I have a tendency to develop what I call hangnails, although that isn’t really what they are. They aren’t the painful kind that develop along the sides of the nail, catch on something and tear. These are little fuzzy, frayed pieces of cuticle that appear around the base of my fingernails. They don’t hurt or bleed. They just make the edges of my cuticles look ragged.

Over the years, I have noticed something about them that continues to amaze me.

When they appear, I take a multivitamin.

And they disappear.

Not eventually. Often within hours, and certainly by the next day.

I don’t pull them off. I don’t trim them. I don’t put anything on my hands. The frayed cuticles simply seem to heal. I’ve actually looked at my fingers afterward and wondered what happened to those little pieces of skin. Did they somehow reattach? Were they absorbed? Did the surrounding tissue change enough that I simply couldn’t see them anymore?

I don’t know.

I also don’t know exactly what I am deficient in when this happens, or even whether “deficient” is technically the right word. There are quite a few micronutrients involved in maintaining healthy skin. Vitamins A and C, several of the B vitamins, zinc, iron, copper, selenium and essential fatty acids have all been associated with the health and integrity of the skin and its surrounding structures. Zinc, vitamin C and vitamin A, in particular, have well-established roles in epithelial repair, collagen production, cell division and wound healing.

Perhaps I am running a little low on one of them. Perhaps it’s a combination. Perhaps something else is going on entirely.

This isn’t a scientific experiment. I haven’t had blood drawn before and after, and I can’t tell you which ingredient in the multivitamin is responsible. But I have watched this happen enough times over the years that I have come to recognize those frayed cuticles as a little warning light on my body’s dashboard.

And what fascinates me isn’t really my cuticles. It is how quickly they change.

How Fast Can We Heal?

We tend to think of healing as a slow process.

Eat a better diet and perhaps you’ll be healthier years from now. Start exercising and gradually your body will change. Take a supplement and maybe, over time, it will have an effect.

But our bodies aren’t actually operating on that timetable.

They are changing every second.

Cut yourself shaving and the response begins almost immediately. Blood vessels constrict. Platelets gather. A clot forms. Immune cells arrive. Signals are sent. Cells begin the process of rebuilding damaged tissue. Eventually a scab forms, and sometime later it falls off to reveal fresh skin underneath.

We’ve all watched this happen so many times that there is nothing remarkable about it.

But think about what has actually occurred.

Your body has identified an injury, protected the area, defended it against infection, removed damaged material and constructed new living tissue in its place.

If we weren’t so accustomed to seeing it, we might call it miraculous.

And it can’t happen without raw materials.

Protein, amino acids, vitamins and minerals all participate in tissue repair. Vitamin C is necessary for collagen synthesis. Vitamin A plays a role in epithelial cell differentiation. Zinc is required for DNA and protein synthesis and cell division. Nutritional status can influence multiple stages of wound healing.

The vitamin doesn’t heal the wound.

The body heals the wound.

The vitamin is one of the things the body may need in order to do it.

That distinction seems important to me.

What We Can’t See

My cuticles are unusual only because they give me something I can actually watch.

Most of what happens after I swallow that multivitamin is invisible.

I can’t see what is happening in my liver or intestinal lining. I can’t see an enzyme functioning differently because a necessary cofactor is suddenly available. I can’t watch immune cells, collagen formation, cellular metabolism or any of the thousands of biochemical processes taking place throughout my body.

But I can see my fingers.

And when something that was visibly frayed in the morning looks normal later that day, it makes me wonder what else may have changed that I can’t see.

This is where I think we sometimes underestimate the body’s ability to heal and reshape itself.

Anyone who has worked in natural or integrative medicine for long enough has seen or heard stories of remarkably rapid improvements following a change in diet, supplementation, fasting, botanical medicine or some other intervention. Sometimes these stories are dismissed precisely because the improvement seems too dramatic or too fast.

Of course, anecdotes aren’t proof. People improve for reasons we don’t understand. Symptoms wax and wane. Coincidences happen. Placebo effects are real. And what produces a dramatic response in one person may do absolutely nothing for another.

Natural medicine certainly isn’t one size fits all.

But I also don’t think we should assume that a rapid improvement is impossible simply because it is rapid.

The body is capable of changing very quickly. We know this because it does so constantly.

Perhaps the more useful question is whether the body has what it needs to make that change.

Reading the Signs

This is also one of the things I appreciate about good naturopathic medicine.

Understanding nutritional status isn’t as simple as buying a bottle of vitamins. Nor is it necessarily as simple as ordering a standard blood panel and looking for something marked “low.”

The body gives us clues.

Skin, hair, nails, gums, the tongue, digestion, energy levels, sleep patterns, circles under the eyes and other outward signs can often reflect nutritional problems.

A good naturopathic physician knows how to look for those clues, combine them with a person’s diet, history and symptoms, and use appropriate laboratory testing when necessary. The goal isn’t to take every supplement on the shelf. It is to understand what the individual body may need and, equally important, what it doesn’t need.

The same is true on a larger scale. Nutrition doesn’t operate independently from metabolism, inflammation, immune function or the microbiome. These are interconnected systems, something we explore regularly in Townsend Letter.

I still don’t know what makes those little frayed cuticles disappear. Maybe someday I’ll get curious enough to have the blood work done and figure it out.

For now, I’m content to let them remain a small mystery and a useful reminder to take my vitamins and be prepared to be amazed, again.