How We Really Get to the Root of Disease

By Dr. Lena Suhaila, ND, FABNO

“Getting to the root cause” is something you hear often, but the phrase has lost most of its weight. In real clinical practice, it’s a way of thinking and a way of being with a person. It’s slow, it’s often messy, and it doesn’t fit neatly into a checklist. It’s also where real healing begins.

Illness doesn’t show up one day out of nowhere. The body keeps a record of how we’ve lived, how we’ve adapted, what we’ve endured, and what we’ve suppressed. Symptoms are often the final language the body uses when it’s been trying to speak for a long time. Before something becomes a diagnosis, there’s usually a history of small signs, disconnection, or stress that went unacknowledged. The root is hidden in those early signals, in the environment you’ve lived in, in the coping strategies you learned, and in the emotional experiences you’ve carried.

Finding the root means looking beyond symptoms. It means asking when you stopped feeling like yourself, what shifted in your body or your life, and how those shifts connect to what’s showing up now. It means building a timeline and seeing the relationships between your physical state and your lived experience. Maybe the onset of illness came after a loss, a trauma, a period of burnout, or a slow accumulation of environmental exposures. These moments are clues, because your biology responds to everything around and within you.

This is especially true in cancer care. A cancer diagnosis is rarely random. It arises in a body that’s been operating under certain conditions for years, sometimes decades. My work as a naturopathic oncologist is partly about supporting you through cancer treatment and partly about reading those conditions honestly, because the terrain that made cancer possible is the same terrain that shapes how well treatment works and how vulnerable you remain afterward.

Finding the root also means we stop asking only what the disease is and start asking why it’s there. Why now? Why in this form? What has the body been adapting to that was never actually safe or sustainable?

This doesn’t mean we throw out science or ignore testing. We still look at labs, imaging, and biomarkers, but we don’t stop there. We place that data in the larger context of your life, your history, your environment, your relationships, your pace, your beliefs. We ask how the terrain of your body became vulnerable, and what it would take to support it back into a state where health is possible again. These are the questions that lead us beyond managing disease and toward understanding it.

Here’s the truth most people don’t talk about. Not everyone wants to get to the root. Not at first. The root is rarely convenient. It rarely lives in a supplement or a single diagnosis. It usually lives in the parts of our lives we’ve avoided: our pace, our relationships, the ways we’ve learned to override discomfort. Looking at the root takes real work and real grit, and it’s easier, frankly more socially reinforced, to look for a quick fix.

Our culture rewards fast answers and visible results. We’re conditioned to want the pill, the protocol, the detox that promises everything in thirty days. Real healing asks for something else. It asks for presence, honesty, and staying in relationship with our bodies even when they’re uncomfortable or inconvenient. This kind of healing doesn’t have a linear timeline, and it isn’t passive. It asks you to become more engaged with your life.

There is rarely a single root. Instead, there’s a pattern, a web of factors interacting with each other: genetics, toxins, trauma, microbiome shifts, lifestyle habits, accumulated unprocessed stress, and chronic emotional patterns that have never found a way to resolve. We’re complex beings. What heals one person may not heal another because their stories, their bodies, and their relationships to their symptoms are different.

Getting to the root takes curiosity more than control, a willingness to listen without rushing in to fix, and the work of restoring the connection between you and your inner cues. That’s often the first thing we lose when we’re unwell: the ability to trust our own body.

True root-cause medicine respects that healing takes time, and that what shows up in the body is often a reflection of deeper layers. Rather than clearing inflammation or balancing hormones and calling it done, we ask what the inflammation is doing there in the first place, and what your system needs to stop living in survival mode.

Healing starts when we stop looking for a single answer and begin to honor the whole story. That includes biology, yes, but also biography. Who you are, what you’ve lived through, how you’ve made sense of it, and where you are now. That’s the kind of medicine I practice, and the only approach I’ve seen actually change what comes next.

If this is the kind of medicine you’re looking for, here’s how we begin together.