This one is personal, and it isn't about kids. But it's the clearest example I've ever lived through of why the SOLVED method matters, so I'm going to walk through it the way I'd walk through any failure investigation.
The problem, as first reported
A family member in my care, a woman in her late seventies, fell and broke her wrist. That was the problem as everyone first saw it. A broken wrist has a known fix: set it, cast it, wait.
If we had stopped there, we would have fixed the wrist and missed everything that mattered.
Ask why
The fall wasn't random. Around the same time, her left side was getting weaker. Her left hand wasn't doing what she told it to, and her left leg was starting to drag. It was getting worse, not better.
That's the moment a symptom stops being the problem and becomes evidence. A broken wrist doesn't make one side of your body weaken. Something else was going on, and the fall was just the first place it showed up.
So the real question became: why is her left side failing?
Ask why again
Imaging answered that one. There was a 7 centimeter mass on the right side of her brain, pressing on it. Seven centimeters is almost three inches. That is not a small thing hiding in a corner.
Here's a detail worth teaching. The right side of the brain controls the left side of the body. The wiring crosses over. So a mass on the right produced weakness on the left. The symptom showed up on the opposite side from the cause.
That happens in every kind of system I've ever worked on. The place where something breaks is often not the place where the problem lives.
And again
Surgeons removed the mass. The biopsy answered the next why: it was lung cancer that had spread to the brain.
She had already been through lung cancer treatment before, including surgery to remove part of her left lung. That fix was real, but it didn't last. Some of the cause was still in the system.
Here's the full chain:
- She broke her wrist because she fell.
- She fell because her left side was failing.
- Her left side was failing because a mass was pressing on the right side of her brain.
- The mass was there because lung cancer had spread.
Four whys. Every answer was true, and every answer was incomplete on its own. Stop at any one of them and you're treating a symptom.
Verify before you call it solved
In quality work, you don't call a problem solved because you took action. You call it solved when the data says so. After surgery, the next step was a PET scan, which checks the whole body for active cancer.
Here's how it works in plain terms. The patient gets a small dose of radioactive sugar. Cancer cells burn sugar faster than normal tissue, so they light up on the scan. Each spot gets a number called an SUV, which measures how brightly it lights up.
What I appreciated, as a measurement guy, is that the report gives you a baseline. Normal blood measured 1.7. Normal liver measured 2.0. Those are the reference values. A reading well above them is a signal. A reading near them is much less clear. That's the same logic as a control chart: you never judge a number alone, you judge it against what normal looks like.
The results:
- The brain, where the mass was removed: no active cancer seen.
- Neck, abdomen, pelvis, and bones: clear.
- Lungs: three spots. One measured 8.2, which is clearly active. One measured 3.8, a gray zone. One measured 2.0, right at the liver baseline.
The verdict: the cancer is active again, but limited to a few spots in the lungs, with nothing found anywhere else. "Limited" is the word that matters. It changes what treatment can do.
Radiation starts next week.
What this has to do with your kid
None of what happened here required a medical degree from the family side. It required a few habits. Nobody accepted "she fell" as the whole answer. Somebody asked why her left side kept getting weaker. When the scan came back, we wanted to see the numbers and know what normal looked like before deciding what they meant.
Those are thinking habits, and they're teachable. That's what the SOLVED method is: the same root cause process I used for twenty years in plants and labs, scaled down so a 10-year-old can run it.
Kids practice it on lost homework and broken bike chains, where being wrong is cheap. The whole point is that the habit is already there on the day the problem isn't cheap at all.
I'll share an update after radiation.
A note: I'm not a MD, and this is one family's experience, shared with permission. Medical decisions belong with your care team. If you want to see the method itself, there's a free starter kit at solved360.com.