Root-Cause Medicine Is Not Alternative Medicine. It’s Better Medicine.

The False Choice

You've been sold a lie. And it sounds like this: there are two kinds of medicine. "Real" medicine, practiced in hospitals and clinics by board-certified physicians using FDA-approved treatments. And "alternative" medicine, practiced by people in linen clothing who want to align your chakras and sell you essential oils.

Pick a side.

That framing is not just wrong. It's dangerous. It's keeping millions of people trapped in a system that excels at one thing and fails catastrophically at another. And the failure is costing lives.

I know because it cost me my mother's.

What Conventional Medicine Gets Right

Let me be absolutely clear about something before we go any further: conventional medicine is extraordinary at what it was built to do.

If you're having a heart attack, you want a cardiologist and a cath lab. If you break your femur, you want an orthopedic surgeon. If you develop sepsis, you want IV antibiotics and an ICU. Acute care, trauma medicine, surgical intervention, emergency stabilization: this is where the conventional system is genuinely world-class.

The pharmacological toolkit we've developed over the past century is remarkable. Insulin saves the lives of Type 1 diabetics. Epinephrine reverses anaphylaxis. Antibiotics cure bacterial infections that used to be death sentences. I'm not anti-pharmaceutical. I'm anti-pharmaceutical-as-default-for-everything.

The diagnostic technology is equally impressive. MRI, CT, PET scans, advanced blood chemistry, genetic testing: we can see inside the human body with a precision that would have seemed like science fiction 50 years ago.

I have enormous respect for conventional medicine. I trained in a healthcare doctoral program. I study pathophysiology, pharmacology, and differential diagnosis. I'm not standing outside the system throwing rocks. I'm standing inside it saying: we can do better for the patients we're currently failing.

Where the System Breaks

The conventional system was built on an acute care model. Identify the disease, match it to a treatment, manage the symptoms. For acute conditions, this works brilliantly. For chronic conditions, it's a disaster.

Consider the standard approach to common chronic complaints.

Fatigue. Patient presents with chronic fatigue. Standard workup: CBC, CMP, maybe a TSH. Everything comes back "normal." Diagnosis: non-specific fatigue. Treatment: "Get more sleep, reduce stress." Maybe an antidepressant if the fatigue is severe enough. At no point does anyone check mitochondrial function, comprehensive hormone panels, organic acids, nutrient deficiencies, or inflammatory markers beyond CRP.

Hormonal imbalance. Patient presents with symptoms of low testosterone, estrogen dominance, or thyroid dysfunction. If their labs fall within the reference range (which is absurdly wide), they're told they're fine. The reference range for testosterone goes as low as 250 ng/dL in some labs. I had a level of 63 ng/dL at 19 and could have been told I was "within range" at certain facilities.

Metabolic dysfunction. Patient has insulin resistance, central obesity, and inflammatory markers trending upward. They don't yet meet the diagnostic criteria for Type 2 diabetes. So they're told to "eat better and exercise" with no guidance on what that means, no investigation into why their metabolism is dysregulated in the first place, and no follow-up until their A1C crosses the arbitrary threshold that triggers a metformin prescription.

Chronic pain. NSAIDs first. If those don't work, maybe gabapentin. If that doesn't work, maybe an opioid. At no point does anyone investigate the biomechanical, nutritional, hormonal, or inflammatory root cause of the pain. We manage the signal (pain) while ignoring the source.

The pattern is always the same. Symptom appears. Symptom gets a label. Label gets a prescription. Prescription manages the symptom. Root cause never gets identified. Patient stays sick. But they're "treated."

My Mother's Story

My mother was hit by a truck while riding her bicycle. This was shortly after I was born. She survived, but she sustained a traumatic brain injury.

What followed was 20 years of depression and anxiety. Two decades.

The conventional system treated her. Let me rephrase that: the conventional system medicated her. SSRIs. Anxiolytics. Mood stabilizers. Therapy. She was a compliant patient. She took her medications. She showed up to her appointments. She did what she was told.

And for 20 years, the system managed her symptoms. It maintained her. It kept her functional enough to get through the day, most days. It never once asked the question that should have been asked from the beginning: why is this happening?

A traumatic brain injury causes neuroinflammation. It disrupts the blood-brain barrier. It damages neuronal pathways. It creates chronic oxidative stress in brain tissue. It alters neurotransmitter production and receptor sensitivity at the structural level. These are not psychological problems. These are neurophysiological injuries with identifiable mechanisms and potentially addressable root causes.

But nobody looked. Nobody tested her inflammatory markers. Nobody assessed her neurological function beyond a standard psych eval. Nobody investigated whether the TBI had created ongoing physiological processes that were driving her symptoms. They just kept adjusting the medications.

On New Year's Eve, 2012, my mother took her own life.

I will carry that for the rest of mine.

What Root-Cause Medicine Actually Is

Root-cause medicine is not a rejection of conventional medicine. It's an extension of it. It uses the same labs, the same imaging, the same diagnostic tools. It's grounded in the same biochemistry, the same physiology, the same evidence base. The difference is a single, fundamental question that changes everything.

Instead of asking "what do we call this?" it asks "why is this happening?"

Instead of matching a symptom to a prescription, it traces the symptom back to its origin. The headache isn't a Tylenol deficiency. The depression isn't a Lexapro deficiency. The fatigue isn't a caffeine deficiency. These symptoms are signals. They're the body's way of telling you that something, somewhere in the system, is not right.

Root-cause medicine listens to those signals and follows them to their source.

This requires a different type of workup. Where conventional medicine might run a basic metabolic panel and a CBC, root-cause medicine might add a comprehensive hormone panel, organic acids test, comprehensive stool analysis, food sensitivity testing, nutrient status, inflammatory markers, oxidative stress markers, and genetic SNP analysis. Not because we're ordering tests for the sake of ordering tests, but because chronic conditions are multifactorial and you cannot identify a root cause you didn't look for.

It also requires a different type of thinking. Conventional medicine is trained in pattern matching: these symptoms equal this diagnosis equals this treatment. Root-cause medicine is trained in systems thinking: how do the endocrine, immune, gastrointestinal, neurological, and metabolic systems interact, and where in that web of interactions did things go wrong?

The False Dichotomy Problem

Here's what infuriates me about the current landscape. The medical establishment has lumped root-cause medicine in with crystal healing, homeopathy, and essential oil MLMs. It's all "alternative." It's all fringe. It's all unscientific.

This is intellectually lazy and it's killing people.

Root-cause functional medicine is not anti-science. It is more science. It's ordering more labs, running more diagnostics, and asking more questions than the standard 15-minute primary care visit allows. The issue isn't that root-cause medicine rejects evidence. It's that the conventional system doesn't produce enough evidence per patient to make an accurate root-cause determination.

When a functional medicine practitioner orders a comprehensive hormone panel, an organic acids test, and a GI-MAP on a patient with chronic fatigue, they're not practicing "alternative" medicine. They're practicing thorough medicine. The tools are all evidence-based. The labs are CLIA-certified. The biomarkers are well-characterized in the literature.

The only thing "alternative" about it is that the conventional system doesn't do it.

And the reason the conventional system doesn't do it has nothing to do with science and everything to do with economics. Insurance reimbursement models don't support 60-minute initial consultations. They don't cover comprehensive functional testing. They incentivize high volume and quick turnover. See the patient, make the diagnosis, write the script, move on.

That's not a medical philosophy. That's a business model. And it's being mistaken for the standard of care.

What Needs to Change

I'm not naive enough to think the entire healthcare system is going to transform overnight. But I am practical enough to know what individuals can do right now.

Demand thoroughness. If your doctor runs a basic panel and tells you everything is "normal" while you still feel terrible, that's not the end of the conversation. It's the beginning. Ask for comprehensive testing. Ask why they're not checking your hormones, your nutrients, your inflammatory markers. If they can't or won't, find a provider who will.

Reject the binary. You don't have to choose between conventional and root-cause medicine. The best approach uses both. Conventional medicine for acute care, root-cause medicine for chronic optimization. They're complementary, not competing.

Follow the incentives. Understand that the medical system has financial incentives that may not align with your health outcomes. This doesn't mean your doctor is corrupt. It means the system they operate within constrains what they can do. Fifteen-minute appointments don't allow for root-cause investigation. Insurance panels don't cover the testing that would be necessary. Your doctor might want to do more. The system won't let them.

Invest in yourself. The most comprehensive health investigation of your life might cost you a few thousand dollars out of pocket. That sounds like a lot until you compare it to the cumulative cost of decades of managing symptoms that never resolve. Financially. Physically. Emotionally. The ROI on finding and fixing the actual problem is incalculable.

The Medicine My Mother Deserved

I think about this constantly. What if someone had looked at my mother's TBI not as a historical event but as an ongoing neurophysiological process? What if someone had measured her neuroinflammation? Assessed her brain's metabolic function? Investigated whether the structural damage from the injury was creating downstream effects that antidepressants couldn't address?

I don't know if it would have saved her. I'll never know. And I've made peace with that uncertainty, as much as anyone can.

But I know this: she deserved the investigation. She deserved a system that asked "why" instead of just asking "what do we call this?" She deserved providers who were curious about the cause, not just proficient at managing the effect.

That's what root-cause medicine is. It's not alternative. It's not fringe. It's not anti-science.

It's the medicine that should have existed all along.

And it's the medicine I'm building my career around, because every patient who walks through my door is someone's mother, father, son, or daughter. They deserve the same thing mine did.

They deserve someone who will look for the why.