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, only mask more fundamental problems. The "drug it out, cut it out" approach that doctors & nurses learn in medical school works great for infectious disease and emergency room medicine. And we're grateful for that. But where chronic and complex illness is concerned, it's not the path to creating and sustaining true health. 

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A functional medicine "root cause" approach might be greeted by some as heretical, 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 health and wellness lie.

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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. Doctors purport to create health, to stave off illness, yet are unschooled in the most basic human bio-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. Non-drug & non-surgical approaches to preventive health and wellness simply can't compete.

 

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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The foundational naturopathic medicine concepts of nutrition (specifically, the actual nutrient content 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.

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