On the illusion of certainty—and why being sure is the moment to get curious again

I was talking with a friend yesterday, both of us deep in the holistic health world, and I told him I was glad we shared so many of the same thoughts. His response stuck with me: “Of course we do—the facts are the facts.”

I sat with that one for a while.

He didn’t mean anything by it; it’s the kind of thing any of us could say without a second thought. That’s exactly why it caught me. In four words, it captured the trap I worry about most for people like us—the quiet slide into certainty we don’t even notice we’re standing in.

Here’s what I mean, and I’m including myself in every bit of this. Those of us who’ve spent real time in the metabolic and ancestral health space get used to seeing things conventional medicine structurally misses. We connect dots a fifteen-minute appointment was never built to connect, and we’re often right to. That part is true.

That track record is also where it gets dangerous. Seeing what another system overlooks doesn’t make us unequivocally better; it makes us better at one particular kind of seeing. There is still infinitely more out there that none of us understand than what any of us have figured out. The ratio isn’t close.

When someone says “the facts are the facts,” what they’re really saying—without meaning to—is that the conversation is over; there’s nothing left to be curious about. The moment I stop being curious, though, is the moment I quietly become the thing I left conventional medicine to get away from.

The same blind spot, four different conversations

Once I noticed it, I started hearing it everywhere. Three more times in two days, actually.

My wife asked me something that’s been sitting with me since. How does a person go from supposedly fine one day to completely falling apart the next—ending up in a medically induced coma? She asked about a child, too, who fell into a pool, went to the hospital, and didn’t pass away until a week later. How does that happen?

I don’t have a tidy answer for either, and I won’t pretend to. What I can tell you is that “fine one day, falling apart the next” almost never means what it sounds like. The falling apart was usually underway for a long time, quietly, in places nobody was looking—the body holding the line until it simply couldn’t anymore. The visible collapse is just the moment the hidden math finally came due. I’ve written before about the gap between looking healthy and actually being well; this is that same gap, playing out at its most extreme.

Then a fellow coach mentioned, almost in passing, that their genetics simply let them handle certain foods and certain fat-to-protein ratios better than the next person. Maybe so. It could just as easily have been one of the thousand things—internal and external—that shifted across the very window when they changed what they were eating and how they ate it. Genetics is the explanation that lets us stop looking. The terrain shifting underneath us is the one that asks us to keep paying attention.

A clinic patient told me, with complete sincerity, that some of what they were feeling just comes with age—no matter how well you live or how clean you eat. I understand why that feels true. It’s also contradicted, plainly, by the people I meet who are thirty-plus years older and in a dramatically better position. Age is real; it’s just not the whole answer. “It’s just age” is the same move as “it’s just genetics” and “the facts are the facts”—a way to gently close a door that deserves to stay open.

Why certainty feels so much safer

That’s the thread running through all of it. We can be remarkably open and nuanced in one breath, then drop that nuance entirely in the next—usually the moment a tidy explanation lets us off the hook. The certainty isn’t malicious. It’s comfortable. Ambiguity is exhausting, and the human brain would genuinely rather hold a wrong answer than sit with no answer at all.

You can watch conventional medicine do this at scale. A particular set of symptoms shows up, the labs match a recognizable pattern, and a protocol gets applied—if the criteria are met, the framework follows. There’s real logic in that, and it genuinely works in a lot of cases; I want to be fair about that.

Where it breaks down is everything the criteria can’t capture. The mismatch between “these symptoms plus these labs equal this protocol” and the actual human being in the chair is, more often than not, all the individual reality you simply cannot see without working alongside that person over time—watching, asking, adjusting, week after week. A snapshot can’t hold a moving target.

The holistic space is not immune

This is the part I don’t think we say out loud enough in my world: the holistic space does the very same thing, with a different set of tools and a nicer-sounding name.

In place of medications, we reach for supplements. I’m not saying the two are equivalent—prescription drugs often carry far more dramatic and deleterious effects, and I’d never wave that away. Putting someone on twenty-plus supplements, though, isn’t as far a cry from five prescriptions for life as we’d like to believe. We pattern-match just as readily; we’ve simply swapped the pharmacy for the supplement cabinet. We’ll question everything, right up until it’s our own protocol on the table.

Even there, it doesn’t get simpler. There are absolutely individual situations where a specific medication or a specific supplement is exactly right, and sometimes the circumstances genuinely dictate that it’s for life. Certainty cuts both ways; being reflexively anti-medication is just another version of the same closed door.

Go one layer deeper and it gets less tidy still. What’s the environment this person actually lives in? Have they had surgeries that removed an organ and changed the whole calculus? Are they exposed to something they can’t currently get away from? Is there childhood trauma, unresolved, quietly shaping their physiology? Is their work genuinely, unrelentingly stressful—and is it unrealistic to ask them to simply walk away from it?

The number of variables is staggering, and most thoughtful practitioners on both sides know it. Naming it out loud is uncomfortable, though. It’s so much easier—and it feels so much safer—to project certainty than to sit in front of someone and honor how individual and ambiguous their situation truly is.

My framework is that there is no framework

This shows up on nearly every welcome call I do in my private practice. Someone asks what my program framework is, fully expecting a tidy answer—the meal plan, the protocol, the system. I tell them it’s different for every single person, and you can almost hear the record scratch.

I’ve been carnivore for over eight years. That fits the infinite complexity of my own day-to-day—my environment, my history, my epigenetics, and a hundred things I’m probably not even aware of. I do believe, under the vast majority of circumstances, that a carnivore approach is the best avenue for addressing the carnivore-shaped piece of someone’s puzzle.

Not everyone I work with is on strict carnivore, though. Some people aren’t ready to go full-bore yet, and a lot of the work that gets them there has nothing to do with what’s on their plate. Sometimes it’s:

  • sleep
  • stress management
  • relationships
  • their home environment
  • their medical history
  • their current medications
  • unresolved childhood trauma
  • a real lack of sun exposure
  • too much bright and blue light after the sun goes down

—and so many more I could keep us here for an hour naming.

When I sit with someone, I’m not scanning for symptoms and conditions to hit with a hammer. I’m looking at a person, as they actually are in the moment I meet them. That’s why the coaching relationship can run long; it takes real time and a lot of back-and-forth to get enough of a feel for someone’s complexity to start handing them information that genuinely fits—information that might be exactly right this week and not apply at all the next.

Trying to shoot a fly from a mile away on horseback

This is also why I can’t tell you, with a straight face, exactly how much of a given supplement a person ought to take. It’s a moving target.

Take magnesium glycinate—something I genuinely like and have watched serve a lot of people well. It almost doesn’t matter how many capsules someone takes in a day; how much they actually absorb, how well they put it to use, and how fast they burn through their own supply all shift constantly, sometimes inside a single twenty-four-hour window. Their stress, their sleep, their gut function, what else they ate that day—all of it moves the number.

I’ve come to think of this work as building a relationship and getting honestly comfortable with that ambiguity. We’re trying to shoot a fly from a mile away while riding horseback. It takes a broad understanding of human health, sure; it also takes an understanding of the specific person in front of you, of how humans tend to behave, of how this particular client or patient behaves inside all of that, and of a dozen quiet little factors we may never be fully conscious of while we’re supporting someone.

This is what makes it click for me. One person can be largely disease-free at a given moment while eating a fair amount of garbage—because their sleep, their light exposure, their stress, their sense of connection, and their environment all happen to be dialed in, often completely by accident. Another can be on a beautifully tailored carnivore diet and still be suffering, still be sick—because their sleep is wrecked, they never get outside, their job keeps them in a constant state of stress, and they feel deeply alone.

Same lever, opposite outcomes, because the lever was never the whole story. Everything is connected, which is exactly why no single piece gets to be the explanation.

We don’t know what we don’t know—and neither do I

That’s the irony I keep landing on. Everything is connected, and yet conventional medicine tends to treat each piece as its own isolated system; the holistic space—mine—just fails in the opposite direction, chasing one shiny variable down a rabbit hole while the bigger picture sits there unattended.

We all fall victim to not knowing what we don’t know. That’s not an insult; it’s the human condition. It’s also exactly how the Dunning-Kruger trap works—the less we’ve truly grappled with something, the more certain we tend to feel, because we can’t yet see the edges of our own ignorance. Staying open and curious at every step is the only real defense, and it’s a discipline, not a personality trait.

This isn’t the place to be falsely modest, so I’ll say the other half plainly. Those of us working with a flood of people day in and day out—across a wide spectrum, intimately involved in their food and their lifestyle and their actual lives—develop a feel for all of this that’s genuinely hard to come by any other way. There are people who’ve cultivated that depth without the high-volume caseload, and I have real respect for them; in my experience, they’re the exception, not the rule. Being guided by real-time outcomes, week after week, teaches you things that living by the randomized controlled trial alone never will.

I want to hold both of those truths at once, because that’s the entire point. The confidence is in the method, not in the conclusions. I trust the approach—stay close, stay curious, follow what the body actually does—precisely because the approach stays humble about any individual answer. The day I’m certain I’ve got someone figured out is the day I’ve stopped paying attention to them.

What I want you to sit with

When a friend tells me the facts are the facts, I know what he means, and I love him for it. I just can’t quite let myself land there. The facts we can see are a small, hard-won island in an ocean of things we haven’t yet learned how to look at.

That doesn’t discourage me. Honestly, it’s the most hopeful part of the whole thing—it means there’s always another layer to find, for me and for the person sitting across from me.

I hope this gives you a little permission to hold your own conclusions more loosely, and to stay curious about the very things you’re most sure you’ve already figured out. In my experience, so far, that’s usually right where the next answer is hiding.

Rance Edwards is a National Board Certified Health and Wellness Coach (NBC-HWC) with over 2,000 clinical hours of experience, specializing in chronic disease management and lifestyle medicine.

If you’re tired of being handed a protocol and want someone who’ll actually sit with your specifics—all of them—that’s the whole reason I do this. Book a free discovery call—no pressure, just a conversation about where you are and what might help.

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