Why Root-Cause Medicine Saves Money

38 years of learning to ask a different question

Part 1: How it Started

My introduction to root-cause medicine began long before the term existed. In 1982, as a senior in medical school, I was assigned a paper and given a list of topics to choose from. I chose patient education. The small indigent clinic where I worked had a Patient Educator on staff, and I spent hours listening to her talk with patients. She explained things slowly, clearly, and respectfully. She helped people understand their own bodies. That experience stayed with me. It showed me that information could change outcomes.

A few years later, during residency, I took a job writing patient-education materials for an internist who wanted to include them in one of the early computer programs for medical practices. I didn’t know much about computers, but I knew patients needed better explanations than they were getting. When I opened my practice in 1985, I had time on my hands and no internet to lean on, so I wrote my own educational handouts. If I wanted to understand a topic, I went to the library or mailed away for materials. It forced me to pay attention and look for patterns.

IBS caught my interest early. There were no books on the subject, so I wrote one. But the real turning point was what IBS taught me. I began to see how often food intolerances and sensitivities were driving symptoms. In the early 1990s, I put patients on strict elimination diets and reintroduced foods one group at a time. I was getting people off gluten long before gluten was widely discussed. Two of my own employees improved dramatically when they removed it. One had textbook rheumatoid arthritis. The other had been diagnosed with a lupus-like syndrome, and her symptoms had started, though none of us saw it at the time, right around when she bought one of those automatic bread makers that everyone had back then and began bringing a fresh loaf into the office almost daily.

Another moment that changed my thinking happened on a plane from California to Denver. I had just attended an IBS meeting sponsored by a drug company. By chance, I sat next to a representative from New Chapter who introduced me to probiotics. He sent me samples, and the first two patients I tried them on came back, one after the other, and said the same thing. They both told me they had their lives back. Same phrase. Same relief. Same spark in their eyes. That got my attention.

A compounding pharmacist friend later invited me to a three-day functional medicine meeting in Houston. I almost didn’t go. Three full days in a classroom didn’t sound appealing. But I went, and it changed the way I practiced. I came home with a clearer understanding of root-cause medicine and began weaving it into my work. When I started in 1985, I was a traditional internist doing all the hospital work myself. Gradually, without realizing it, I was practicing functional medicine before it had a name.

I learned to look for patterns. One patient’s IBS always flared after restaurant meals. We eventually discovered MSG was the trigger. I even conducted an investigation into MSG as a cause of IBS. The results were never published, but the lesson stayed with me. Don’t wait for someone else to tell you what is going on. Pay attention. Follow the clues.

Not every case was straightforward. One elderly woman, one of my favorite patients, had unexplained weight loss. I sent her to multiple specialists and ordered every test I could think of. Nothing made sense. I asked a medical student to spend his entire rotation reviewing her chart and listing everything that had been done. Today AI could summarize it in seconds, but back then it took real work. In the end, we discovered she had amyloidosis, diagnosed by a Congo red stain of the rectum. It was rare, and it reinforced the same lesson. Keep digging.

Over the decades, chronic illness went from being the exception in my practice to being the shape of it. Autoimmune conditions I saw occasionally in the 1980s were coming through the door weekly by the end. What has not changed since is the system underneath, still built on a disease-drug model that treats symptoms instead of causes. And what has not changed for me either is what made the work worth doing. When you find the cause of someone’s problem, real relief becomes possible in a way it never was while everyone was managing symptoms.

This is one of the reasons we built It’s My Health. I waited a long time to write this because I wanted a real community in place first. Now that we have one, I hope this story helps someone else find relief. I hope IMH becomes a place where people can share their experiences, learn from each other, and discover information that genuinely helps.

We have refined the website, moved away from personal medical questions, and moved toward IMH Perspective, where we can explore topics like peptides and psilocybin that are shaping the future of medicine. We are still evolving, still improving, and still building.

There is one part of this I did not expect when I started. Finding the cause did not only change how people felt. It changed what they spent. That is the next piece of the story.

Authored by Gerard Guillory, MD

Gerard Guillory, MD, is a board-certified internist who practiced for nearly four decades with a focus on functional, root-cause medicine. He is the author of three books on irritable bowel syndrome and the founder of It’s My Health, where he and his team put current health news in context and help members understand the underlying causes of chronic symptoms.