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The Root Cause of the Disease

Posted by Manuela Boyle on 7 August 2021
The Root Cause of the Disease

Functional medicine empowers patients and practitioners to achieve the highest expression of health by working collaboratively to address the root causes of disease.

It is an emerging, personalized model of diagnosis and treatment that better addresses the need to prevent and manage chronic disease.

In a word, it is the medicine of WHY, not WHAT.

Functional Medicine practitioners are like soil farmers. They create a healthy soil, so pests can't come and weeds can't flourish. A healthy soil means disease can't take hold.

So with cancer, a Functional Medicine practitioner would say that yes, we still need radiation and other conventional approaches, but what else can we do? How can we properly cultivate a healthy soil?

Cancer results because of in an imbalance in the system. So many people are walking around with tumours and don't know it. We can do something to prevent them from growing by maintaining a healthy soil.

Instead of dividing everything into diseases and labels, emerging science points to a different way of thinking about diseases.

Rather than divide the body into organs, Functional Medicine approaches disease as a systemic problem, and we have to treat the system, not the symptom; the cause, not the disease.

This completely redefines the whole notion of disease.

The landscape of illness is changing.

How we label cancer is no longer synced up with what we know about the origins of cancer or the fact that two people who have cancer with the same name like breast cancer can have two completely different diseases which require different treatments.

Just because you know the name of your disease doesn't mean you know what's wrong with you or what to do about it.

Classifying tumours by body site lung, liver, brain, breast, colon, etc. misses the underlying causes, mechanisms, and pathways involved in a particular cancer.

What's more, it gives us no information about how it manifested in a given patient. Two people with cancers in different parts of the body may have developed it for the same reasons.

Similarly, two people with cancers in the same part of the body may have developed it for different reasons.

A patient with prostate cancer and one with colon cancer may have more in common with each other than two patients who have colon cancer.

We need to look under the hood and find out what caused the illness to begin with.

Author:Manuela Boyle
Tags:NewsCancerFunctional Medicine

Associations

  • The Institute for Functional Medicine
  • Society for Integrative Oncology
  • Naturopaths and Herbalists Association of Australia
  • Australian Traditional-Medicine Society
  • British Naturopathic Association