Anyone who has ever had a chronic illness or chronic pain has heard it a hundred times:

It’s a phrase we dread. Sometimes what we-with-disabling-chronic-conditions should try is yoga or meditation—a suggestion that is equally irksome but should be the subject of its own essay—but more and more often, “what we should try” is related to a particular regimen of diet and eating that will return us to the presumably symptom-free life we led before becoming disabled. And it will do so “naturally”—that is, without traditional medicine.

It’s not that we don’t appreciate it when friends and family, or even kind strangers, take our suffering seriously and actively attempt to participate in its amelioration. Most of us have tried many of the things people have suggested we try. (Okay, sometimes I don’t appreciate it when a random person in a grocery line sees my cane and lectures me about the...

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