4. What Root Cause Medicine Actually Means

If you've ever felt like you're managing your health but never actually healing — this episode is going to land deeply.

In this first ‘TCM Tidbits’ episode, I'm breaking down the concept of root cause medicine: what it actually is, where it comes from, and why it's been the foundation of traditional Chinese medicine for thousands of years long before it became a buzzword in the wellness space.

I walk you through the difference between treating the branch (the symptom) versus treating the root (the why behind the symptom) — and why that distinction matters more than you might think for your long-term health. I want to help you understand not just how TCM works, but how you can start seeing your own body differently.

Because here's the truth: your body is not broken, it's communicating. And when we learn to listen — really listen — everything changes.

Topics Covered

• what root cause medicine is and where it actually comes from
• the tree analogy: roots, branches, and what your symptoms are really telling you
• branch treatment vs. root treatment — a side-by-side breakdown using acid reflux
• why suppressing stomach acid often makes the problem worse long-term
• the role of the vagus nerve and nervous system in digestive health
• why two people with the same diagnosis receive completely different treatment in TCM
• the difference between a drug and a medicine (and why it matters)
• how healing from the root can resolve symptoms for good — without lifelong dependency
• why your bioindividuality is your greatest superpower in healing

If this episode resonated with you, I'd love to connect. Follow me on Instagram @drlexistiles for more reflections, teachings, and tools to support your own pursuit of wholeness. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome to the Pursuit of Holeness podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Lexi Stiles. Everything here has one common thread, the intention of bringing you back to the healthy, divine, and worthy self that you are. We'll gather for conversations about Eastern medicine, holistic and preventative health care, the power of the subconscious mind, and to witness the authentic journeys of like-minded, inspirational humans.

SPEAKER_00 0:28

You're already whole exactly as you are. Let's help you remember that.

SPEAKER_01 0:36

Hello and welcome to this Thursday's episode. Happy Thursday if you're listening on the day that it was released. And happy whatever day of the week it is if you're not. These Thursday episodes are going to be another mini-series within the Pursuit of Wholeness podcast that I'm calling TCM Tidbits, where I will be sharing some theories and wisdom behind Chinese medicine in a way that actually makes sense in real life. So think of it as like bite-sized classical knowledge meets practical everyday application. And this is relevant whether you're a student deep in your TCM studies, whether you're a clinician or a physician working with patients, or if you're someone that's just trying to understand your own body a little better and trying to traverse your own healing journey in a way that feels empowering. So no matter where you are, I hope that there's something here that feels helpful and supportive. And in these episodes, I will be diving into theories, treatment approaches, protocols, and even specific health concerns or conditions. And I hope to break it down in a way that's easy to understand and even easier to apply and to make relevant to everyday life. I'm really inspired to create these episodes just from things that come up in clinic, in my work, or frequently asked questions that I get from friends or even the strangers, common themes I see in everyday life, and also pieces of my own health and healing journey. And so this week I wanted to kick it off with talking about this word or these three words root, cause, medicine. You may be hearing about it more these days, as it has definitely gained popularity in the functional health space. And maybe it's just my algorithm, but starting to see it kind of all over Instagram and social media. So while it seems like it might be revolutionary, it's actually an operating principle that's been around for thousands and thousands of years. And this idea of root cause medicine gives some insight into how Chinese medicine works. And so, overall, this episode will be a great one to share with anyone that's curious about taking an integrative or holistic approach to their health. If they are looking to understand what root cause medicine is a little bit more, or kind of trying to decide which approach is best, this will hopefully help to kind of distill down the differences in different approaches and give everybody a really good understanding of the approach that not only Chinese medicine takes, but this idea of like what is root cause approach and what does it mean and what is a part of it. And so we'll get into all of it. Um, the root cause approach is very much rooted in Eastern traditions of medicine, for example, Chinese medicine and Ayurveda, and it has more recently been adopted by Naturopathic, functional, and integrative medicine for the last hundreds of years, but it's been the way that doctors of Chinese medicine and Ayurveda have been functioning for thousands and thousands of years. So let's just start with kind of a broad definition. Root cause medicine is basically any systemic approach that aims at finding the underlying cause or origin of disease in the body instead of just managing or covering up symptoms as they appear at face value. So the method of a root cause practice requires extensive questioning and diagnostic methods and really diving deep into the nature of the presenting individual instead of just a standardized band-aid solution or a standardized treatment approach or a standardized protocol. So it really places the into the individual at the center stage when it comes to treatment. It's not like treatment first, individual second, it's very much individual-based, individual focused. This is a very foundational aspect of TCM theory, traditional Chinese medicine theory. All the modalities and approaches within Chinese medicine are built upon this methodology of first digging into the root. We don't move forward with any kind of treatment until we have a really good idea of what is going on at the deepest level available to us at that time. And by S I mean I can't speak for everyone, but if you're a good practitioner, if you are in integrity, if you are a fully trained doctor of Chinese medicine, this would be the way that you would approach it. I can't speak for what everyone is doing. But yeah, we we really prioritize understanding what's going on at the deepest layer that the body will reveal to us at that time. And then sometimes the body does continue to reveal more layers as we go through treatment, but we just continue pursuing these underlying mechanisms. We continue pursuing understanding, understanding from the lens of compassion and really meeting the body where it's at. Never trying to place an idea or an assumption or an expectation on the body, but approaching it in a way that's like, body, you speak, we listen, not the other way around. So I think I'm like kind of a visual learner in some ways, or like an imaginative learner. So I wanted to give an example that might help distill this down. I want you to consider a tree, like a classic tree. It has its roots and it has its branches, it has its trunk. We see the roots are beneath the surface of the earth. The trunk is kind of the part that marries what is beneath the surface and what's above the surface the most obvious, the most outreaching, which are the branches. So we can see the branches, we can easily see what's going on with them. They're like the most obvious part of the tree, but we can't see the majority of the root system. And so we can't give any sort of evaluation really as to what's going on with the roots just at face value. However, if we were to dig open the soil and look at the root system and consider its integrity and its capacity and its function, is it exchanging water well? Is it healthy? Is it hydrated? This root system, even though we can't see it on the surface, is what determines the health of the entire tree. So if there's something wrong with the roots, there is a guarantee that it will express at some level in the branches. If there's something wrong in the root system underneath the ground, we can almost guarantee we will see it in the branches above the ground. We'll see that the branches are maybe dehydrated, malformed, or weak or brittle, there might be a different color, they might be unable to produce leaves. And so even though this root system and its state is hidden, quote unquote, under the soil, the evidence is still there in the integrity and the health of the rest of the tree. On the contrary, if there's something wrong with the branches, it doesn't necessarily mean that there's something wrong with the roots, because there could be a scratch on a branch from an animal, there could be a weather pattern that broke some of the branches, there could be a neighboring tree that affected some of the branches. And so what's going on at face value with the branches doesn't actually reflect an issue with the whole system necessarily. It can, but it doesn't automatically mean that there's something happening under the roots because it could just be something on the surface. It just could be an external factor, an environmental factor that affected these branches. And so treating something that's just happening with a branch could actually be a disservice to the entire tree and its systemic health. Like if we see a branch that has a scratch on it from some animals and we give tree treatment as a tree doctor to this tree trying to resolve this, it would be a disservice because the tree is not actually unhealthy at all. It's just kind of an external factor that happened and the integrity of the tree is still intact. So we really can't just treat something that's happening with a branch without digging in a little bit deeper and considering why is this here? Is it an internal thing or is it an external thing? And we can kind of consider the body in the same way as a tree, in a way. The symptoms of the body and the symptoms that the body is expressing are like the branches. They're what we can see very clearly, but they don't actually give us the whole story about what's going on in the body. So if we just treat a branch or a symptom without considering the rest of the system, the body, we could actually be taking detrimental action to the whole system because the system or the symptoms aren't the whole story. The symptoms that we see, the branches that we see, are like one little piece of the plot in a book. It would be like reading one chapter of a book and saying, you know, the trajectory of the entire novel. It's just not true. A snapshot is not an accurate understanding of the body. Meanwhile, on the contrary, the true state of the body can be represented and interpreted underneath the surface, like the roots, which we can't see at first glance. But what's happening under the surface does give us a clear idea or inclination of the health of the entire body of the system. We can't infer the health of the body based on a symptom, just like we can't infer the health of a tree based on one tree branch. But we can infer the health of the body based on deeper revelatory markers and diagnostic methods, just like we can infer the health of the tree based on what's going on with the roots. Or we can predict things about what may happen in the future. Like the roots just give us a really good and kind of thorough understanding of either what's currently going to be happening in the roots or what's kind of coming down the road. So let's kind of look at a practical example to distill this even further. We'll consider someone that has acid reflux and kind of look at it between the lens of what a branch treatment would do and what a root treatment would do. So someone has acid reflux. In a branch treatment approach, a person would state that they're experiencing acid reflux, they'd be prescribed a proton pump inhibitor, an antacid, maybe antihistamines to neutralize or reduce their stomach acid and to stop this incidence of acid reflux. And so while they will have less discomfort from any of those prescriptions, it doesn't actually solve anything because we haven't explored why it might be happening in the first place or what kind of imbalances eventually led to this stomach acid situation, whether it's too much or too little, we'll get into. And to kind of just directly try and change something like that or interfere with something like that, it doesn't have any effects. The body is so intelligent and everything it creates or produces is for a purpose. Like it's for a meaning. It is so important. Everything at every level of the body plays such a strong role. And it's so funny to me that as humans, we think we can just like cancel out a part of it or stop something from happening, especially when we think that we can do that with no other effects. There's always going to be a ripple effect, anything, any input we give to the body, because the body's main goal is always to find homeostasis. So it has to take in any stimuli, physical, chemical, emotional, mental, and shift around the entire system to compensate for this new piece of stimuli that it took in. So an antacid within the kind of the branch treatment approach, an antacid would be an example of it. An antacid isn't as simple as just neutralizing stomach acid, but that is kind of the branch treatment approach. There is a symptom, we give something to stop that symptom, end of story. That's kind of like a broad overview of what a branch treatment approach looks like. By contrast, a root treatment approach would consider many, many factors, um, like how long has this been happening for? When did it start? Was it after a big emotional event or a big life change? We would ask and consider what makes it worse and what makes it better. And then most importantly, we would actually look at other symptoms, unrelated symptoms. Well, people think they're unrelated, but symptoms going on in other systems of the body in order to get a full picture of what's going on in the whole system. So, like I said, one symptom doesn't tell a story, but we can start to piece things together. We can start to really understand the story when we look at this holistic picture of the body. And we start to consider other things as well, like how's your sleep? How are your energy levels? How's your mood? What's happening in your cycles if you're a female? So we explore and ask questions about the symptom. Is there actually an underproduction of stomach acid? Could there be a co-infection in the stomach, like H. pylori? Is there a histamine overload? Is it a structural issue with the sphincters? How's the nervous system doing? I mean, one of the main branches of the vagus nerve or one of the main neural highways of the nervous system, it actually wraps around the stomach and it discharges stress from the rest of the body into the parts of the vagus nerve that are wrapped around the stomach. So oftentimes the stomach can truly become like paralyzed in essence from too much stress in the system, and this would impair acid production. Honestly, more often than not, acid reflux is a sign of low stomach acid, not high stomach acid. So it is kind of interesting that a branch approach target just looks at reducing stomach acid. And this is why we see so many long-term issues or even short-term impairments in digestion with that approach. But the essence of a root treatment approach is that we just keep digging. We have to get underneath the soil. We really want to understand what's going on. We want to understand what's going on from many different layers and perspectives on really considering the body as this holistic ecosystem. So we do, we just keep digging and digging until we find as deep as we can the epicenter of the cause of what's going on. Is it emotional? Is it physical? Is it structural? Is it mental? Is it genetic? Or is it trauma stored in the body? And more often than not, it's going to be a combination of these things. And so there'd be no single treatment prescribed or given until we find out what's going on. And sometimes, honestly, the first, the first hour or the first few sessions I spend with patients is just on getting to know their system, playing like a detective, combining lab reports with our TCM diagnostic modalities, getting a feel for the person's physical, mental, emotional state. It's rarely a situation of, oh, you have that, here's this treatment. There's always some digging to be done first. And after we go through the process of determining what's going on at the very deepest layer that we can get to, then we can start with a treatment. And it's funny because the treatment might not even seem like it's directly targeted at the symptom. Like, for example, in working with someone that has acid reflux, I might have to start with clearing pathogens from the body. And then maybe we move to unwinding stories about low self-worth that have created these fascial and muscular and neural restrictions in the tissue around the stomach. And then we do some retraining on meal times and eating undistracted and some deep breathing or vagal toning exercises before meals. And then voila, the reflux starts to fade away. But I don't necessarily, I or I didn't necessarily give a compound that's directly going to affect stomach acid. I was looking at things through like a much broader picture. And so it's also interesting when you when you um look at things from this broader perspective and actually find the root cause of a symptom. When we start to correct this cause at the very deepest level in the body, it has a systemic effect throughout the whole system. And so naturally, other symptoms or imbalances will start to resolve. And look, we may have just started with an attempt to get relief from acid reflux, but by the time we're done, the person is sleeping better, they have more mental clarity, their digestion is better, their energy levels are improved, they feel better and more confident in their body. And this is just kind of a natural progression of really finding the deepest imbalances in the body because we're not just correcting one single thing, we're correcting a systemic imbalance or a combination of systemic imbalances. And those imbalances are going to affect several, several systems in the body all at once. It's not just going to only affect the stomach acid production, it's going to affect systemic hormones, it's going to affect the endocrine system, it's going to affect the cardiovascular system, it's going to affect neurotransmitter production in the brain. And so one of the beautiful things about root-cause medicine, and why I'm so obsessed with Chinese medicine, is like we just don't isolate things. Like we can't isolate a symptom and treat only one branch of a tree. We never just look at a single branch and like just treat that one branch. Because it's kind of a futile effort. Like if you're not treating something from the inside out, if you're not really effectively improving its health or improving its quality, you're just gonna have to keep putting more and more and more band-aids on. And so there's definitely stark differences between the two approaches. But do I believe there's a place for both? Yes, I do. I think convenience, especially in this day and age, convenience is not going away anytime quickly. And for the commonly trained immediate gratification brain these days, convenience is a nice thing to have. And pharmaceutical drugs or prescriptions that offer that quick uh that quick relief can be very supportive for people in certain situations. Like if you have a migraine and you don't have two weeks or a month or hours and hours to cure it, you need to go to work now. And so sometimes, I mean, you have to pop a painkiller. That's the nature of life. And honestly, how lucky are we that we have these quick fixes available? But the key is to not become reliant on them or to not use them as a false sense of treatment. I mean, I will often define the difference between a drug and a medicine, and a medicine is is not Advil, is not an antihistamine, is not an antidepressant, because a medicine is something that we take one time or for a short amount of times and it's curative, like an antibiotic. Whereas a pharmaceutical drug is something that we become reliant on. Anyways, that's a conversation for another time. But the point is there are these short-term kind of quick fixes that have a time and a place for sure. We just don't want to become reliant on them or consider that that we're actually healing the body because there's not actual healing happening in short term fixes or in temporary fixes. And on the other hand, if we take a root cause approach, for the most part, I mean, I have seen some extraordinary cases, but for the most part, it will take longer because we're essentially. Retraining the body, we're reorienting it, we're unraveling patterns, and we're reprogramming new ways of being within the system at many different levels and layers. So it takes time and it takes repetition and it takes consistency. But the beauty is that it actually teaches the body how to reach and maintain homeostasis by itself on its own. So the body becomes self-sufficient instead of having to rely on something like a prescription. And anytime we have to rely on something, we're kind of giving away some of our power. And when we have to rely on a substance in particular, it like by definition becomes a drug. So the other thing to consider is that if someone is given a drug for acid reflux, for example, they'll have to take it for the rest of their life, and likely they'll have to take more or a higher dose each year because the body becomes less responsive to it. Whereas if we tackle acid reflux through this root cause approach, it might take a month or two months or six months, but once it's resolved, we can say with a lot of certainty that it could be resolved forever. The person doesn't have to develop a reliance on a system because through the process of treatment, their body has remembered its self-healing capacity. And so if things start to slightly come out of homeostasis again, because of the retraining we've done at such a deep level in the body, it kind of knows how to correct these imbalances. And I mean, if we if we go back to ignoring the symptoms or living out of alignment or doing detrimental things or get another infection, I mean it could come back. But the idea is that once we resolve something from a root, from a root approach, it's like we are, we do have the potential to be completely free of it forever. And the final thing I wanted to kind of touch on in this area is that because of the nature of digging into the very specific why behind what someone is experiencing, there will be a very different web of causes in each person. And so each person will receive very different treatment. For example, two people that both have, say, chronic migraines would receive very different courses of treatment in this system of root cause medicine because there's a very different cause behind what they're experiencing. So in root cause medicine, two people with the same disease get different treatment. Whereas within the branch treatment approach, two people with the same symptom or disease would likely get the same prescription or the same like one of three prescriptions. So the root cause approach really honors bioindividuality and the understanding of unique physiology and life paths and stories that have gotten someone to where they are. We're not looking at the body as this standardized machine that functions the same from person to person, but we're really taking into account the nuances of stories and events and life progression, all the things. And I mean, like over time, we I definitely see some trends, and there are like loose protocols that work, and within Chinese medicine, there's acupuncture protocols that work. But honestly, in giving treatment to probably thousands of people at this point, never have I ever given two people the exact same progression of treatment protocols, even if they've had a lot of similarities in their cases. And I mean the treatment protocols themselves could have had similarities, but never, ever, ever have I ever done the exact same thing for two different people. Because we're not treating what we see on the surface. We're treating the deeper layer, um, the deeper layers, which are completely, completely unique in each person. And so I really want to give licensing to people to start tuning into that uniqueness and that individuality because it truly is your superpower. No one else can be you. No one else has the unique makeup of genotype or phenotype that you have. And I think if we all really start harnessing our specific flavor, the world will just flourish. Because in doing that, we're all being the little unique piece of the puzzle that makes such a pretty picture when it's put all together. And no one else can be your puzzle piece, and you can't be anyone else's puzzle piece. And Ergo, you can't be treated like anybody else. Your little piece of the puzzle needs to be treated with what's going on in your little piece of the puzzle. And I think this is such an empowering way for people to learn about themselves, to start to understand and really digest the levels and layers of their history, what's happened to us, our current story. And when you open yourself up to the curiosity of wanting to go deep and wanting to understand these things about yourself, it's almost like inviting a part of your soul and your truth forward. And it ends up being this really beautiful journey of getting to know yourself and then getting to curate a life that really serves that and that really fosters that knowing. And that is the point of healing. Like that's that's the greatest gift that healing gives us is taking us on this journey of getting to know self and finding the confidence to be that self and to create a life from that self. So to me, it's not so much about the approach of root treatment versus branch treatment, but it's more about what the essence of the approach provides. Is it creating a sense of inner authority and empowerment? Or is the solution and approach dependent on being reliant on something outside of ourselves? Because I think a huge piece of healing is remembering and harnessing this internal power and retraining our capacity for that to be the focal point of our lives, to have this internal focus and this internal reliance as opposed to this external focus or this external reliance. And I just think you're so much more powerful than you realize. I think your body is so much more wise and nuanced and powerful than you realize. I think your mind and your thoughts are so, so much more powerful than you realize. But I do think we have to be given the circumstances that enable us to connect with that power. And that's what I'm here for. So I hope this was helpful and supportive to you in some way. And if it could assist someone else you know in navigating their own health journey, please feel free to share it. And I'd also love feedback on other topics within the realm of Eastern medicine, Chinese medicine, holistic approaches, whatever assortment of healing modalities. I want to know what you want to know. So please comment or send me a message. I am here for you, and I am here for your pursuit of wholeness.