The Weakness of What - The Strength of Why
by Henri Roca, MD, Clinical Functional Medicine Specialist
We, individually and collectively, pay huge sums of money to the medical-industrial complex to tell us ‘What’ is wrong with us. There is a sense of comfort when we get a name to describe our experience. Naming can convince us that there may be an answer. And usually once your symptoms are named, the process abruptly stops. Curiosity melts away. Playing the “What” game begins a disempowerment cycle. We NAME our symptoms. We then treat these NAMES as actual things that imply a cause and BLAME the NAME for the symptoms (I wonder if you see the circular reasoning here). Then we seek to TAME the NAMED thing.
This naming system drives medication development. We combine symptoms into a rigid descriptive structure and give it a name. Then we seek to research how we might suppress that set of named symptoms with some kind of medication or intervention. We NAME it, BLAME it, then TAME it. The process takes our health out of our hands. We no longer seek health. We seek the suppression of symptoms. We don’t seek resolution of symptoms. NAMING, BLAMING, and TAMING stops curiosity in its tracks as soon as a description captures the constellation of symptoms. We may not experience the symptoms as strongly when we suppress them with medication but the dysfunctional process that we have ignored creates new symptoms. And remember most disease names are only descriptions.
For example:
Arthritis > Inflammation in the joint
Arthrosis > Dysfunction of the joint
Arthralgia > Pain in the joint
The Weakness of What is:
It stops the process of curiosity and diverts us from seeking underlying root causes
It convinces us that our descriptions are actually the real disease process itself.
It focuses our efforts to improve our health most often on pills
It creates the circumstances for new symptoms to pop up in other areas of our biology.
It creates unhealthy individuals and populations who spend lots of money on pills.
It stops the process of healing.
It disempowers us from our best functioning
Now let’s change the conversation from What to WHY. Why is this happening? Why is this happening now? Why did symptoms occur when they occurred? Why does my health matter to me?
Considering the ‘Why’ questions opens the door to greater curiosity. It allows us to consider that symptoms may be related beyond the limits of their descriptions. Why questions allow us to peel back the onion of potential causes and drivers of disease. When we sequentially ask “Why”, “Why now”, we drill down deeper and deeper into potential causes. As we drill down to the dysfunctional processes that cause symptoms to emerge and that deepen the strength of symptoms, we return more and more options to each of us to improve our health. We finally reach the roots of our illness – often having to do with nutrition, toxic exposures, nutrient absorption, movement, stress resiliency, sleep, and a host of others.
In this framework for diagnosing illness, we look for patterns among the constellations of symptoms. For example, the diagnoses of eczema, allergies, asthma, fatigue, arthritis, irritable bowel, interstitial cystitis, and others may be combined as reflections of a single dysfunctional process relating to gut dysfunction rather than 7+ separate disease entities each of which may need a medication or two. In tis example, if we work on optimizing gut function, then the associated symptoms can melt away. When seeking the answers to “Why”, we move toward health and optimal functioning.
When we encourage you to consider “Why” understanding the root causes of your symptom matters to you, we invite you into the process of deeply considering the options that are available to you to return yourself to better health. And you begin to have a reason to do and maintain the hard work of health. There is strength in understanding why symptoms occur. That strength is the foundation for health.
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