How is a Root Cause approach different?

Addressing symptoms versus addressing root cause.

I am asking the ‘Why’ question. Why does your body feel compromised, causing you to feel the way you do? It’s about truly getting down to the root of the problem. Strange that this isn’t always the approach, isn’t it?

When it comes to addressing the most common 21st-century health issues like chronic pain, chronic fatigue, infertility, gut issues, depression and brain fog, and the inability to lose weight, the established modern medical approach fails, and in fact, it perpetuate the problem because it doesn’t address the root cause nor educate you on what causes these conditions. Make sense?

When it comes to these chronic health issues, only addressing the symptom is essentially equivalent to putting on a band-aid. While the pain may be masked by this approach, leaving you feeling better in the short-term, it fails to address the root cause and thus removing the band-aid results in the return of symptoms.

For example, the conventional approach would be to prescribe anti-acid pharmaceuticals like Prilosec to treat acid reflux or heartburn. Our approach, however, would be to look for reasons that have caused the body’s natural ability to deal with stomach acid to have gone awry and would potentially look for nutrient deficiency required to make stomach acid and/or unwelcome gut bacteria and would then design a plan to address this which would likely lead to the end of heartburn symptoms, permanently.

When you don’t address the underlying root cause(s) there is no exit plan or end to treatments, which in most cases consist of pharmaceutical drugs. Thus people find themselves taking blood pressure meds, insulin, and anti-depressants for years with no end in sight!

Long-term use of these medications eventually leads to other health issues, requiring more drugs and more dis-ease and more importanty – a decrease in the quality of life, and most of the time you won’t even know it. It becomes your new normal.

Symptoms, such as those listed above, are signs that the key body systems that are designed to keep you healthy are not functioning well.

• Digestive tract

• Metabolism

• Stress Response

• Detoxification Pathways

• Immune System

Our cells are like rechargeable batteries and when they lose their charge they don’t function. A cell has to have a certain amount of energy to work and a certain amount of energy to make new cells. When your cells lose this ability you become compromised and symptoms appear. We chalk it up to ‘getting old’, but yes, if you don’t address the root cause, you do age faster than normal and as chronological time progresses, new symptoms will likely appear.

Disease doesn’t happen overnight. It takes years and years, sometimes, decades of dysfunction before disease appears. When not addressed, over time, these imbalances may result in disease.

So what causes your cells to lose their charge and your body systems to fail? The answer is lifestyle factors such as:

• Diet and nutritional deficiencies

• Exposure to environmental toxins

• Unremitting mental/emotional/physical stress

• Hidden infections in the gut or mouth or imbalances in the microbiome.

These lifestyle factors influence our cells voltage (pH) and wash over our genes and influences their expression, turning them on or off. This is called epigenetics. Epigenetics is the influence of our environment on our genes. Your genes are not your destiny. It is how you engage with your environment that will determine whether or not you have health or disease.

My job is to help you identify what your triggers are and which body systems they are affecting. We do this through a detailed health history, careful evaluation of  your lifestyle and through functional labs. Functional labs look for proper function and not just disease. Remember, it is years and years of dysfunction before disease appears.

Conventional medicine is really good at diagnosing and treating disease. But they are not looking at the underlying mechanisms of the key body systems that drive disease. This is why they may tell you, you are perfectly fine, but you don’t feel fine. In many cases they won’t see the dysfunction until disease shows up.

Typical functional approaches consists of a combination of natural agents (supplements, herbs, nutraceuticals, and homeopathies), nutritional and lifestyle changes, and spiritual/emotional counseling to nudge your body systems back into optimal state, so that they can do their job of keeping you healthy. The goal is to replace any nutritional deficiencies and repair any damage to the body systems that are designed to keep you well.

This integrative approach views the body as an integrated system

The body is an integrated system where seemingly unrelated issues and body systems are actually related. Seeing a functional health expert about depression or anxiety will likely result in them wanting to explore your gut health.

From the conventional point of view, you may not think your gut health had anything to do with your mood issues, but in fact they are inextricably linked. You absorb nutrients that drive the various body systems that contribute to your mood, behavior and cognitive ability through your digestive tract.

Further, the majority of your microbiome, which has been linked to almost all aspects of human health, including our mood and behavior, resides in our large intestine. Seeing your doctor for these same mood issues would more than likely result in a prescription for an anti-depressant without any guidance on how your lifestyle factors and digestive health may be contributing to your condition.