Many people make costly mistakes when reasoning about their health. Even most doctors make this mistake, because it’s not a mistake that’s caused by a lack of medical knowledge. Rather, it’s caused by a lack of clear thinking.

People experience symptoms, and then they look for the root cause of their symptoms. For example, somone with heartburn or pain in their stomach might decide the root cause of their issues is excess stomach acid/GERD (GastroEsophageal Reflux Disease – a disease affecting around 20% of the population!!). They then treat this root cause with antacids, often for many years. These people sometimes die of esophageal cancer, because the identified root cause was not the true root cause, and the treatment was imperfect.

The mistake was identifying a root cause inside the body. The root cause of a health issue is always something outside the body. (In the case of genetic disorders, the root cause is your parents giving you bad genes, and your parents are outside your body.) Our universe is material, and operates on cause and effect. You can always, in theory, trace the causes back far enough to find one that’s outside your body. This is important, because if you identify a cause within your body, you can’t be sure there’s not another cause inside your body, causing that cause.

My story, briefly: I initially started having stomach pain. Later, I developed lower GI issues, like bloating. I initially attributed these issues to bad gut bacteria, which I did in fact have.

If I had decided that bad gut bacteria were the root cause of my health issues, I would have taken antibiotics and probiotics to correct that issue, but it would have kept coming back, and I would have been chronically ill for life, having to go through cycles of antibiotics repeatedly, which I did for a while.

The bad gut bacteria were most likely caused by stomach acid and bile flow issues. Took me a while to figure that out.

If I had decided that excess stomach acid or low bile flow were the root cause, I would have taken an antacid or a bile supplement, and I would have been chronically ill for life.

The stomach acid and bile flow issues were most likely caused by vagus nerve dysfunction. Took me a while to figure that out too. I won’t go into all the details, because they’re not important, but one thing that helped was developing new symptoms (heart palpitations) that were clearly not related to acid/bile.

If I had decided that vagus nerve dysfunction was the root cause, I would have done vagus nerve calming methods like ice packs, deep breathing, and vagus nerve massages, and I would have been chronically ill for life.

The vagus nerve issues were most likely caused by muscle tension in the neck. I figured this out when a physiotherapist released muscle tension at the back of my neck, and the episode of heart palpitations I was having stopped quickly afterward.

If I had decided muscle tension in my neck was the root cause, I would have done regular physiotherapy to release the muscles and gotten regular massages, and I would have been chronically ill for life.

Fortunately, it was easy for me to see that the tense muscles were themselves caused by my desk job. This is the real root cause, which you can tell, because it’s outside my body. This is the only thing I can fix or work around that will fully fix my health issues. Everything else is only treating symptoms.

There are no shortage of doctors, naturopaths, etc. who would only treat the bad gut bacteria, or only treat the stomach acid issues, never finding the root cause of what’s wrong. I met several of these people. The utter disinterest health care practitioners have when it comes to identifying root causes – even good, kind, caring practitioners – was shocking to me. But medical school doesn’t teach you to think, it teaches you about medicine. The sheer number of non-root-cause diagnoses in medicine is a sign of how irrational the whole field is when it comes to this. “IBS” doesn’t even pretend to identify a root cause. Mental health issues are often blamed on chemical imbalances in the brain (which is inside the body). Insomnia is treated with sleeping pills. And so on.

Just today I saw a woman on TikTok describing how she was sick of doctors not finding the root cause of her POTS (a condition giving elevated heart rate when changing body position), which she’d had for five years. Doctors would treat the heart rate itself, prescribing her beta blockers to stabilize her heart rate. She eventually decided on an admirable, high-agency strategy: she called neurology clinic after neurology clinic, asking them if the testing they perform would be able to show her exactly what’s wrong with her, without any guesswork. If they equivocated, she’d hang up and call the next clinic. She eventually came across a functional neurology clinic that satisfied her requirements, and did a tilt table test. What that test showed was that her brain’s blood flow was dropping first (by 70%!), before the elevated heart rate kicked in. So the root cause of her POTS, she concluded, was cerebral hypoperfusion (low blood flow to the brain), caused by broken reflexes that control blood flow and heart rate in the brain. Her TikTok video ended on a note of hope, describing how now she’s found the root cause of her health issues.

Notice, however, that the brain reflexes that control blood flow and heart rate are inside the body. That means some exterior cause exists, but has not been identified. By random chance, I think I know what it might be. In one comment, the woman admitted to having EDS (Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, a hypermobility disorder). Again, I’m not a doctor, but from my own health investigations I discovered that people with EDS often have blood flow issues to the brain because of a neck issue called cervical instability. The neck ligaments become stretched out, and the upper spine bones move around too much, putting pressure on nerves and blood vessels, especially during position changes. I suspect this woman will eventually discover her neck is the cause of her blood flow issues, and that the EDS is the cause of the neck issues. EDS is an inherited disorder, caused by your genes, and your genes come from your parents, which are outside the body, so that could complete the root cause analysis. If this is the case, then this woman is going to spend who knows how long messing around with trying to retrain her brain’s broken reflexes, treating a “neurotransmitter failure”, when her brain is fine, and her neck is the issue. I could be wrong! The root cause could turn out to be something totally different! But what it cannot be, is broken reflexes in the brain, because the brain is inside the body.

Sometimes, there can be more than one external cause. Sometimes, you won’t be able to figure out the root cause at all. The human body is not fully understood. But then, if you’re adhering to the outside-the-body standard, at least you know you don’t know the answer! At least you know to keep looking, unlike the millions of people currently taking antacids who explain their stomach acid issues by saying “I have GERD” and don’t even realize there’s an unanswered question lurking in the background, or all the people who attribute their depression or anxiety to neurotransmitters! I often wonder just how many millions of people currently suffer from chronic health conditions simply because they don’t even realize the root cause of their health issues has not been found. I also wonder if medicine itself would benefit from adopting an outside-the-body standard to make it clear what diagnoses are root causes and which are only intermediate explanations.

Being very intelligent doesn’t make you rational. Being very educated doesn’t make you rational. A doctor knows a lot about the body. A rationalist knows how to think. They know that the universe is made of tiny balls bumping into each other, and that everything can be explained in these terms. Only the rationalist has heard Richard Feynman ask why recursively, and read Eliezer Yudkowsky explain why some explanations aren’t actually explanations. I’ve tried to identify the exact rationalist principle that would lead to the outside-the-body test, but I can’t think of what it would be. Still, it’s clearly a rationalist maneuver, to say that no, this intermediate explanation cannot be good enough. No, changes to this system cannot be caused by the system itself. Trace it back far enough, and you’ll find a cause outside the system, or the system couldn’t have changed at all.

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