In this episode of Ditch the Labcoat, Dr. Mark Bonta does something different. For the first time on the podcast, he speaks with a former patient.
Nora Rabah Rodden joins the show not as a clinician, but as someone who lived for years with debilitating symptoms that medicine couldn’t explain or fix. Despite normal tests and repeated reassurance, her pain, GI symptoms, fatigue, and nervous system distress persisted. What she encountered instead was a gap in care. Not a lack of effort, but a lack of framework.
Nora shares how learning about neuroplasticity and nervous system patterning finally gave her symptoms context. Not imagined. Not psychological. Learned, reinforced, and reversible. That experience became the foundation for why she later co-founded Nervana.
Together, they explore why so many patients are dismissed once serious disease is ruled out, how threat signalling and conditioned responses can keep the body stuck in symptoms, and why telling patients “nothing is wrong” is often the most harmful message of all. The conversation breaks down the science of neuroplastic recovery in plain language, while staying honest about its limits and responsibilities.
This episode is about what happens when medicine runs out of explanations, and what becomes possible when we stop treating unexplained symptoms as a dead end and start treating the nervous system as something that can learn, adapt, and heal.
