12 Root Cause Medicine Principles

There are many methods, procedures and protocols in various systems of medicine, but only a limited number of core principles that underlie those that work, whether for regaining health or achieving longevity.

If you learn these principles, you’ll understand the big picture and will be able to tell which approaches can work successfully in the long run and which can’t.

So let’s start with the most important principle …

1. Focusing on Root Causes

To regain health, remove Root Causes of Illness and introduce Root Causes of Health.

Root Causes of Illness create disturbances, imbalances and disharmony in the body, which ultimately leads to various signs and symptoms of a disease. The Root Causes of Health, on the other hand, are restoring balance, harmony and self-healing abilities of the body.

The right path to regaining health is, therefore, simple – removing the Root Causes of Illness and introducing the Root Causes of Health. This approach contrasts with merely suppressing the signs and symptoms of a disease, which leaves the underlying issues unchecked and continues to harm the body.

In line with the number of Root Cause Medicine Principles, there are also 12 Root Causes of Illness and 12 Root Causes of Health.

The 12 Root Causes of Illness are as follows:

1. Unhealthy food
2. Micronutrient deficiencies (lack of vitamins and minerals)
3. Toxic substances (heavy metals, environmental pollutants, industrial & household chemicals, biological toxins, radioactive substances)
4. Chronic stress
5. Poor lifestyle choices (sedentary lifestyle, lack of sleep, social withdrawal, smoking, alcohol abuse, etc.)
6. Negative thoughts and beliefs
7. Psychological trauma (typically in childhood)
8. Non-native electromagnetic fields (EMFs)
9. Root-cause pathogens (only a minority of pathogens – most pathogens are merely triggers of a disease, not a Root Cause of Illness)
10. Pharmaceutical products (their side effects)
11. Physical injuries, and
12. Genetic disorders (gene mutations and chromosomal abnormalities).

There are usually several Root Causes of Illness at play for each resulting disease. This multifactorial origin means that we can see improvement by addressing any of the individual root causes, but also that we should ideally address all applicable Root Causes of Illness to regain our health fully.

In practice, however, it is usually sufficient to decrease the level of disturbances below the body’s current capacity to rebalance (which is, as a further benefit, gradually increasing as a result of our efforts). Keep in mind that the body protects and heals itself if it’s not overloaded with Root Causes of Illness.

Unlike genetic disorders, genetic predispositions do not fall into the category of Root Causes of Illness. They are individual “weak points” that only cause issues when the underlying Root Causes of Illness are at play, or the Root Causes of Health are ignored.

In other words, while conventional medicine often emphasizes their role, genetic predispositions are (fortunately) not at the root of the problem. Their consequences are entirely avoidable by doubling down on the underlying Root Causes of Illness and, perhaps even more importantly in this context, the Root Cause of Health.

Speaking of which, here are the 12 Root Causes of Health:

1. Healthy food (including herbs and supplements)
2. Immunity training
3. Stress-coping techniques (such as meditation)
4. Physical exercise
5. Good night’s sleep
6. Proper breathing
7. Healthy and positive environment
8. Empowering thoughts and beliefs
9. Social connections
10. Sense of purpose
11. Forgiveness, and
12. Spirituality (for those who believe in God or something higher than them).

For more on this foundational Root Cause Medicine principle, you can read The First RCM Principle: Focusing on Root Causes.

2. Self-protecting and Self-healing Body

The body protects and heals itself, so support this process and don’t fight against it.

The body is a very intelligent system designed to protect and heal itself, with a degree of sophistication several orders of magnitude higher than the current level of science. All therapeutic efforts should, therefore, aim at supporting and enhancing the self-protecting and self-healing processes, as opposed to fighting against them.

The only exceptions are emergency situations in which the body clearly overreacts, such as acute allergic reactions or cytokine storms.

We’ve all experienced healing from a cut or scratch. We didn’t have to tell our bodies what to do – it knew exactly how to respond. While we might help the healing process by cleaning the wound or stitching it if needed, interfering with the healing itself would only make things worse.

Similarly, your body can heal itself from much worse conditions – and if you support it along the way, the healing can be even faster. But if you fight against the natural processes in your body, it’ll backfire sooner or later, although you might feel better in the short run.

Further, don’t think of your body as merely a physical object. In the same way you can’t separate your brain from your body, you can’t separate your mind from your body. Your mind is responsible not only for your thoughts and emotions, but also for countless processes in your body that you don’t know about – here, we’re talking about your subconscious mind.

There’s always a mind-body connection, the body and mind constantly affecting each other, but the mind has the upper hand. That’s why your beliefs, thoughts and emotions are such an important factor in health and healing.

3. Health over Absence of Disease

Focus on regaining and maintaining health, not merely on dealing with any particular disease.

Each disease name is basically just a label for a particular pattern of signs and symptoms. Whatever these signs and symptoms are, they don’t appear by a stroke of bad luck, but have underlying root causes.

With a disease-oriented focus, doctors and patients are primarily interested in the disappearance of related signs and symptoms, which often leads to suppressing them pharmaceutically, without addressing their root causes. The problem with that approach is that the root causes of illness will then express themselves as different signs and symptoms, which are again suppressed pharmaceutically – and the vicious circle continues.

If we shift our focus to regaining and maintaining health, we see signs and symptoms of any disease as important indicators that there are root causes of illness that prevent us from regaining and maintaining health in general.

By removing the root causes of illness and introducing the root causes of health, you can not only recover from a particular disease but also prevent all other diseases and achieve true longevity. As the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure!

4. Natural over Artificial

Favor natural or nature-mimicking over artificial or synthetic.

Favoring natural doesn’t mean that everything natural is good and everything non-natural is bad. It means that when you have a choice, go for the more natural alternatives unless you have a compelling reason not to.

When it comes to long-term health, natural compounds, procedures and processes are generally safer and more effective than their man-made counterparts.

As a simple example, a natural form of vitamin C (fruits, vegetables, or their extracts in capsules) is always better than its synthetic version. But for high-dose vitamin C treatment, you need to supply vitamin C intravenously. You can’t inject fruit extract into anyone’s vein, however, so in this case, you don’t have a choice, and using a synthetic version of vitamin C is completely appropriate.

As another example, naturally acquired immunity is always more complex, more effective, and longer-lasting than vaccine-induced immunity. So with common respiratory infections, it’s better and safer to build one’s immunity in a natural way.

On the other hand, the risks of potentially crippling diseases like polio or high-mortality diseases like tetanus are generally higher than the risks associated with the respective vaccines, so “going all-natural” is not necessarily the best option in such cases.

Despite the strong preference for natural substances, there are situations when non-natural (synthetic) substances are acceptable in treating chronic diseases, provided they have a well-established safety profile in therapeutic doses.

This is usually done as a follow-up measure when natural substances or treatments haven’t fully achieved the desired effect, especially when there’s a need to neutralize and eliminate accumulated toxic substances from the body.

5. Physics over Chemistry

Understand the human body within an energy paradigm and favor physics-based over pharmaceutical therapies.

There’s no life without energy. The human body uses energy for the following activities (ranked in the order of preference):

• Keeping its internal environment in balance (homeostasis)
• Extracting energy and building blocks from food (metabolism)
• Reacting to present or perceived danger (fight-or-flight stress response)
• Protecting itself against pathogens, toxins and cancer (immune system)
• Healing itself, regeneration and growing
• Everything else we decide to do in our life.

You can see that protecting and healing itself isn’t (cannot be) the body’s top priority, because it has to ensure survival in the short term first; only then can the body allocate sufficient energy for longer-term survival.

If your body’s internal environment is, for example, continuously pushed into acidosis due to junk food, your body keeps wasting a lot of energy to counterbalance this push.

Similarly, if you live under chronic stress, your body spends a lot of energy to keep you tense and ready to counter a threat that is often just an anxious imagination based on unpleasant memories. As Seneca said almost 20 centuries ago, “We suffer more often in imagination than in reality.” 

To have enough energy available for your body’s immune system and self-healing capacity, you need to reduce or eliminate the root causes of illness, as most of them are huge “energy stealers,” and focus on increasing energy availability by engaging the root causes of health.

Understanding the human body within an energy paradigm means understanding that most of biochemistry revolves around energy, such as the extraction of energy from food, transforming it into ATP (the body’s “energy currency”) and using the ATP energy to sustain each individual’s life, both short-term and long-term.

But the energy paradigm also means understanding that there’s a more fundamental level than biochemistry and that the underlying foundations of how the human body works are ultimately rooted in physics.

Working on this deeper level, which includes the subatomic and quantum realms, is therefore more effective than interfering with biochemical processes through pharmaceuticals.

The frequencies associated with various forms of energy can also act as carriers of information within the body, much like how wireless technologies transmit data across the internet. This concept forms the basis of multiple branches of informational medicine, including homeopathy, bioresonance therapy, energy healing, and Chinese Image Medicine.

Apart from this informational role, specific frequencies and forms of energy typically exert more direct, physical effects on the body’s tissues and cells. These therapeutic applications focus on delivering energy in precise ways that stimulate healing or harmonizing responses.

Examples of such physics-based therapies (to be applied alongside efforts to address the root causes, which is always of utmost importance) include phototherapy (such as red light therapy), magnetotherapy, audiovisual brainwave entrainment, neurofeedback, plasma-generated electromagnetic waves, microcurrent electrical therapy, radiofrequency therapy and sound therapy.

Physic works for the human body also on a more palpable level. Complementary procedures like thermotherapy (which includes saunas and ice baths), hydrotherapy, vibroacoustic therapy and massages are helpful mainly for deep relaxation, lymphatic drainage, strengthening the immune system and repairing tendons, muscles, cartilages, and bones.

6. Long-term over Short-term

Go for long-term health rather than short-term results.

Requiring quick results for little or no effort is one of the traps of modern society.

Root causes of illness, and deficiencies in root causes of health, usually affect individuals for years, sometimes even decades. Under such circumstances, can we expect a dramatic change in health right after just starting to deal with the root causes? Does the body heal itself immediately?

The answer is no, of course not. But we can expect first positive changes within a matter of weeks and regaining health in a matter of months or – in more severe cases – within one or two years, if the relevant root causes are being addressed and there was no permanent damage at the beginning.

Pharmaceutical drugs, with their rapid effects, are great for dealing with emergencies but often counterproductive when treating chronic diseases or striving for longevity.

Quick suppression of unwanted symptoms may provide instant gratification for the patient, but there is usually a heavy price for that in the long run – not only due to various side effects of pharmaceuticals but mainly due to the root causes of illness, and the lack of root causes of health, still causing harm to the body.

As a rule of thumb, what works best in the short term works worst in the long term. Keep that in mind. The choice is usually “easy now – hard later” or “hard now – easy later.” Think long-term, and your initial pain and discomfort will pay off.

7. Immunity is Key

Long-term health and longevity depend primarily on well-functioning immunity, so keep training, supporting, and protecting your immune system regularly.

The immune system is the key component of your self-protecting and self-healing body. It protects you not only against various infections but – crucially – against cancer as well. Last but not least, the immune system also facilitates regeneration and healing by removing damaged and old cells so they can be replaced by new cells.

Simply put, a properly trained immune system is very, very important for your health!

You train your immune system by reasonably exposing it to diversity and adversity on a regular basis.

This includes diverse healthy food, diverse natural environments, diverse gut microbiome, diverse temperatures (such as taking cold showers and saunas), diverse people you’re meeting and, last but not least, diverse animals, helminths, microbes and viruses you’re in contact with.

Avoiding or “sterilizing away” anyone’s regular exposure to this diversity results in a weak and dysregulated immune system, which sadly translates into a higher propensity to infections, allergies, autoimmune diseases, and cancers.

You support your immune system by providing your body with vitamins, minerals, and other compounds that contribute to the proper function of the immune system, such as vitamin C, vitamin D, zinc, and selenium.

Protecting your immune system means not letting anyone weaken your immune system, whether by fearmongering, social isolation, unwarranted application of immunosuppressants, or in any other way.

8. Doctors Advise, Patients Take Responsibility

Healthcare professionals provide the expert guidance needed, but it’s the patients who have the final responsibility for their own health.

Root Cause Medicine is based on mutual cooperation and respect between doctors and patients.

Doctors should always empower their patients, guiding them towards everything the patients can personally do to regain their health, rather than relying solely on pharmaceutical products or surgical procedures.

Patients should respect that professional medical guidance is often needed to tackle health issues, but they should also understand that professional guidance can be dramatically different depending on the training and preferences of the healthcare practitioner involved.

The patients’ responsibility for their own health also means that it’s primarily them who’s making the decisions. This includes choosing the right healthcare professional, deciding whether to seek a second opinion, and selecting among the recommended courses of treatment.

Such responsibility requires the patients to be actively involved, do their research, ask questions, and set their preferences and priorities. After all, it’s their health that’s at stake.

Most importantly, however, taking responsibility requires each patient to do the “homework” needed to regain and maintain one’s health. As the saying goes, nothing works unless YOU work!

Addressing the root causes of illness and the root causes of health requires primarily lifestyle and daily routine changes, so it’s only the patient personally who can physically implement them.

There’s no “magic pill” that will bring about those necessary lifestyle changes for the patient; it’s as simple (and challenging) as that.

9. Environment Affects Everything

To change cells, organs, the human body, individuals, the medical profession, the population at large, or anything, you have to change the respective environment.

Any environment affects everything it surrounds. If an undifferentiated cell ends up in liver tissue, it’ll become a liver cell. If the very same cell lands in your skin instead, it’ll turn into a skin cell. If you keep subjecting cells to toxic or otherwise unnatural conditions, they will become cancerous.

If you have well-functioning immunity, your body is an environment where no pathogenic viruses or bacteria will thrive.

Your beliefs, thoughts, and emotions also create an environment. If you believe something will help you, it is more likely to help you, whether it’s a placebo or not. If you fear a virus, the emotion of fear creates an environment that suppresses your immune system, and you’re more likely to get infected by that virus.

If you’re in a good mood, you boost your immune system, as well as the mood (and immune system) of people around you.

Then there are “classic” elements of the environment such as air quality, temperature, humidity, light, and electromagnetic fields, each affecting us on all levels.

Equally importantly, the powerful environment also consists of all life forms around us, from microorganisms to other humans.

Whether we like it or not, a powerful environment is also created by corporations, institutions, and governments. Think of pharmaceutical companies, medical associations and societies, media, non-governmental organizations, local and central governments, and international organizations like WHO.

In pursuit of their own goals, they affect the health of entire populations, typically by influencing how doctors practice medicine and how patients understand their own health.

10. Food Is Always a Root Cause

Any food belongs either to the root causes of illness or the root causes of health, so keep making the right food choices.

Everything you eat pulls you either toward health or toward disease; there’s nothing in between.

Eating proper food consistently is essential for recovery from any disease, as well as for maintaining long-term health. On the flip side, unhealthy food is one of the most significant causes of chronic illness.

Our health is a reflection of what we do on a regular basis, and eating food is one of the most recurring things in our lives – that’s why food is so important.

But even people who understand the importance of food usually don’t realize that if they’re making food choices similar to the majority of the population, they’ll be in a similar health condition as most of the population, which is worsening every year.

Sooner or later, you’ll have to understand that what is considered “normal food” is often the primary driver of disease and that the fact that most people are eating it is precisely why you shouldn’t.

To regain and maintain health, you should primarily stop eating GMO and highly processed food, as well as stop drinking sweetened beverages. Then, you should avoid, or significantly limit, consuming foods containing gluten (such as bakery or pasta), milk, and added sugar.

You should also limit, or ideally eliminate, the use of seed oils (such as sunflower, canola or soybean oil), because they are highly inflammatory. It’s essential that you replace them with healthier options such as olive or avocado oil.

What you should eat is whole foods, such as vegetables, fruits, legumes (lentils, chickpeas, and beans), herbs, rice (brown if possible), and – in moderation – fish, poultry, meat, and eggs, all preferably from organic or naturally raised and fed sources.

11. Microorganisms Are Essential

There is no health without constant interaction with microorganisms inside, outside, and on our bodies.

Microorganisms like bacteria and viruses have lived on Earth for billions of years. They are the foundation of life on Earth; no higher form of life could evolve without them.

The human body hosts vast microbial communities called the microbiome. There are more bacterial cells than human cells in a healthy body, and more than 140,000 different virus species in a healthy person’s gut. If you have healthy skin, up to 1 million bacteria inhabit every square centimeter of it.

The most important for human health is the gut microbiome, but microorganisms also reside on or within other areas of the human body, such as the skin, oral and nasal cavity, lungs, or vagina.

The primary role of the human microbiome is to continuously train and regulate our immune system, teaming up for this task with beneficial helminths (worms) and other above-microscopic organisms that, too, have always lived in human bodies (I call all these visible, but still relatively small life forms the “mesobiome”).

On top of training by “friendly” microbiome and mesobiome, frequent encounters with naturally occurring pathogens are needed for our immune system to function at its optimal level.

No fighter has ever become great by avoiding real fights – and the same applies to our immunity. Some encounters will be losing battles, starting from common childhood diseases, and some we won’t even notice, but all of them are necessary for our long-term health.

You can’t sterilize or sanitize your way to health – in the long run, you’ll achieve the exact opposite. Just keep to standard hygiene practices, such as washing your hands with simple soap, and let your immune system do its job.

12. Avoiding Effects of the Root Conflict of Interest

Be aware of the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine, and don’t let it influence any of your health-related decisions.

As in other areas of human endeavor, all incentives in healthcare should be directed toward the desired outcome – a patient cured, the population getting healthier.

Unfortunately, the current healthcare system is controlled mainly by pharmaceutical companies, who have no incentive to cure patients but instead to treat them continually with their products – ideally for the rest of the patients’ lives.

For pharmaceutical companies, a patient cured is a customer lost. They’re not looking for cures but for increased revenues. I call this the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine. There are other conflicts of interest in medicine, but they’re not as influential as this one.

Unfortunately, the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine drives many things in current Western Medicine healthcare. How patients are treated and informed by doctors, what doctors are taught at medical schools, how clinical studies are designed, what gets published in recognized medical journals, what is considered “safe and effective,” and what is not.

Addressing the root causes of illness and health is generally discouraged because lifelong management of symptoms with pharmaceuticals is far more profitable. Expensive new drugs, regardless of their actual comparative effectiveness and safety, are always preferred over less profitable repurposed and other generic drugs.

Moreover, effective natural remedies or inexpensive solutions are discredited by being labeled as “pseudoscientific”, “debunked”, or “dangerous” — despite the fact that at therapeutic doses they are generally safer than pharmaceuticals.

The results of the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine are well known – over time, the population is becoming sicker, while healthcare costs continue to rise, along with, of course, the corresponding pharmaceutical profits. With the Root Conflict of Interest completely unchecked, there can unfortunately be no other outcome.

Healthcare regulatory agencies, such as the FDA and CDC, were originally intended to protect patients from the effects of the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine. However, they have since been transformed into primary proponents of pharmaceutical interests—a phenomenon called “regulatory capture.”

If you want to regain health—whether your own or your patients’—always be aware of the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine and, as a rule, address the root causes rather than merely suppressing signs and symptoms of diseases with pharmaceuticals.