My patients can't describe symptoms. How do I stop feeling overwhelmed?

A patient sits across from you. They cannot name what hurts, or when, or how much. You feel the full weight of every possible cause land on you at once, as if you must solve it in this one conversation. That weight is not real. It is a story you tell yourself — that diagnosis is one act of insight, not many small acts of narrowing down. No physician who ever lived worked from certainty. They worked from the next useful step. What is in your power is smaller than you think, and enough. Not the full picture. The next observation. The next order. The next thing you can safely rule out today.