A good doctor takes your existing lab results as data to use to generate a hypothesis about your condition in order to think of other tests to run or other things to try or other specialists to refer you to. Again, the appropriate response to “your lab results look normal” is “I don’t fucking care, I still feel like shit, do your damn job - no wonder everyone is flocking to alternative medicine and chatgpt if you don’t understand that what I want is results, not a shrug.”

Basically all healthcare systems function like this - most doctors, most of the time, are phoning it in. They have tons of other patients to see, and a tee time to get to, and the default assumption is that if the standard tests don’t bring anything up then the patient is fine, and the condition will resolve itself, or else the patient is simply a hypochondriac. The way you get them to take you seriously is by being annoying as fuck and telling them to do their damn job, and often, doing their job for them by looking into things that could be causing your condition yourself. You could look into getting a healthcare advocate, someone who knows the system and can ask for the right things to get you to the person you need; or a concierge doctor, a doctor you pay directly to actually be a fucking doctor and either solve your problem or help you manage it. Or you could reach out in your social network to see if you have any connections in the medical field who could point you in the right direction for appropriate treatment or referrals.

And I will note the distinct possibility that the doctors you are seeing and who are dismissing you might be right in their implicit assumption that you are simply a hypochondriac - in which case you still have a problem, and you need to see a mental health care professional.

But when trying to figure out any health issue, it is categorically true that the more you investigate, the more possibilities you find, and the longer your list of things to try becomes. The struggle of someone actually working to solve their health problem is that they have too many things to do, too many disappointments to face, and an endless array of treatments and protocols they need to try to prioritize. If your complaint is that there is nothing to be done, then you aren’t actually trying, which is why no one wants to listen to your complaints.