Are we treating the root cause?

The “root cause” of disease is an idea, that as far as I can figure, comes from naturopathic philosophy.  The idea is to not just treat the thing that’s in front of you, but to get to what is really causing someone’s symptoms, and treat that cause.  Just as pulling a plant out by the root will make sure it doesn’t come back (as oppose to just pruning the top growth (symptoms), which usually makes it come back stronger!), removing the cause of disease will theoretically make sure the disease never returns. 

But while this idea sounds lovely, practically it’s a bit of a nightmare, because you never truly know in your heart and soul what has “caused” your illness.

Let’s say your IBS is “caused” by stress.  Treatments aimed at the root cause from a naturopathic perspective will likely be aimed at your stress then – herbs to help calm you down and become resilient, or a prescription for meditation to help you become calmer.  But what has caused your stress?  A trauma from your childhood?  Maybe your parents put a lot of pressure on themselves and you are emulating that behavior? So what caused that? Probably something in their childhood.  And on and on and on and on. 

Another example: You have arthritis.  What caused it?  Did you run too much as a youngster and now have bad knees?  Then you are SOL when it comes to treating the cause.  Or is it a breakdown of cartilage?  Maybe someone would prescribe glucosamine and chondroitin for your cartilage then.  But what caused your cartilage breakdown?  Age? Then, I am sorry to inform you that you are human.  But maybe instead of age, it’s a genetic predisposition (because not everyone who gets old gets arthritis – therefore there is some kind of predisposition you have that others don’t).  So all we have to do is change your epigenetic factors to reverse your arthritis (to which I say, good luck).  But that’s still not THE cause!  Because something CAUSED your epigenetic change!  Maybe your parents ran too much and caused an epigenetic change, and maybe they only ran so much because they needed to escape a turbulent household growing up, which was only turbulent because your grandparents lived through the great depression and were traumatized by it, and they were only traumatized by it because THEIR parents (your grandparents) defined their worth by how much money they had, and then they lost all of it, but that was only true because THEIR parents had come from nothing and… so on and so on and so on.  I could really keep going, it’s kind of fun.  But I will spare you.

Just as pulling a plant out by the root will make sure it doesn’t come back (as oppose to just pruning the top growth (symptoms), which usually makes it come back stronger!), removing the cause of disease will theoretically make sure the disease never returns. 

But my point, is that we cannot say we treat the root cause when we don’t really know what “causes” disease in the first place.  There are proximate causes – things that trigger your illness.  Those can be removed if necessary, but they only look like causes; if you were truly “healthy” then these stressors in life would not necessarily trigger a chronic illness. In other words, in the IBS example above, stress does not trigger IBS in every person on the planet; you have already be unwell for stress to trigger a chronic condition like IBS. This is the brilliant insight that Hahnemann had that created his theory of miasms - that illness only seems to be caused by these triggers, but if we dig deep, you will find the person had small things going on before. The trigger (stress for IBS) just riled up a chronic disease that was simmering below the surface. Homeopathy accounts for that, which I believe is why it has gotten a reputation for being so holistic.

The deeper truth of this idea, however, is that widening your lens of disease – in other words defining disease as more than your disparate symptoms – and working to treat based on this wider view is more helpful than treating one symptom at a time.   In other words, advil for a headache is not as effective as changing your chair so you have better posture at work, thereby preventing your tension headaches from happening in the first place.

To this point, I can say I do believe homeopathy treats this “wider lens” of disease; homeopaths look at all your current, and many past, symptoms and prescribes a remedy at this more “wholistic” view of disease.  However, we still can’t say that we know for sure that our remedies treat a root cause, because we can’t say for sure what that root cause is.