I've been having a mysterious chronic health problem for the past several years and have learned a bunch of things that I wish I knew back when all of this started. I am thinking about how to write down what I've learned so others can benefit, but what's tricky here is that while the knowledge I've gained seems wide-ranging, it's also extremely specific to whatever my problems are, so I don't know how well it generalizes to other people. I welcome suggestions on how to make my efforts more useful to others. I also welcome pointers to books/articles/posts that already discuss the stuff below in a competent way.

But anyway here is some stuff I could talk about:

• Rationality lessons of mysterious health problems: certain health conditions (like mine) are quite mysterious, e.g. having no clear cause or shifting symptoms or nonspecific symptoms. This makes the health problem not only challenging on the basic suffering/emotional level, but also at an epistemic level. Some weird epistemic stuff happens when you are dealing with such a health problem, including:
  • Your "most likely diagnosis" will keep shifting or will have a wide distribution, which can be confusing to reason about (it's almost as if the health problem is an agent diagonalizing against me). My "most likely diagnosis" has changed like five times.
  • Some mistakes I think I made trying to reason too literally about symptoms and ruled things out too early instead of just being like "ok maybe I have this thing" and then just trying the low-effort/safe interventions just to see if they help.
  • Weird interacting nature of symptoms: ignoring certain symptoms because they aren't the most painful can end up being a bad idea because eliminating that symptom can help with a lot of other symptoms, because the mind/body is weird and interconnected.
  • I think turning to certain quacks is actually rational in the case of certain chronic illnesses. These quacks were never the first choice for the ill person, but after the conventional/established medicine's interventions have all failed and established medicine basically shrugs and says "we don't know what this even is", and gives up on you, it makes sense to keep going anyway and try wackier things.
  • You need to do "rationality on hard mode" -- when you're stressed, when you have brain fog, when you have few productive hours in the day, when your emotions get all messed up.
  • There is a kind of "lawyery" thing you have to do, where you simulate the objections people will raise about things you should have done or things you should try, and you have to preempt all that and try it and be like "see? I already tried it" so that they don't have easy outs.
• How to deal with the health bureaucracy (US-specific, but what I know is even more specific): how to get the benefits you need from health providers, how to deal with insurance, how to get referrals, how to push providers with questions, optimizing which health insurance to have.
• How to do health research: how to find information about symptoms, how to organize your research, how to ask good questions when meeting doctors, the importance of talking to a lot of people.
• Specific things I've learned about different drugs, nootropics, health devices, practices, etc., and which ones seem the most promising.
• General life outlook stuff:
  • How to orient toward "this being your new life"
  • How to stay motivated to live life and accomplish things while chronically ill; the hardcoreness of being ill for so long and what this does to your personality.
• How to maintain a "health tracker": how to keep track of your symptoms, what you did each day, what you ate, how you slept, etc. for future reference, and whether or not tracking any of this is useful.
• Productivity hacks:
  • Daily goal-setting: how to get shit done even if you feel like shit every day.
  • The importance of having a "health buddy" who has similar health problems who you can talk to all the time, as having a chronic health problem can be very isolating (very few people can understand or support you in the way you need).
• The importance of just trying lots of things to see what helps, and what this looks like in practice.
• Basic health stuff that seems good to do regardless of what the cause of your symptoms is: nutrition, exercise, sleep, wackier stuff.