By Valérie Orsoni — Biohacker & Longevity Expert
Valérie Orsoni is a biohacker, author of 56 books, and founder of biohacker.fr. She has been tracking her biology through N=1 self-experimentation protocols since 1998. She has completed a Stanford Genetics Longevity Research certificate, a Stanford Medicine Nutrition Science certificate program and is currently enrolled in the Stanford Medicine GLP-1s & weight loss certification program. She was named in the Top 50 Longevity Leaders by Life Spanning magazine and is currently the #1 on the Longevity Cup Leaderboard (chronological age -23 years).
The part I usually don’t show you
You usually hear from me after the win. “Here is how I reversed the irreversible.” What you don’t see is the messy middle: the dead ends, the wrong hypotheses, the specialists who shrug.
This article is the messy middle, written in real time, before I have the answer.
For two years I have had pain on my right side that nobody can explain. I have not solved it yet.
But I want to show you exactly how I hunt for a root cause, because the method matters more than any single answer. And thanks to my method…I did find the root cause, after 2 years of searching!
The pain
The pain lives on my right side, in a band that runs from the middle of my glute up toward my right kidney. It started about two years ago, with no trigger I can recall: no fall, no race, no new training block. One day it was simply there.
It is a dull, deep ache, never sharp. And it comes and goes: I can be pain-free for three days, then have it for a full day. Sitting for a long time is the main trigger. Running doesn’t hurt, and neither do long strides. On a bad day, stairs can. A figure-four stretch eases it.
It hasn’t stopped me. I simply train around it: on pain days, upper body and abs; on good days, legs. But manageable is not the same as solved, and I want to know why.
Three countries, many experts, no answer
Over two years I have had physical exams, X-rays and two full-body MRIs, and seen osteopathic doctors, chiropractors and my family physician in three countries: France, Germany and the US. The imaging never showed anything.
I don’t blame any of them.
Each one looked through the lens of their own specialty, and the problem may simply sit between those lenses.
That is a pattern I see again and again in hard cases.
The Corsica session stands out. Four days of pain, then six months of none. Something in that deep manual work changed the mechanics, and that is a clue in itself: it points to a structural, local problem rather than something systemic.
The thigh exercise taught me something too. It brings instant relief, and for a while I took that as proof it was working. Then I asked myself why. Raising my knee flexes my hip, and hip flexion opens the space deep in the buttock where things can get pinched. So the relief may simply mean I’m taking the pressure off for a moment, not fixing anything. I don’t read relief as a cure anymore. I read it as data: it tells me where the problem lives.
How I research a mystery: My fail-proof method
Applying the following process led me to two suspects: one my doctor raised…after 2 years of research (!), and one no practitioner had mentioned, whose map matches my pain almost exactly.
Here’s the method, what the suspects are, how I’m testing them, and the routine I’ve started.