RootCause Medicine is an attempt to reverse the modern tsunami of chronic disease by addressing and correcting its fundamental dietary and lifestyle root causes. RootCause Medicine honors the Hippocratic commitment to first do no harm as the foundational premise of medical practice.
The RootCause Medicine approach is built on the following set of theses.
Regarding humans:
Homo sapiens, like all other living organisms, has evolved homeostatic mechanisms that naturally and spontaneously trend toward health in the absence of medical intervention or injurious environmental insult.
The human organism is a complex system1. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th order effects of novel (i.e. synthetic, not present in our evolutionary past) environmental exposures and medical interventions may be delayed and unseen, with possible cumulative damaging long term effects on health.
Absence of evidence of harm of a pharmaceutical intervention on an arbitrary time scale does not prove safety, and the burden of proof rests upon those advocating for any intervention or environmental exposure that was absent in the multi-million year evolutionary history of Homo sapiens.
Human health cannot be separated from biosphere health and the health of the environment that produces human food. Environmental toxins and synthetic compounds in the food chain may bio-accumulate and contribute to human disease. Loss of micro-nutrients in the soil results in human micro-nutrient deficiency by consumption of nutrient-deplete food.
Food is medicine or poison. The quality of food and its degree of chemical contamination launches the individual on a long-term trajectory towards optimal health or chronic disease.
Environmental mismatch is the root cause of chronic disease. Long term exposure to evolutionarily inconsistent diet (modern processed foods), continuous feeding, inactivity, sunlight deprivation, synthetic chemical ingestion, etc. causes illness.
Re-creating the evolutionary niche of Homo sapiens with regard evolutionarily consistent environmental exposures and hormetic stressors including animal foods, fasting, sunlight exposure, intense episodic physical exertion, sleep, etc. is the best strategy for achieving and maintaining optimal human physiological function.
Regarding the practice of medicine:
First Do No Harm. Every decision to treat should be based on the risk of iatrogenic harm, which is defined as net deficit of benefits minus harm from a given intervention2, including possibility of long-term, multi- or trans-generational harm. Pharmaceutical or surgical intervention is only justified when the risks of failing to intervene outweigh the known and unknown risks of the intervention i.e. in severe illness. Measures of absolute risk reduction (Number Needed to Treat/Number Needed to harm) should be used to inform and consent patients prior to intervention, especially for treatment of mild illness in a patient who is otherwise healthy (e.g. statins for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease). These interventions often carry marginal potential benefit and non-negligible risk of highly adverse events. In the absence of clear potential benefit, favor non-intervention.
Treat the patient, not the number. Biochemical markers have obvious value in identifying pathological disease states but can be inappropriately employed as surrogate markets of health to justify unnecessary intervention. Lab findings should always be used in a holistic clinical context.
Regarding the theory of medicine:
There is an absolute necessity for skeptical and critical thinking in the process of truth discovery. The scientific method is a continuous processes that necessitates rejecting of hypotheses that have been dis-proven. Failure to reject unsound or disproven hypotheses has stalled the progress of medicine and will continue to obstruct the practice of gold-standard medicine.
Anecdotes or n-of-1 studies provide immensely powerful epistemological proof-of-concept for physiological effects that can guide probabilistic causal inference, particularly regarding dietary interventions. Aggregated effect findings typical of nutritional epidemiological studies lose granularity and external validity for the individual as a patient. They are easily manipulated to further justify population-level treatments that ignore unique patient characteristics. Observation and analysis of empiric findings should once again form the basis for dietary recommendations. The vast majority of nutritional epidemiology findings should be discarded and ignored.
Regarding medicine and society:
Medical science, and by extension clinical medicine, has been corrupted by the profit-driven corporate interests of the Pharmaceutical and Food Industry. Corporate capture of regulatory bodies has resulted in plant consumption and lifelong medication being prioritized over chronic disease reversal as the main strategy of patient care.
The majority of clinicians and doctors act with the best intentions but a principal-agent problem3 biases towards pharmaceutical prescription and defensive medicine. Failure of individual clinicians to critically appraise evidence and treatment guidelines allows the Pharmaceutical industry to dictate practice, leading to sub-optimal patient outcomes and an enormous amount of iatrogenic harm. However, clinicians cannot expect to be absolved of the moral culpability of the iatrogenic harm they have caused through inappropriate prescribing under the excuse of ‘merely following clinical practice guidelines’ (i.e. Nuremberg Defense4).
Mitigating iatrogenic harm relies on a favorable incentive system that is best achieved with direct patient-doctor financial exchange of services. The more parties that have a financial stake in the patient-doctor interaction, the more more expensive the service and sub-optimal the patient outcome.
These are the foundational theses that underlie RootCause Medicine. They serve as a basis upon which the vision of RootCause Medicine will be achieved — the fractal improvement of the human condition at every level, by means of optimal health of the individual.
A society of individuals expressing their naturally-bestowed gifts of energy, health and vitality is most conducive to the greatest level of human consciousness and is most conducive to multi-generational civilizational flourishing.
This is the world we are building. Join us.
The Rest Is Up to You…
-RootCause MD
August 16, 2021
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_system
https://fooledbyrandomness.com/medicine.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_orders