Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about fairy tales because the diseases I’m seeing in clinic right now sound like they escaped from storybooks.
Let’s start with scurvy.
If you know anything about it, you probably picture sailors on wooden ships, mouths bleeding, teeth falling out — a disease supposedly solved in the 1700s when the British Navy discovered that limes worked miracles.
We filed scurvy away as history. A museum diagnosis.
Except it’s back.
Not on ships; in American clinics. And not because food is scarce, but because some patients on powerful weight-loss medications like Ozempic or Wegovy eat so little variety that they’re missing basic Vitamin C. Bleeding gums. Bruising. Fatigue. The same deficiency, different century.
Then there’s rickets, the Victorian disease. Children with bowed legs and soft bones, a condition we thought we eliminated when we started fortifying milk with vitamin D.
But pediatricians are seeing it again. Not from poverty, but from well-intentioned choices: kids drinking trendy plant milks that aren’t fortified with Vitamin D and, restrictive diets missing key nutrients. The bone deformities look identical to textbook cases from the 1800s.
And at the opposite extreme: vitamin B6 toxicity. Not from starvation but from overdose. Energy drinks, supplement powders, fortified waters stacking on top of each other until people accidentally poison themselves with a vitamin the body needs in tiny doses. The symptoms mimic nerve damage.
These aren’t diseases of deprivation. They’re diseases of distortion.
We’re drowning in health hacks, viral shortcuts and influencers selling extremes.
The fairy tale we actually need? Goldilocks.
Human nutrition works best in the middle; not too little, not too much, just right. Real food, variety, and moderation. When we chase extremes, even in the name of health, we can accidentally recreate diseases we thought belonged to history.
Modern medicine isn’t just about new drugs and technology. It’s about remembering the basics. The quiet truths that don’t trend online: eat broadly, question miracle claims, and treat your body less like an experiment and more like a long story you want to keep telling.
Fairy tales were never really about magic. They were about wisdom. And we still need a lot of that!
