What is Health Potential?
Health Potential refers to the maximum level of health you may attain, considering your biological, psychological, and social capacities.
What is Optimal Health?
Optimal Health is defined as the best state of physical, mental, and social well-being that you may achieve within the boundaries of your health potential. In other words, it represents the peak of feeling well when maximizing your health potential.
What are Root Causes?
Root Causes refer to the fundamental, underlying reasons that drive a problem or event. Root causes are the underlying factors that stirred your clinical imbalances in the first place. These root causes can be related to deficiencies, toxicity or injury. They are the most basic, essential causes that, if addressed, can eliminate or significantly reduce the problem’s occurrence or impact.
What is Root Cause Analysis?
Root cause analysis is the process of identifying and understanding the root causes behind an issue or problem. There may be multiple causes behind a single issue, and root cause analysis helps to uncover these causes so they can be addressed directly.
For example, if you struggle with chronic fatigue, root cause analysis would look at what could be causing this fatigue, such as poor nutrition, inadequate sleep quality or quantity, stress, or environmental factors.
In functional medicine, root cause analysis is used to find out what’s causing your health issues. By looking at all aspects of your lifestyle—including diet, hydration, activity level, sleep habits, stress levels, environmental factors—a practitioner can begin to piece together how those elements are impacting your overall health. They can then develop treatment plans that address the underlying causes and help you make lasting changes that lead to improved wellbeing and maximized health potential.
How Can Root Cause Analysis Support You on Your Quest to Maximize Your Health Potential?
When used properly, root cause analysis can help you get to the bottom of your health issues and make positive changes that lead to optimal health. By addressing the underlying issues instead of just treating symptoms with medication or other procedures that don’t target the source of a problem, you have better chances for long-term sustainable improvement and healing.
Symptoms are Your Body’s Way of Getting Your Attention
The idea that your body provides feedback about internal imbalances and responds to external influences is grounded in biology. Every living organism in creation listens to the feedback their body is providing them with and utilizes that information moment to moment to assist them throughout each day.
That “feedback” that your body provides you with is referred to by conventional medicine as “symptoms”.
Symptoms are observable or measurable indicators that something is not functioning as desired or expected. They are the language your body employs in conveying its messages.
Symptoms can be acute or chronic. A “disease” (aka dis-ease) is basically a combination of chronic symptoms with a label (aka diagnosis) attached to them.
The Conventional Diagnosis Paradigm (aka “What”)
The current conventional model of medicine is strongly focused on assigning a diagnosis (aka “what”) to a constellation of symptoms which seem to be associated with an underlying pathology.
When it comes to chronic conditions, this model typically labels the condition based on a group of symptoms (“diagnosis”) and provides the approved boilerplate treatment for managing/suppressing the symptoms of this diagnosis (usually “prescriptions” or “procedures”). This approach is referred to by the medical community as “standard of care”.
People would often think of a diagnosis as being “the cause” of their symptoms. In some situations this may well hold true, for example acute bacterial rhinosinusitis (ABRS) is a diagnosis which quite clearly tells you you have an infection in your your nasal cavity and sinuses due to a bacteria.
With most chronic diseases however, a diagnosis does not tell you the cause (aka “why”) of your symptoms, it merely tells you what is usually the end observed consequence of a long chain of events leading to the abnormality it defines. Consequently, with relatively superficial diagnoses we end up with fairly superficial treatment strategies intervening too far downstream in the sequence of events causing the ultimate symptoms of the condition.
This conventional medicine paradigm of symptom suppression and management is effective at addressing acute and emergency situations but is highly deficient at addressing and resolving the underlying causes and interconnections of chronic and auto-immune conditions.
If you have high blood pressure, you’ll be prescribed a drug that lowers it but does NOT address why it is high in the first place.
If you have high serum cholesterol (how high is high anyway?), you’ll be prescribed a drug that lowers it but does NOT address why it is high in the first place.
If you have cancer, you’ll be put on chemo to kill the tumors (together with other perfectly healthy cells) and likely kill you as well but NOT address why they formed in the first place.
You get the gist? This approach attempts to “suppress” a symptom while ignoring the root cause of the condition or disease. It’s like covering the check engine light in your car and fooling yourself that all is well now that the light is no longer visible. Will that really solve the problem? Of course not.
This explains why—despite all the amazing advances in medicine—you are more likely to die of heart disease and cancer today than you were 100 years ago.
To understand this on a deeper level, let’s examine a common diagnosis called hypothyroidism. This diagnosis indicates insufficient thyroid hormone going around your body. It purports to explain why you’re experiencing symptoms like weight gain, hair loss, cold intolerance or constipation. However, what it doesn’t explain is why the circulating thyroid hormone in your body is low in the first place.
Once your medical doctor pinpoints your slow thyroid as the root cause of your symptoms (weight gain, hair loss, etc), he/she then prescribes a magic pill (called Synthroid, Levoxyl, etc) that is designed to “augment” or “fix” the function of your glandular system, thereby resolving your symptoms.
But, wait, is your thyroid really the problem? What caused your thyroid to be slow in the first place? Is it nutrient deficiencies? Is it mineral imbalance? Or, maybe it is gluten sensitivity?
The Functional Get-to-the-Root Paradigm (aka “Why”)
In contrast, the functional health model strives to answer the question, “Why did you develop a particular condition?” versus “What condition do you have?”. Functional health practitioners also strive to determine what you can do to prevent the progression of, and even reverse, your condition. While this approach takes a lot more time (certainly more than today’s 10-15 minute acute care-centric visit) and requires a more rigorous review of medical histories, more-targeted lab testing, and extended ongoing support and coaching, it actually achieves long-term, sustainable results.
It’s important to note that the functional health approach is not anti-conventional medicine and nor are we. We are grateful for doctors and emergency procedures. The list of benefits of conventional medicine is long. Thanks to emergency medicine we’re living longer and aren’t as vulnerable to acute infections and accidents as our ancestors.
Moreover, the field known as “complimentary medicine” or “alternative medicine” which aspires to align with the functional health model, is often practiced within the same paradigm of symptom suppression, only using a myriad of expensive and unnecessary tests as well as supplements in place of pharmaceuticals to achieve the same end. This leaves you with the necessity to develop your own knowledge and hone your own discernment as you embark on your healing journey. Educating yourself and choosing the right practitioners to guide you on this journey is no less important than summoning your commitment, determination, and self-discipline.
What is a Quick, Reliable Functional Method for Identifying Potential Root Causes?
You can manually assess the relevance of the most common major root causes to your health status by reading Unlock Your Health Potential book and taking the mini quizzes embedded in the book.
Alternately, you may choose to take the comprehensive online HealthPotentialAnalytics™ assessment and receive a complete detailed report within minutes.
Either way, once you have a prioritized list of root causes that potentially drive your current health status, you will need to embark on a healing journey to resolve these causes, improve your wellbeing, and ultimately maximize your health potential.
To achieve that, we recommend referring to the Unlock Your Health Potential book for guidance on immediate actions you may take to improve/resolve root causes identified by your HealthPotentialAnalytics™ assessment.
Long-term, we recommend identifying a functional health practitioner [link to Find A Practitioner Page] or an integrative health team (a combination of medical and functional practitioners), presenting them with your HealthPotentialAnalytics™ report, and asking them to help you confirm the relevance of these causes to your current health status (Unlock Your Health Potential provides a detailed list of diagnostic tools per root cause), and outline a treatment plan accordingly.