Chapter 3: Side Effects

In medicine, every treatment comes with a profile. Efficacy on one side, side effects on the other. The informed consent process is supposed (operative word, here) to walk you through both before you decide. Consenting to a treatment isn’t signing up for a specific result, it’s always, on some level, a roll of the dice. There’s no way to actually know how your body will or won’t respond. The best a doctor or you can do is to carefully weigh the chances and make a deliberate decision. Side effects are the changes that weren't the target. Sometimes unwelcome. Sometimes welcomed.

This chapter is about side effects. Specifically, the good kind.

There comes a point in medical training where you're forced to make a decision that nobody announces as a decision. It arrives quietly, gradually forced by the accumulating weight of everything you've learned about how the human body works and how it can fall apart. With every organ system, every cellular pathway, every mechanism of function, comes a corresponding catalog of ways that system, tissue, or organ can fail. The list is long and it never stops growing from day one.

And so you choose: you become a worrier, or you don't.

A worrier thinks: anything can go wrong at any moment, and they’re right. A non-worrier thinks: so much could have gone wrong, and yet hasn't, and is also right. When I faced this decision in my training, I landed firmly in the second camp — which is, I should say, occasionally a source of friction with my wife.

Taylor will tell me one of our kids has a complaint and I'll respond with something that lands closer to being dismissive than reassuring. She'll gently repeat herself, asking me to think about what we can actually do about it, and that reframe usually produces a more useful answer than my first. But my default remains the same physician's shrug I developed somewhere in the middle of training: kids are resilient. The body knows how to recover. Worry is expensive, and most of what it costs you doesn't buy anything.

This disposition isn't recklessness. It's rooted in a deep conviction that the body, when given what it needs, has a remarkable capacity to heal. You can't simultaneously believe that and also believe that every fever, ache, or pain is a crisis.

There's a joke in our house whenever a package arrives on the front porch. One of the kids will spot a box through the window and sigh: "It's probably vitamins."

It's funny because it's true. It usually is vitamins.

That's the honest answer to what a sick day looks like in our household: tinctures, immune support, targeted supplementation, and a calibrated amount of watchful waiting. Between my medical training and cumulative parenting experience Taylor and I have logged across four children, I know two things with confidence: kids get sick, and they usually get better regardless of what you do. It's physiology, Creation in action. The immune system, given appropriate support and reasonable time, usually does what it was designed to do.

I want to be careful to say this clearly, because I don’t want you to take my default approach as direct medical advice: the most powerful tool you have as a parent is your intuition. It’s not in a cabinet or on a prescription pad, it’s in between your own two ears. A parent who knows their child — their attitude, their mannerisms, the particular quality of an off day versus a truly sick day — has insightful clinical information no physician can replicate in a 15-minute visit or with a lab test. Trust that above all else. And be willing to act on it when it's telling you something is wrong.

Our pediatrician operates on a similar philosophy. We usually see her just once a year — a check-in on growth, development, the broad strokes of health. Beyond that, she's largely hands-off, which suits us fine. The worst we've seen across four kids is a lacerated forehead that required a handful of stitches. For that, we were grateful for the Emergency Department and didn't pretend otherwise.

I said in Chapter 2 that Taylor began asking hard questions of our pediatrician. I was deliberate about leaving it there, but this time I’ll say it out loud: we stopped vaccinating our children.

That decision didn't arrive as an ideology. It arrived as a conscious risk-benefit calculation that produced a different answer than the one the Science expected.

When our pediatrician couldn't clearly articulate — beyond standard boilerplate reasoning — why our daughter needed a vaccine against a disease that had been eradicated from our country for several decades, the analysis became more straightforward. Known risk, however small, against theoretical benefit that was smaller still. The math pointed in one direction. We followed it.

This is another spot where I want to be careful, because this is the place where a reader can most easily assume they know what I'm saying. I'm not necessarily making a universal claim about vaccination. I'm describing a specific decision made by a specific family, applying a specific framework to a specific set of circumstances. The framework — don't accept institutional consensus as a substitute for evidence, seek truth over convention — is the same framework running through every chapter of this series. The vaccination decision was one application of it and the calculations for your situation may genuinely be different. I think one of the biggest traps in modern healthcare is blanket recommendations either way. Do your own homework. 

For us, it felt like standing on solid ground. Taylor and I had done our homework, reached a conclusion we could defend, and made the call that backed our convictions. There was something clarifying about that.

Professionally, it was the most exposed I had felt since the crack first appeared in Karen's living room. I was a physician making a choice that most of my colleagues would consider irresponsible. I didn't broadcast it. I'm a private person at work — many of my unconventional convictions still aren't widely known in professional circles. But the weight of it was there. The awareness that the gap between my private conclusions and my professional context was widening, and that eventually those two things would have to meet was lingering more and more in the back of my mind. 

The meeting of those two was still ahead of me. For now, we made the decision, stood by it, and moved on.

Not everything always resolved cleanly.

My oldest daughter had some swollen lymph nodes appear that didn't improve the way I expected. We watched them for several days. They didn't go away.

I know enough about swollen lymph nodes from training — and knowing it is exactly the problem. You can't unknow what you’ve already learned. The differential diagnosis for persistent lymphadenopathy in a child sits in your mind whether you want it to or not, and the entries on that list range from entirely benign to things no parent is equipped to consider calmly no matter their training.

At that moment, I remembered the family culture I grew up in. Don't ask questions you don't want answers to. I felt that pull — the specific temptation to watch a little longer, wait a little more, to avoid the conversation that might produce an answer I wasn't ready for or didn’t want to hear.

I asked the question anyway.

We saw our pediatrician. We ordered labs, and thankfully, everything came back clean.

The relief was significant, and what I learned from that experience was that the non-worrier posture has distinct limits. The inclination towards trusting the body's capacity to heal is not the same thing as avoiding the hard questions. Those are different things, and it took a few anxious days watching lymph nodes to feel the difference clearly. 

Another time, my second daughter, when she was about eight or nine months old, ran a fever of 103F. She was clearly sicker than a standard childhood illness — the physician's instinct that something was off was present, and I didn't dismiss it. She too, recovered. But the fear that lived in those hours was real, and it was specifically the fear of a father, not a physician. The clinical training receded. What remained was a man hoping his child would be alright. Little did I know at the time, I’d face a much more advanced form of this same tension later. 

Those two moments also clarified something about the worrier/non-worrier decision I described earlier — it isn't always as fixed as I made it sound. You typically have a natural disposition towards one side, but a few days of watching your daughter's lymph nodes and a night next to a nine-month-old running 103 can move you across that line whether you planned to go or not. The change isn’t permanent; you will usually move back. You just discover that the disposition is a default, not a fortress. And discovering the limit of it — feeling the fear fully, acting through it anyway — is its own form of the framework working. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is that you weren't sure.

And sometimes something comes up that forces you to one side of the equation or the other, no matter how strong your natural disposition.

For most of the years covered up until this point, Taylor led. She was the one reading, researching, asking the questions, and pushing further down the road we had agreed to walk together while I consumed the conventional curriculum full-time without the bandwidth to seriously engage a parallel framework. I followed, calculated, and occasionally dragged my feet when the gap between our private choices and my professional identity felt too wide.

That dynamic has since shifted. As my functional medicine training deepened, I've been able to bring more clinical structure to the choices we were already making intuitively — to put science behind the convictions we had been living out largely on instinct. We've both led at different points. The direction has always been the same.

Above our kitchen table, where we eat most of our meals together as a family, there's a framed statement — our family's culture, in writing, displayed where it can be read and absorbed and argued with and eventually, we hope, owned by our children as well.

The Morgan family lives intentionally. We seek to reflect God’s original design in all we do. We walk in intimacy with the Lord and with each other. We desire God’s best for our lives and love to learn, work hard and build together. 

What I didn't anticipate was how early the owning would begin.

Our kids, like most, have no filter. This is mostly a feature, but occasionally becomes a liability — it creates moments of humor and moments of social exposure in equal measure. It has not been rare for one of them — usually whoever is youngest at the time — to loudly evaluate the contents of a stranger's grocery cart. The verdict of "healthy" and more often, “not healthy” gets deployed in public with a confidence that is, depending on the distance from the other person’s shopping cart, either admirable or slightly embarrassing.

But the grocery cart is a smaller expression. The birthday cake is where this culture we’re building gets real legs.

Our children will regularly decline cake or treats at other kids' parties when they can identify that the ingredients don't meet the standards of our own household. Not because we've forbidden it, not because there are consequences, but because they've internalized the reasoning well enough to make the call on their own. Other times, they'll walk away from a half-finished serving and explain, matter-of-factly, that they didn't think finishing it would be good for their bodies.

I want to be careful not to make this sound like deprivation or rigidity. We reward this behavior when we identify it. Our goal is not for our children (or ourselves, for that matter) to be driven by fear around food or health. We believe — genuinely, not just as a parenting strategy — that God gave our human bodies a remarkable capacity to heal and thrive. We are not fragile creatures. The goal was never to protect our children from every suboptimal ingredient in the world. It was to give them a framework for why some choices serve the body and some don't, and to trust them to apply it.

The side effect of that — the good kind — is children who choose well when we're not watching.

There's no step-by-step process for this in the conventional parenting literature. But watching a nine-year-old set down a piece of birthday cake and walk away because she decided it wasn't worth it — that moment, more than most, told me our unconventional path was producing something real.

The crux was never about sweets themselves. It was about choosing the sweeter thing: stewardship instead of immediate gratification. It’s about fostering a perspective that’s focused on something farther out than most 9 year olds are seeing. It’s about feeling the ebb and flow of your body, when to push, and when to yield. It’s about learning the dance of life through pleasure and discipline. Somehow, thankfully, kids seem to have gotten that memo without being handed it explicitly. Maybe there’s more to that frame above our kitchen table than we thought. 

As beautiful and rewarding as it is to see starting to sprout up in my children, what I hadn’t yet fully reckoned with was what it would cost me to hold these convictions outside of our home. The cost of walking my own walk in a professional world that was about to make my private conclusions and professional context meet. 

That's where Chapter 4 begins.