Why Root-Cause Medicine Saves Money

38 years of learning to ask a different question

Part 2: Why Root Cause Medicine Saves Money

She worked in my office, and she had spent her career in medicine, which means she understood her own diagnosis better than most people ever will. Textbook rheumatoid arthritis, diagnosed years before she ever came to work for me, and by the time I knew her well she had settled into the routine that a chronic diagnosis creates. Appointments on the calendar. Prescriptions that got adjusted rather than finished. Labs every few months to see whether the medication was doing harm somewhere else.

She was on the usual drugs, the ones that work by suppressing your immune system. That is the standard of care, and it was aimed squarely at the inflammation. Nobody had asked what was feeding the inflammation.

We took her off gluten. Not as an experiment on a hunch, but as part of the same elimination protocol I had been running on IBS patients for a few years by then, because I had started to notice that the people whose joints hurt and the people whose guts hurt kept turning out to be the same people.

Within four to six weeks she was much better. Her inflammatory markers had normalized. That is the part I want you to sit with, because inflammatory markers are not a mood or a good week. They are a number on a lab report, and hers came down because of something she stopped eating. And we learned it was not a coincidence, because it held up in reverse. Over the years, whenever gluten came back into her diet, the symptoms came back with it. Consistently. She had, in effect, run the experiment on herself a dozen times.

Now count what stopped. The visits she no longer needed. The refills she no longer picked up. The labs that existed only to monitor the medication. The mornings she got back. The days she didn’t miss. Nobody sent her a statement for any of that, which is exactly why almost nobody notices it.

That is the part most people never connect. Getting to the root cause of a problem doesn’t just make you feel better. It often costs less, and not mainly for the insurance company. It costs less for you.

Think about how the other path works. You develop a symptom, you see your health care practitioner, you get a prescription. If the symptom persists, you go back. Maybe you see a specialist. Maybe you get imaging. Maybe you end up in the ER at two in the morning. Every step has a price: a co-pay, a deductible, a morning off work, a refill that renews every month for the rest of your life. Five symptoms become five prescriptions, and each prescription can generate a symptom of its own. The cascade is not anyone’s fault. It is just what happens when the question stays at the level of the symptom.

When you find the trigger, the cascade stops.

I want to be careful here, because this is where health writing usually overreaches. What I am describing is what I watched happen in my own practice over almost four decades, not a claim about what will happen to you. In my patients, the ones whose migraines eased were often the ones who dropped aspartame. The ones whose bladder pain settled were often the ones who gave up carbonation. The woman whose IBS flared after restaurant meals turned out to be reacting to MSG. Yours may be something else entirely, or nothing on that list.

One pattern is worth stating plainly. If you are prone to food intolerances, the culprit is very often a food you love, and one you seek out when you are tired or stressed. Comfort food. Which means the food you would least want to give up is often the first one worth testing.

And the money is only the visible layer. The bills you can add up. What you cannot add up is the energy that goes to managing a condition instead of living, the plans you stop making because you are not sure how you will feel, the patience your family spends alongside you. Chronic illness is expensive in currencies nobody invoices. Most people are paying in those currencies long before they ever look at the financial ones.

Over the long run the arithmetic is not subtle. Since 1999, the total cost of family health coverage through an employer has risen about 342 percent, and the share taken out of the worker’s own paycheck about 308 percent. Over those same twenty-five years, average earnings rose 119 percent and inflation ran 64 percent. Family coverage now runs close to $27,000 a year, with roughly $6,850 of that coming out of the household directly. That gap is not going to close on its own, and waiting for the system to fix it is not a plan. What you can do is ask a better question about your own body, earlier, and keep asking until the answer explains something.

You do not need five medications for five symptoms if the cause is addressed. You do not need three specialists if the problem resolves. You do not need to miss work if you are not sick.

This is one of the reasons we created It’s My Health. We are not here to diagnose anyone online, and we are not here to stand between you and your health care practitioner. We are here so that people have access to the kind of information that can prevent years of unnecessary suffering and unnecessary spending. People deserve to understand what is happening in their bodies. They deserve a health story that moves forward instead of looping.

The woman who opened this essay fit that pattern too. In her case the answer was in an everyday food she had no reason to suspect, and finding it took someone asking a different question.

Root-cause medicine can save money. More than that, it gives people the potential to get their lives back.

If someone came to mind while you were reading this, a person who has been managing something for years without ever getting an explanation, help us grow the community by forwarding this essay to them. That is how most of our community has grown.

Stay curious and thrive,

Dr. G

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.