What is root cause medicine, and how is it different?

Root cause medicine is treating the underlying cause of your disease, rather than its symptoms or its triggers.

There isn’t a silver bullet for treating migraine that works for everyone. There can’t be, because while migraine has just one name, it has many causes, unique to our physiological function and how our genetics are expressed in response to our past and current environment and lifestyle.

There are many root causes of migraine, and they can vary widely. For example, some migraine conditions are associated with the stress hormone called cortisol. And others are associated with musculoskeletal trauma or tension. Clearly, addressing cortisol levels will require a much different treatment approach than addressing musculoskeletal issues.

While the traditional approach to migraine may sometimes mask the symptoms, it will keep coming back until we find the root cause and adopt the actions that change how our physiology and genetics respond to create the disease.

While having the genetics for migraine can feel like we’re doomed to a fate, addressing our root cause is actually a skill that can be learned, making this a very hopeful approach for people.

It is important to understand that treating root cause is different than addressing “triggers.” That is because migraine is a “threshold disease.” You might think of it like this-as our lifestyle interacts with our genes, we are controlling the water level in a cup.

As the water level gets to the brim, a single ”trigger” might be the droplet that makes the cup overflow producing a migraine. That effect can make us think that understanding triggers is the key to solving our migraine mystery. But focusing on triggers usually fails because our triggers keep changing since any kind of droplet would cause the cup to overflow. The solution is to address the root causes of our migraine condition so that our water level goes down permanently and we can tolerate more droplets before the cup overflows and produces a migraine. This is what root cause medicine allows us to do.