The founding mission of Root Resolution Health is to support folks in (or even lead them to) a new way of thinking about illness and health, observing that, with a handful of exceptions, prescription drugs and surgery don't really fix anything: they only serve to mask more fundamental problems. The "drug it out, cut it out" approach that doctors & nurses learn in medical school can work wonders for infectious disease and trauma medicine, and we're grateful for that. But where chronic, complex illness is concerned, drugs and surgeries are almost never the path to true health. 

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A functional medicine "root cause" approach might be greeted by some as glib or gimmicky, but if you strip away a lifetime of "match the pill to the ill" cultural programming, approaching illness and health with questions like "How?" and "Why?" suddenly seems intuitively obvious. After all, it's at the very foundational level— assimilation, signaling, redox & inflammatory status, mitochondria & membrane health, detox capacity, hormone balance, barrier integrity & elimination— that the elements of our biochemistry & physiology are found.

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At the core of this approach, Rethinking Illness, Rethinking Medicine,  is the fundamental realization that our health care system, such as it is called, is completely dysfunctional; no, worse than dysfunctional, it's utterly broken. Doctors purport to create health, to stave off illness, yet are unschooled in the most basic human physiology, in nutrition, in "systems medicine" (i.e., how different processes in the body affect one another). Medical schools, medical journals (which pretty much started with Dopesick's Arthur Sackler), even doctors' and nurses' required Continuing Medical Education, are all funded, programmed and overseen by the drug & device companies.

 

To top it off, that 17-minute visit with your GP, and this or that prescription s/he will send you away with, will be completely or mostly covered by insurance. A visit to the kind of physician who might actually be able to help you, who will spend an hour with you in order to piece together your life story and health history, and who will take the time to figure out what physiological processes are at the root of what on the surface ails you, will not.

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To maybe mangle Shakespeare here, "A pill, a pill—another pill—perhaps a surgery?"

 

And more dispiriting still, it's not only health care— but the food (& beverages) we are sold, modern agriculture practices, our out-of-balance work & commuting lives, and the polluting of our water, air and soil— that are making all but the most resistant of us chronically unwell.

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A 37 year old woman (wrongly) diagnosed with ALS; a 50 year old veteran who was told he had schizophrenia without doing any of even the most basic tests described in the medical literature (here is link to fave Nature Neuropsychopharmacology paper on this) and prescribed medications that lead him to try to take his own life; an Arizona executive who, just last week, shared his story of nursing himself back to health after being misdiagnosed with MS— when he was actually full of metals.

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There is the Xanax addicted widow who struggled for decades with crippling insomnia & (mostly psychogenic) hypertension after a "routine" hysterectomy, recommended by her ob-gyn. (see related post) The infertile walleye fisherman (from Lake Erie, no less): don't eat those fish! The dry cleaners owners who suffered through two IVFs and one IUI and still could not conceive— until someone took the time to get to know them, think outside the box & connect the proverbial dots. The young NYC woman disfigured by a botched lymphedema surgery (that had zero effect on the lymphedema) when the root cause turned out to be something she herself had control of.

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The foundational naturopathic medicine concepts of nutrition (specifically, the actual nutrient content (or "density") of the foods we consume day to day) and detoxification (that is, a detailed understanding of what the human body needs on a daily basis to inactivate and package for elimination all the plastics, poisons & other chemicals we breath in, swallow and absorb through our skin— as well as the ones produced within our own bodies) are now more than ever essential— both to understand and to practice. "Getting to the root" in this way, the "Medicine 3.0" way, has never been easier, the payoff never more satisfying, and the need never more urgent.

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