Root Cause: What Medicine Really Means When It Says “Evidence”

The Claim

Every few weeks, a new headline or wellness reel declares that “conventional medicine doesn’t address the root cause.”

That’s why, they say, we’re all sick.

It’s a compelling line — one that sells protocols, supplements, and subscriptions. But the truth is more complicated. Medicine has always been about root cause. It’s just that science defines root differently.

From Mysticism to Mechanism

For most of human history, disease was explained through superstition — imbalance, punishment, or fate. Then came the Enlightenment and the birth of the scientific method: observation replaced belief, verification replaced tradition.

The 19th and 20th centuries turned that method into medicine. Germ theory, vaccines, antibiotics, and anesthesia redefined survival. Modern medicine became what it is today: reproducible, evidence-driven, and refined through failure.

How Medicine Defines “Root Cause”

Critics call biomedicine “mechanistic,” but that precision allows for proof. Diseases are traced to biological mechanisms — pathogens, mutations, cellular dysfunction — and treated directly. Antibiotics kill bacteria. Insulin replaces deficiency.

A tumor is excised.

That’s root-cause medicine — verifiable, testable, and falsifiable.

Where medicine falters is not curiosity but capacity: chronic illness, lifestyle, and psychosocial factors exceed what rushed systems can handle. The failure isn’t scientific; it’s structural.

Where Functional Medicine Steps In

Functional medicine arose to fill that gap — a call to treat people, not pathologies. It considers diet, sleep, trauma, and stress. That empathy matters. But when verification disappears, empathy becomes speculation.

Common “root causes” often lack consensus or standardized testing:

• Adrenal fatigue — refuted by the Endocrine Society.

• Leaky gut — intestinal permeability exists, but not as a stand-alone disease.

• Heavy metal toxicity — rare; most “detox” products are unregulated.

• IgG food tests — indicate exposure, not intolerance.

• HCG diet — deemed unsafe and unapproved by the FDA.

Functional medicine didn’t invent curiosity — it rebranded it. But curiosity without verification isn’t medicine.

The Verifiability Divide

Conventional medicine defines “root cause” as measurable, reproducible, and testable. Functional medicine often defines it as felt.

Once a diagnosis becomes unverifiable, it escapes accountability. What can’t be proven can’t be disproven — and that’s where faith replaces science.

When Root Cause Becomes Reinvention

Chronic fatigue, brain fog, dizziness, “seizures” without EEG findings — these are real experiences. But when biology offers no name, the internet will: mold toxicity, EMF exposure, GMO sensitivity, chronic Lyme.

Sometimes the origin isn’t toxic or microbial but psychological — trauma, anxiety, somatization. The body voices what the mind cannot. That doesn’t make suffering less real. It makes it human. But chasing unprovable villains often delays real help.

Why People Still Turn to Alternatives

It isn’t ignorance — it’s exhaustion. Healthcare is fragmented and impersonal. Functional and alternative practitioners listen longer. They validate. They give hope structure.

But hope, when monetized, becomes a product.

Proof, Not Promise

Functional medicine humanizes care. Conventional medicine safeguards it. Both have value. But medicine’s credibility depends on verification.

Root cause isn’t what you believe it is. It’s what you can prove it is.

Without that, treatment becomes storytelling. And storytelling, while beautiful, doesn’t belong in the exam room.

Author: R.E. Hengsterman, MSN, MA, M.E., RN

Registered nurse, night-shift administrator, and author of The Shift Worker’s Paradox

Nursewhowrites.com

For educational purposes only. Not medical advice.