What Is Root Cause Medicine?
When it comes to illness, root cause practitioners distinguish symptoms from underlying root causes. While symptoms are the body’s way of communicating problems, they are not the cause of illness. Symptoms express a body’s attempts to heal, much like the way your car’s check engine light demonstrates your engine has an issue.
Root cause practitioners provide relief from symptoms using natural approaches. Their goal is to uncover and help heal the root causes of illness. In doing so, they facilitate the body’s natural healing ability so that symptoms can be alleviated naturally.
I believe that identifying and addressing the underlying root causes of disease whenever possible leads to the most positive and enduring health outcomes for clients.
Multiple factors contribute to both health and illness. These factors include but aren’t limited to: Diet, lifestyle, genetics, psycho-emotional, spiritual, socioeconomic, environmental issues, and more.
When working with a client, I treat the whole person by uncovering, evaluating, and treating the root causes of illness (aka, obstacles to good health). I recognize that lifestyle choices are the single largest contributor to chronic disease. Among U.S. adults, 90 percent of Type 2 diabetes, 80 percent of cardiovascular disease, 70 percent of stroke, and 70 percent of colon cancer are potentially preventable by modifiable lifestyle changes.
While I understand wanting a “quick fix,” achieving and maintaining good health takes both time and work. To identify the root causes of illness, I spend 75-90 minutes with clients in an initial consult compared to an average 20 minute appointment with a conventionally trained medical doctor.
Because I focus on root causes, I may be a good fit for individuals who have struggled with unresolved symptoms for months or years, who have tried Western medicine’s approach of putting a band aid on symptoms, who have been told their labs are normal despite the number of signs and symptoms they are reporting.
We have been living in the current healthcare paradigm for so long that most people do not even realize that there is another, more effective and more logical, way to approach health and the prevention and healing of chronic illness. This new approach to wellness might just change the way you think about your own health.
Conventional healthcare:
Is reactionary. Doctors wait for you to get sick and then deal with the problem.
Is diagnosis-focused. Focused on determining "What" the problem is and giving it a diagnostic name and code.
Emphasizes symptom management with prescriptions. Focused on prescribing pharmaceutical drugs to improve symptoms of the aforementioned diagnosis.
Root cause medicine:
Is preventive. Aims to identify and correct potential nutrition and lifestyle issues that could lead to illness before illness occurs.
Is root cause-focused. The focus is not on asking "What" is going on, but more importantly "Why?"
Includes nutrition and lifestyle treatment. Treatment protocols address and correct the multi-factorial nutrition and lifestyle issues that underlie the most common contributors to chronic illness.
The conventional healthcare model does not emphasize true prevention of chronic illness. True prevention can be boiled down to proper nutrition and lifestyle guidance while individuals are still healthy. Sadly, the current system does not equip physicians with the in-depth knowledge and skills to use basic preventive and highly effective nutrition and lifestyle therapies. On average, students received 23.9 contact hours of nutrition instruction during medical school (range: 2–70 h). Only 40 schools required the minimum 25 h recommended by the National Academy of Sciences. Most instructors (88%) expressed the need for additional nutrition instruction at their institutions.
The current system focuses on making a diagnosis and prescribing a symptom-relieving pharmaceutical drug but it does a huge disservice to the patient. By not asking why the patient became sick and addressing these underlying issues, the body is denied a true opportunity to heal, which the body often can do, given the proper root cause approach. Symptom management alone can lead to a worsening of the initial illness and make medication doses no longer adequate as well as allow the underlying problem to manifest as new, additional ailments. If that isn’t enough, many of the medicines that are prescribed to suppress symptoms cause their own side effect which means these new problems might have their own set of symptoms and require additional medications.
Conventional medicine rarely acknowledges that the body has an incredible capacity to heal and can and will do so when root causes are addressed. When someone is diagnosed with a chronic illness, the implied message is that this illness was their genetic fate and the focus then becomes helping alleviate the symptoms that are believed to be inevitable.
Symptoms are the body's alarm system telling us that something is not right and it is the job of practitioners and physicians, to try and figure out the root cause(s), and help the body heal. Western medicine is great for acute, life-threatening ailments. However, for chronic, non-acute illnesses and imbalances, root cause medicine is the only logical approach. Root cause medicine is a long-term, foundational solution to chronic illness.
Want to figure out what the root cause of your symptoms is? Get in touch!