Dr. Jeffrey Rediger has spent more than thirty years asking the question most of medicine steps around: why do some people recover from illnesses that are supposed to be incurable? He is a Harvard psychiatrist with a Master of Divinity, a man raised close to the land in a deeply religious Midwestern world who went on to study both the soul and the body — and in his book Cured, he did the unglamorous work of tracking down the documented cases of “spontaneous” remission and asking what those survivors actually had in common. What he found kept pointing past the biology alone, toward something quieter and harder to measure: whether a person had come home to their own life.
His new book, Relationsick, co-authored with Dr. Lissa Rankin, MD (bestselling author of Mind Over Medicine), names the pattern out loud. Relationsickness is what happens when a lifetime of over-giving — being the good one, the one who anticipates everyone’s needs and buries their own — stops being a story about character and becomes a story about physiology. A nervous system kept in chronic self-abandonment never fully stands down; the body stays inflamed, the immune system frays, and disease finds its opening. In this conversation, Dr. Nasha and Dr. Jeff sit with the reframe at the center of it all: that being endlessly, selflessly good — the giving tree who ends the story as a stump — can be an express lane to illness, and that self-protection is not selfishness but medicine.
This is a conversation about what heals when the diet and the supplements aren’t enough — about fawning mistaken for kindness, about the difference between martyrdom and love, and about the strange grace of an illness that finally gives a person permission to matter to themselves. For anyone who has done everything right, given everything they had, and quietly wondered why their body still broke.
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