There Is No Root Cause

We are a culture addicted to being able to get an answer as quick as a super computer can process our question, scan the entirety of the interweb, and then spit out a neat and tidy summary.

We are also a bit brainwashed thinking that medical professionals should have the answers to why something is going sideways with our health.

So when presented with most clinical issues my answer to why a pathology has manifested is presenting my "Collection of Minor Insults" theory.

We all want a Solvable Problem

There's something deeply satisfying about the idea of a single cause. Hidden mold exposure, eating the wrong foods, a chronic virus that keeps resurfacing, a sad microbiome, some genetic factors, etc. If we can just find the thing, we can remove it, fix it, and move on with our lives. Case closed. Health Achieved.

A single cause means a single solution. It means the problem is solvable in a way that feels clean and controllable. But bodies, nature, relationships, fill in the blank, do not function this way. What caused that illness, the crop to fail, the marriage to end....death by a thousand papercuts if you will.

And most of the time, when someone has been dealing with chronic pain, infertility, fatigue, skin issues, hormonal chaos, or any of the dozens of complex health concerns that walk through the door — there isn't a single culprit waiting to be unmasked. There's a collection of minor insults that built up over time, each one unremarkable on its own, until together they weren't.

What this actually looks like

Nobody develops a chronic issue because of one dramatic event, usually. It's often from:

• Years of under-sleeping, stacked on top of

• A stressful job that never quite let up, stacked on top of

• A gut that was never quite right after a rough bout of food poisoning, stacked on top of

• A genetic tendency toward inflammation, stacked on top of

• An environment that isn't doing anyone's hormones any favors

  
  

None of these alone would necessarily cause the disease, the infertility, or the pain pattern you're dealing with now. But layered together, over years, they add up to a body that's simply out of balance. And once you're out of balance, small things stop bouncing off you the way they used to. Woof. Writing this is making me look at my own life. lol.

Sometimes there is a major contributing factor worth addressing, obviously. But treating it as the sole cause, and ignoring everything else that got the body to this point, usually leads to disappointment. You fix the one thing, and you still don't feel better, because the one thing was never the whole story.

How TCM approaches this

This is where Traditional Chinese Medicine offers something different. We don't just ask what caused this, we ask what is the pattern of disharmony. And spoiler alert, most people don't walk in with just one pattern. They walk in with several, overlapping and interacting with each other. Someone might be dealing with Liver Qi stagnation and Spleen Qi deficiency and some underlying Kidney depletion — all at once, all contributing to the same symptom picture in different ways.

There is some asking why but that is not the main point, most of the time we are all making an educated guess about the why when the what is presenting in the current moment is the more important part to understand, oh and then what to do about it. This kind of symptom web is what real, lived-in human bodies look like. The disharmony isn't caused by any one thing, it's the sum of all of them.

This is also why treatment in TCM tends to work on multiple fronts simultaneously rather than isolating a single lever to pull. We're not chasing one root. We are addressing several patterns that are all playing a part, because that's a more honest reflection of how the imbalance developed in the first place.

Why this actually matters for you

Well it is a way for me to communicate how TCM views the body and illness but also how you can take some control of your own life. If your health issue has one root cause, and you haven't found it yet, that can feel very frustrating. Like the answer is out there somewhere and until you find it nothing will change. Not true.

But if your health issue is the result of a collection of contributing factors, that means there isn't one lock you're missing the key to. It means there are multiple places to intervene, multiple ways to make progress, and you don't have to find the "smoking gun" before you start feeling better. We all have things that we should be doing that we know make us feel better but for whatever reason they get back-burnered when life is busy.

So shore up the gut. Support the nervous system. Move your body. Dial in your sleep. Each of these moves the whole system back toward balance, even without ever identifying a single root.

That's the case for a genuinely holistic approach. If the problem was never one thing, the solution was never going to be one thing either.

Next time you catch yourself hunting for the one root cause of a health issue, it might be worth reframing the question. Instead of "what caused this," try asking "what collection of things has kept this pattern going, and where can I start chipping away at it?"

That's a question that actually has an answer. And it's one we can start working on today, without waiting to find a villain that was probably never there to begin with.