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.

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

You’ll still need a doctor on your side, but you’ll understand the big picture and recognize the important role that you play in regaining and maintaining your health.

After reading the 12 Root Cause Medicine Principles below, you’ll get an understanding of health and medicine that took me 12 years of study and research to grasp fully. Make use of that time!

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 and imbalances in the body, which ultimately lead to various signs and symptoms of a disease. Root causes of health, on the other hand, restore balance and self-healing abilities of the body.

The right path to regaining health is therefore simple – removing root causes of illness and introducing root causes of health. This approach is the opposite of merely suppressing the signs and symptoms of a disease, which only allows the underlying problems to continue causing harm to the body.

Frequent root causes of illness include:

• Unhealthy food
• Chronic stress
• Psychological trauma (typically in childhood)
• Negative thoughts and beliefs
• Heavy metals
• Micronutrient deficiencies
• Non-native electromagnetic fields (EMFs)
• Synthetic chemicals, and
• Pharmaceutical products.

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 need to address all root causes of illness to regain our health fully.

The main root causes of health include:

• Proper food (including herbs and supplements)
• Immunity training
• Stress-coping techniques (such as meditation)
• Good night’s sleep
• Change of environment
• Empowering thoughts and beliefs
• Forgiveness
• Physical exercise
• Proper breathing
• Social connections, and
• Sense of purpose.

For people who believe in God or in general something higher than them,

• Spirituality

serves as an important root cause of health as well.

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 that is 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 and not at fighting against them.

The exception is emergency situations when the body is clearly overreacting, such as an allergic reaction or a cytokine storm.

We all have experienced healing from a cut or scratch. You didn’t have to tell your body anything; it knew exactly what to do. One could support the healing by cleaning the wound after the injury or stitching up the cut, if necessary, but any interference with the healing process 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 thoughts, beliefs, and emotions are such an important factor in health and healing.

3. Health over Absence of Disease

Focus on regaining and maintaining health, not 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 interested in the disappearance of the 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 on 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 root causes of health, we can achieve not only recovery from a particular disease, but also prevent all diseases based on the same root causes of illness.

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 dried fruit into anyone’s vein, so in this case, you don’t have a choice, and using a synthetic version of vitamin C works very well, too.

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 generally better and safer to build one’s immunity in a natural way.

On the other hand, the risks of crippling and high-mortality diseases like polio and tetanus are generally higher than the risks associated with vaccines, so “going natural” is not advisable in such cases.

5. Physics over Chemistry

Understand the human body within an energy paradigm and prefer physics-based rather than 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 or pharmaceutical drugs, 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 a memory or anxious imagination.

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 all biochemistry revolves around energy, starting with 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 the energy needed to sustain life are rooted in physics.

Working on this deeper (subatomic or quantum) level, where energy exists in the form of frequencies, is therefore in principle more effective than interfering with biochemical processes through pharmaceuticals.

Examples of such physics-based therapies (to be applied along with addressing root causes, which is always of utmost importance) include phototherapy (such as red light therapy), magnetotherapy, microcurrent electrical therapy, and radiofrequency therapy.

Physic works for the human body also on a more palpable level. Complementary procedures like thermotherapy (which includes saunas and ice baths), hydrotherapy, massages, and mechanical vibrations are useful especially for strengthening the immune system and repairing tendons, muscles, cartilages, and bones.

Another useful complementary procedure is sound therapy, which works on both physical and mental levels.

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 patients 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 all root causes are being addressed and there was no permanent damage at the beginning.

Pharmaceutical drugs, with their rapid effect, are great for dealing with emergencies but counterproductive for chronic diseases.

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. It’s 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 depends primarily on well-functioning immunity, so keep training, supporting, and protecting your immunity on a regular basis.

The immune system is the key component of your self-protecting and self-healing body. It protects you not only against various infections, but importantly against cancer as well. Last but not least, the immune system also facilitates regeneration and healing by removing damaged and old cells so that 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 reasonable 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, experimental vaccines, 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, as opposed to converting them into passive recipients of pharmaceutical products or surgical procedures.

The patients should respect that professional medical guidance is generally needed for tackling health issues, but should also understand that the 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 choosing 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 is 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 tough) as that.

9. Environment Affects Everything

To change cells, organs, the human body, individuals, medical profession, 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 own 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 you on all levels.

Equally importantly, the powerful environment also consists of all life forms around you, 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, such as 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 root causes of illness or root causes of health, so keep making the right choices.

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

Eating proper food on a consistent basis 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 similar food choices as the majority of the population, they’ll be in a similar health condition as the majority 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 main driver of disease, and the fact that most people are eating it is exactly 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 highly inflammatory seed oils (such as sunflower, canola or soybean oil) and 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, such as 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. For example, there are up to 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells in a healthy person and more than 140,000 different virus species in his gut. If you have healthy skin, around 1 billion 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 main 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” human 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 health-related decision.

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 per patient. I call this the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine. There are other conflicts of interest in medicine, but they’re not as detrimental as this one.

Unfortunately, the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine drives everything 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.

Dealing with root causes of illness and health is discouraged, because life-long management of symptoms with pharmaceuticals is way more profitable. Expensive new drugs, regardless of their actual comparative effectiveness and safety, are always preferred over less profitable repurposed and other generic drugs.

The results are known – over time, the population is getting sicker, while healthcare costs are going higher.

Healthcare regulatory agencies, such as FDA or CDC, were originally supposed to protect patients from the effects of the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine, but they have since been converted into the main proponents of pharmaceutical interests. This is called a “regulatory capture”.

If you want to regain health, whether your own or that of your patients, always be aware of the Root Conflict of Interest in medicine and, as a rule, address the root causes instead of covering signs and symptoms of diseases with with pharmaceuticals.

_______________________

And now, it’s your turn! Which of the 12 RCM Principles did you find the most relevant to your situation? Or the most surprising? And which one will you newly start applying first, one small step at a time?