the doctor or the patient?

Haresh Patel: Both.

Dr. Michael Haley: Both?

Haresh Patel: The patient has to start the journey. They have to build the story.

The system systematically helps you build the journey. It gives you the option to answer questions, just as you do on other AI platforms that we use every day, but it asks the right questions.

Dr. Michael Haley: Talking to AI, the key is how you talk to it. If you don’t know how to talk to it, you’re not going to receive the full advantage of AI. In this case, the system is prompting you to provide the proper information.

Haresh Patel: That’s where we built what I would call the secret sauce: the art of questioning and questioning properly.

Dr. Michael Haley: Is it a platform where people create an account online?

Haresh Patel: Yes. I’ll be providing you with a promotional code.

We are just launching the platform, so we’re looking for early users to give us feedback because customers make it perfect.

You asked whether it works for both sides. For the patient, obviously, they want to get cured. Hopefully, they’re going to invest the time, as I did, to build the story.

Some people don’t want to do that. We’ll give them options. For one fee, we can do that for you.

If you sign a consent form, for another fee, we can have you speak with a live person who is compassionate, wants to listen, and can help build your story. It is a dialogue.

If you’re more comfortable doing that, it’s an upsell opportunity for the doctor.

Dr. Michael Haley: I think you said it earlier. I was good at what I did, but my business skills were not where they needed to be. I’m repeating your words.

I have no pride in my accomplishments or lack of accomplishments. I recognize that I’m a flawed human, like everyone else.

Haresh Patel: Almost every practitioner I have talked to says, “I know what I do really well, but building my Instagram page, Facebook page, website, billing, and insurance is overwhelming.”

We can help practitioners too.

On the practitioner side, we can solve some of those problems by giving them tools because they have to operate on our platform.

What they’re most interested in is more business, but they want the right business. They view the platform as a qualification engine.

When they can see the story, they can say, “I can help that person,” or, “I cannot help that person.”

A bad review or no review can be equally bad. Good reviews propel a business. Their interest in our platform is receiving more qualified patients.

At the end of the day, we are a dating engine. It’s as simple as that. Or we’re like Airbnb.

You may want a vacation in a particular country, with a certain number of bedrooms and a particular type of swimming pool, or no swimming pool. The homeowner lists all the features available. Airbnb matches you together.

We do the same thing.

Dr. Michael Haley: What is the web address?

Haresh Patel: SanareHealth.ai.

The best way to reach me today is through my email, haresh @ sanarehealth .ai

HareshPatel.ai is my personal website. I’ll provide all of those links so you can include them.

Dr. Michael Haley: Great.

I want to talk about one of the problems with AI, probably because of what came before it, which was Google Search, Bing, Yahoo, or whatever platform you used.

One of the big problems with searching online is that it can be very anti-alternative.

We know that from COVID. I couldn’t even say that word in a video because the video could get banned from YouTube simply for saying “COVID.”

People had to talk in code because the algorithm was against it. We were told the information had to come from the CDC, which had its own slant. The algorithm was against us.

If you posted a video and it appeared anywhere, there might be a big warning below it saying, “Click here to get real information.”

Everyone says they’re afraid of misinformation, and no one wants misinformation, but sometimes they were calling good information misinformation.

How do you get around that while creating a platform that remains open to alternative ideas?

Haresh Patel: We may face similar challenges. I can’t guarantee that we won’t.

One thing we’re doing is building the education component. Remember, I told you that people used to go to libraries and spend hours, days, or weeks doing research. Then the internet arrived and sped it up. It still takes a lot of time, even with AI.

I’ll give you one example: tinnitus. Twenty million people have it. It’s a ringing in the ears.

The same problem applies. There’s a story behind it, but our first reaction is to go to an ENT specialist.

In my view, that is the wrong specialty about 80 percent of the time. Tinnitus may have little to do with the ear itself. It can have to do with hearing loss.

Someone might tell you, “You’re 64. Your hearing is about where it should be.” But that’s still hearing loss.

There is a particular part of the brain that processes sound. When it doesn’t have sound, it goes crazy and creates sound. That’s tinnitus. You have to figure out how to calm that down.

People who have gone outside conventional medicine have said that the questions are not being asked correctly. The doctor may not have been trained to ask them.

Here is what you may need to ask: During the last 12 months, did one of three things happen?

Did you have a slip or injury in which your neck or jaw was displaced? You have to examine that. Remember, it’s time travel. You’re building the story.

Did you experience severe trauma or stress? We’re back to the mind-body connection.

If any one of those three things, or all three, happened, there may be a high likelihood that you develop tinnitus. You have to unpack it. Only then can you consider an appropriate therapy.

In my case, in December 2024, we had a roofing company that decided it couldn’t handle the project properly. The storm date never changed, and the house became the Titanic.

I slipped and fell and injured my back badly. At some point, that fall displaced something in my neck or jaw.

I mentioned it to my chiropractor because I was seeing him for my back. He said, “We’ve been trained on that.”

He started working on my jaw and neck, and the tinnitus slowly started dissipating.

On top of that was the trauma of seeing my home completely destroyed in one storm, being displaced for ten months, and dealing with the financial stress because the insurance company wasn’t going to play nicely.

I had all three things happen, so no wonder I had tinnitus by February or March.

We do the research. I spent ten or twelve hours finding that needle in the haystack. We’re creating content so the engine can feed you that information as you build your story.

As I said, it’s all about building the story.

If you simply say, “I have a headache,” the system is going to say, “Take aspirin.”

But if it starts asking, “Why do you have a headache? Did you fall down?”

You might say, “Yes, I fell and hit my head.”

Then it can say, “Maybe this is a reason to discuss an MRI.”

As you build the story, you have more options. It’s about building the story and traveling back through time.

I didn’t answer your question, though. I’m sorry.

I believe the world is changing dramatically. As much as we may agree or disagree with today’s administration, it is lowering many barriers around optionality. People are curious, and the world is changing dramatically.

So many walls are cracking and crumbling that I believe there is a breakthrough opportunity.

Dr. Michael Haley: I agree with that.

As someone who uses AI quite a bit, I am seeing a shift. I’m seeing an ability to sway AI with the information we feed it.

There is a lot of evidence showing how natural things can be beneficial for restoring health.

It’s funny that you mentioned tinnitus because I’m someone who had tinnitus. I may never have gotten down to its root cause, but I know what my triggers were.

For people listening to this podcast who know me, this might be shocking: Years ago, I used to drink Diet Coke.

I haven’t had Coca-Cola, Diet Coke, or any soda like that in years. It was probably one of those treats for me when I was in school. I probably gave it up around the year 2000.

I didn’t initially realize that my tinnitus had gone away.

A few months later, for whatever reason, I decided to have a Diet Coke. I didn’t realize my tinnitus had returned until maybe a day or two later.

I thought, “This is weird. I have tinnitus again.”

Eventually, it went away, and I started questioning whether Diet Coke could possibly be the cause.

I tested it. Yes, if I had Diet Coke, which has an artificial sweetener in it, the tinnitus would return. That chemical must have been affecting my nervous system and triggering the tinnitus.

I haven’t had a Diet Coke since.

How many people have taxed their children’s Halloween candy? I did. Every now and then, I would slip—or not really slip. You think, “I have such a good, healthy diet. Why not? Is this really going to kill me?”

Your kids come in with bags of candy, and why not have some with them?

Then, all of a sudden, there was my tinnitus again.

There must have been some chemistry in the junk I was putting into my body that caused the tinnitus to return.

I haven’t had tinnitus in years now, mostly because I eat a clean diet. Those foods were the trigger for me.

What the original cause was, I don’t know. Maybe it was chemistry.

Haresh Patel: You were doing pattern recognition. You were connecting the dots by looking backward. It’s the same thing as building a story.

You may not have gotten to the exact cause. But all of the foods that triggered it may have had something in common.

AI could help you enter all of those foods and ask, “This chocolate, this chocolate, and that chocolate—what is the common ingredient?”

Some ingredients aren’t required to be listed, so you may never get to the bottom of exactly which ingredient is triggering it, but it could still be an interesting experiment.

Dr. Michael Haley: It’s funny that you say that.

As someone involved in manufacturing both cosmetics and things that people consume, I know that when you purchase a raw material, that material can contain other things.

Let’s say one ingredient you need is cocoa. The original supplier may have preserved that raw ingredient. Whatever they used to preserve it doesn’t necessarily appear on the ingredients list of the final product. When you manufacture your product, the label may simply say “cocoa,” not everything that had previously been added to the cocoa.

There are definitely things in cosmetics and food products that don’t appear on the ingredients label.

I learned this initially when we made this product. It’s funny—I have it on my desk right here.

For people seeing this, I’m sorry. We’re out of stock and waiting for new tubes to come from China so we can make it available on our website. I have my secret supply.

I’m sorry for showing it because we’re getting so many calls about this stuff.

The first time we reformulated it after I took over the brand, we wanted to make it paraben-free.

Technically, it was paraben-free. There were no parabens on the label. But one of the ingredients I sourced was itself preserved with parabens.

I realized there are subcomponents that never make it onto the final label.

You don’t really know everything you’re eating or putting on your skin when you buy processed products.

Haresh Patel: Your product is aloe-based, right? That’s the specialty of your company?

Dr. Michael Haley: That’s our secret.

Haresh Patel: My wife has an aloe plant. She cuts it and rubs it all over her face.

Dr. Michael Haley: That’s the best way to use it, by the way. You definitely have the right core ingredient.

There is something about aloe vera. Just like we mentioned black tea and green tea, these natural things are gifts from God. Plants can be your medicine.

Over the years, we have damaged that philosophy and understanding. We’ve created man-made medicines and chemicals, although sometimes their ingredients still come from plants.

I like what you’re doing. I like how you’re bridging these different approaches and how Sanare Health is going to bring in alternative perspectives.

You’re also getting to the root cause because there is always a cause.

I always like to look at both sides of the equation. What is causing the problem? Let’s remove that. Then, what can I do to support the body?

In your case, we might look at the skin rash and ask what caused it. What mental, emotional, or spiritual component needs to be addressed? Let’s take care of that.

Then we might also ask, “How do I support an autoimmune condition? What can I do about an immune system that is overreacting?”

Maybe by working on a gut-healthy diet, removing inflammatory foods, and consuming gut-supportive foods, I can support my health from an alternative perspective rather than only taking medicine that suppresses the symptoms.

Haresh Patel: I’m glad the medicine is there. I’m glad we have those options until we figure out what to do to actually get well.

I did the math for a patient with diabetes.

If you add all the quarterly visits to the endocrinologist, the laboratory work, and the slow progression of insulin treatment, it adds up.

First, there is diet and exercise. Then metformin is added. Then insulin is added in layers.

Then someone says, “There’s a new study showing that you should get ahead of cholesterol and blood pressure.”

By the time you’re finished, you may be taking five or six medications.

Over 30 years, including the time you’re away from work, the cost can exceed $500,000. That’s only to manage diabetes.

But if you investigate how diabetes might be treated or reversed, there is a whole world out there.

You have to be careful about how hard you explore that world because you might get banned.

There is a whole mind-body connection. Is the mind speaking to the liver? Is the liver speaking to the gut, or vice versa? Is the liver speaking to the pancreas? The pancreas is producing insulin, but something is off in the signals.

It’s only when you step back and ask, “Why do I have diabetes?” that you begin looking at the whole system.

That question is not asked.

Imagine if, three years into it, you could figure out why. You would save the entire system and yourself years of suffering.

The employer, who might be self-insured, would save a lot of money.

But the system isn’t set up to cure.

Dr. Michael Haley: Well said.

I wouldn’t be surprised if your math was off and the damage was actually much worse.

Haresh Patel: I said that assuming there were no complications.

Dr. Michael Haley: Because diabetes can cause vision problems, arterial issues, high blood pressure, and kidney disease. There are many additional costs.

Haresh Patel: I didn’t add the insult-to-injury part. I was only describing someone who kept their A1C at 6.5 and was considered a good citizen.

But that good citizen was a nice ATM machine.

Dr. Michael Haley: I enjoyed the conversation, Haresh. Where should people go to find out more?

You mentioned your website. Is there a specific call to action?

Haresh Patel: My call to action is to become the CEO of your own health.

Build your story on our platform. You get to share it with whomever you want. It’s your vault.

Even when we use LLMs or other forms of AI, we don’t send your name and everything about you. It is your information. You get to decide which door to open.

We give you the doors you may want to open and the ability to have conversations.

But it has to start with owning your own health, being curious like you were with your Diet Coke story, and keeping all the options open.

When you do those three things, you will get closer to a cure. A cure means you become a happier person. It’s as simple as that.

Hopefully, our platform at SanareHealth.ai will become a gold standard for the 133 million people living in perpetual diagnostic limbo.

Dr. Michael Haley: Thank you. That’s wonderful.

Not knowing you previously and not knowing much about your platform, I don’t know whether I asked all the right questions.

Is there anything I left out that is important? Is there anything where you’re thinking, “I wish he had asked this,” or, “I wish we had mentioned that”?

Haresh Patel: I think you did a good job of teasing out all the salient points.

If you hadn’t asked the final question about where to find us and what people should take away, I would have summarized it this way, and I’ll repeat it one more time: Take control. Build your story.

Building your story is not easy. There are things buried deep that you may not want to discuss. There are things you don’t remember.

There are different ways to bring those things out. That’s what hypnosis and past-life regression are about. Those are options for building the story.

You’re going to find that pearl under 20 mattresses if you keep digging and removing each layer.

It is about building the story and then leveraging today’s technology to find the right path and the people who might be able to help you.

We don’t diagnose on our platform. We connect you with people who are experts.

Dr. Michael Haley: I have a little personal question to ask you. I’m going to relate it to some of the things you said about yourself.

When I was young, I had very little emotion.

I could be watching a movie, and the person next to me could be tearing up. I would think, “It’s just a movie. What’s wrong with you? Why are your eyes leaking?”

Something changed.

For me, I don’t know when the change happened, but I learned to actually have emotions. I felt like I had been missing out.

You might think, “How could you be missing out? Who wants to cry?”

But I knew something was missing.

I don’t remember exactly when it happened, but something in my life changed. Now I have a hard time not crying when I watch the evening news.

Do you cry now?

Haresh Patel: I think there is something about age that brings it on.

My dad was exactly the way I used to be and how you described yourself. I never saw him cry.

Now the same man, who I never saw cry, cries over the smallest things.

I’m catching up.

It is very therapeutic to let everything out, in both ways: crying and laughter.

I learned to laugh. I needed to go back to a wellness center in India called Jindal.

One of the yoga sessions involved looking at the person to your right and the person to your left, making funny faces, and making each other laugh.

There is a whole practice called laughter yoga.

I stayed there for about two weeks. When I came back, I started laughing at jokes. I started laughing during movies.

Before that, I would think, “Why is everybody laughing? It’s funny, but it isn’t worth a laugh.”

You have to train yourself to laugh.

Dr. Michael Haley: That’s another good emotion that I probably didn’t express much. I was just very unemotional.

It’s nice to watch a movie with my wife and know when she’s becoming emotional because I’m feeling it too. If I’m feeling it, she probably is as well.

I can’t always cry yet, but I get choked up or get goosebumps. I’m making progress.

Haresh Patel: There’s healing there.

Dr. Michael Haley: That’s great.

Haresh, this was an interesting podcast. Thank you so much for sharing.

Haresh Patel: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Narrator: I hope you enjoyed today’s episode of The Dr. Haley Show.

Make sure to hit subscribe on whichever platform you are using to listen. If this episode made you think of someone, take a screenshot and share this exact episode with them.

You can find the show notes for this episode at DrHaley.com.

If you want to geek out with Dr. Michael Haley on other radical health topics, be sure to check out his YouTube channel, where he posts exclusive video content.

All the details are at DrHaley.com, and we can’t wait to hang out with you on the next episode.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Haresh Patel?

Haresh Patel is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, author, and the founder and CEO of Sanare Health. In this episode, he describes a 55-year search for answers to chronic health symptoms and explains how his experience inspired him to build technology that helps patients organize their complete health stories.

What is Sanare Health?

Sanare Health is an AI-assisted platform that helps people organize symptoms, medical records, treatments, life events, and health timelines into a practitioner-ready brief. It is designed to improve communication between patients and practitioners rather than provide a diagnosis or treatment plan.

What does the mind-body connection mean in this episode?

The mind-body connection refers to the possibility that stress, trauma, grief, emotional patterns, and major life events may interact with physical and biological factors. The episode does not suggest that every illness is psychological or caused by emotions.

Why can a patient’s complete health story be important?

Symptoms and medical findings may appear unrelated when viewed separately. Organizing them chronologically alongside treatments, injuries, diet, stress, and major life events may help patients and practitioners recognize patterns that were previously overlooked.

Does Sanare Health diagnose illnesses or replace a doctor?

No. Sanare Health organizes information and produces a patient-approved, practitioner-ready summary. It does not diagnose medical conditions, prescribe treatment, replace a qualified healthcare professional, or provide emergency care.

What is The Ghost in My Body about?

The Ghost in My Body is Haresh Patel’s memoir about his decades-long diagnostic journey, the loss of his mother during childhood, his health challenges, his exploration of emotional and spiritual healing, and the experiences that inspired his vision for improving healthcare.

Can unresolved grief or emotional stress cause chronic illness?

This episode explores the possibility that unresolved grief and prolonged stress may contribute to or intensify physical symptoms in some people. Haresh Patel’s experience is personal and does not establish that emotional stress is the cause of every chronic condition. Persistent or unexplained symptoms should be evaluated by a qualified healthcare professional.

Medical disclaimer: This episode is provided for educational and informational purposes only. It does not provide medical diagnosis or treatment. The experiences and opinions discussed are not a substitute for individualized care from a qualified healthcare professional.

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