As this is my first article, I thought it would be fitting to talk about root cause. This has been thrown around a lot lately. But what does it mean and does it mean what people are saying? This is the foundation for most practitioners but it can be impaired by our knowledge base philosophical view. Our philosophical view can be affected by our training, culture, upbringing, and what scientific studies you hold on to. That last part needs some explaining. As we all know oftentimes our current science textbook is obsolete by next year. Science changes rapidly. Some things hold true and they tend to be laws and theories, but even they can change. But what happens is new findings take a long time to trickle out for people to accept them.  I read one place that it can take up to around 15-20 years for new research to be accepted in the mainstream. Sometimes the new research gets disproven and the old view is back again. This very apparent in idea of fat being bad for you. I will write a future article on that topic. All this is to say our worldview can be and often is quite skewed from reality. This affects what we so lovingly tell our patients is the root cause of disease.

Why even talk about root cause?  Chronic disease is on the rise and has been for sometime. The top killers in the world are chronic diseases such as heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory disease, and diabetes. According to the CDC, in 2012 about half of all US adults have some type of chronic health condition. Recently I discovered while writing a paper on Autoimmune diseases, diseases where your body attacks itself, it is estimated that over 50 million people have autoimmune disease in the US! These diseases include rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, type 1 diabetes, and Hashimoto’s thyroiditis. With these illnesses on the rise, there is an increasing need to understand why as well as a paradigm shift in how we handle and look at them.

For a long time, we thought we could just identify the problem by focusing in or reducing the problem down to its smallest components. This is called reductionism and it permeates the medical world. This works in many cases. Acute infections are easily treated by antibiotics depending on the situation. An appendicitis can often be successfully stopped before more damage is done through surgery. We hoped that the Human Genome Project would help us identify the causes of all disease but it is not that simple. So when we try to figure out what causes something, how to prevent future issues, or how this affects distant body systems reductionism has its limits. Hence, a systems approach has been emerging. Systems meaning the different body systems and how they work together and depend on each other. This can also be called a holistic approach. Holism is the idea of treating the body as a whole not in a single, small component unrelated to the rest of the body. A systems perspective requires an understanding of how body systems can affect each other for example when our gut is having problems we stop digesting properly. This can not only affect our energy levels but also can cause depression and other mental disorders. Thus when we apply our interventions we have to keep this in mind. I spoke earlier of antibiotics. They are miracle drugs but they do not come without their consequences. We are learning more and more about the human microbiome and when antibiotics are given it can alter the microbiome for almost a year if not longer if interventions are not put into place. The microbiome consists of friendly bacteria and microorganisms that live on and inside the human body. They actually help us digest, give us nutrients and protect us from harm. But when it is altered the consequences can be detrimental which I will talk about in future articles.