One of the things I struggle with as a physician practicing 'the new medicine' is that the change that is needed in medicine is quite fundamental. Although getting doctors to use effective Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) therapies is important, it is not enough. Cutting-edge research is telling us that what is needed in medicine is a paradigm shift. The medicine my colleagues practice in hospitals and clinics is backwards and incomplete because it is focused on an outdated concept - diagnosis.

Everything we do in medicine is currently focused on diagnosis. The process begins when a person notices that their body is behaving abnormally and seeks professional help. These problems are called symptoms – things like cough, chest pain, headache or fever – and they are clues. The doctor takes a medical history to uncover any other important symptoms, and performs a physical examination to look for physical abnormalities that are also clues – these are called signs.

Based on these clues, doctors generate a mental list of all the possible ‘diseases’. That list is called a differential diagnosis, and it forms the basis of further testing. This might involve laboratory evaluation to measure the levels of hundreds of substances in the blood, urine and other tissues and fluids. For just over a century, it has included taking pictures of different parts of the body using X-ray, ultrasound, CT scan or MRI techniques. A new era promises genetic testing and many other specialized techniques.

The goal of all of this activity is to arrive at a diagnosis. This is how doctors understand health problems, and how they select your treatment. Doctors obviously do not treat osteoarthritis in the same way that they treat schizophrenia or asthma. If you know your diagnosis, you can look it up on the internet and learn everything that doctors know and more. You can learn what the typical symptoms are, when it usually occurs, how prevalent it is, who is most likely to get it, what the X-rays look like and blood tests show, how it is officially diagnosed and – more importantly – how it is treated.

If you have an infection, antibiotics kill it. If you have high blood pressure, you are given drugs to lower it. If you are depressed, you take antidepressants. Tumors are cut out, low iron is replaced, absent hormones are prescribed, pain is treated with pain killers and sedatives treat insomnia. It is more effective in some cases than others, but it is always incomplete. It is incomplete because modern medicine treats what you have, but it does not address why you have it.

This must be a part of the new medicine.

While early medicine attributed many problems to such things as bad humours or evil spirits, it evolved into a paradigm of treating a diagnosis. For centuries, doctors were taught that there was one cause for each disease, and it was the challenge of our profession to find that cause and eradicate it, thereby curing the patient.

This made sense in its time, since most of the illnesses that doctors treated were caused by infectious micro-organisms such as tuberculosis and cholera. It doesn’t work so well anymore. The reason is that most ‘diseases’ are not diseases at all. They are simply patterns of dysfunction.

Let’s say you have a leak in your roof. The damage after a heavy rain will depend on how your house leans, where the leak is, how your foundation was built, etc. You might see water damage on your sofa, your basement floor, your bathroom ceiling or your closet clothes. What would you think of a repairman who told you that you had ‘sofa disease’, insisted that you need to repair or replace your sofa … but did nothing about your roof?

That is how we practice medicine today. In most cases, the root causes of illness are ignored. We have lots of scientific evidence linking these factors to most chronic diseases, and we pay lip service to some of them, but less than 1% of our health care dollars are used to deal with them. They include emotional traumas, psychological stress, poor nutrition, lack of exercise and sunlight, physical injuries, surgical scars, toxic metals and chemicals, chronic infections, harmful electromagnetic fields and genetic variations – and they are implicated in virtually all the diseases that afflict man.

When you consider that our way of life and our physical, mental and emotional environment are all becoming more and more unhealthy, it should come as no surprise that most diseases are on the rise. The solution is not more drugs and surgery.

First and foremost should come prevention. Taxing junk food and polluting industries, subsidizing vegetables and promoting exercise at school and work, teaching children and adults to meditate and regulating industrial chemicals are just as important as paying for doctors, hospitals and drugs. There is ample research supporting this kind of medicine, but it is largely ignored.

Next comes natural medicines. Plant-based nutrition represents a huge health resource, and many supplements and herbs are proven to be safer and more effective than drugs – at a fraction of the cost. Chronic pain causes so much suffering, but most patients are only offered drugs to treat the pain – only a small minority have the money and knowledge to seek real treatment from manual medicine providers and other healers. We have helped hundreds of people return to health without drugs.

The good news is that the new medicine is easy. While there are thousands of diseases, they are all caused by the same few things. They are the root causes of all disease. How they affect the body is even simpler – in most cases, it is about the three control systems of the body – the nervous system, the endocrine (hormone) system and the immune system. They all work together, and their common action is the focus of the new field of psycho-neuro-endo-immunology.

Medical specialists, with their hyper-focus on one small part of the body, do not appreciate these links yet. Integrative physicians who see the body as a whole cannot help but look at things this way. And slowly, we are beginning to treat the causes of the problem AND the problem itself.

Implementing this new understanding of how and why people get sick can radically improve the health of people around the world. But changing the way the ‘experts’ think is no small task. I firmly believe that this revolution will not come from doctors – it will come from patients. And it has already begun. The internet allows anyone to find the answers. Seek and ye shall find.

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