My Symptoms Chart: Causation Cascade

If you’ve read my book, you’ve read my mini-rant on my hernia surgery. We knew I had a hernia, but at no point did the surgeon ever ask (other than “were you lifting anything”): “Why?” Why do you have a hernia? What caused it? You’d think that would be the million-dollar question: something caused the hernia, and whatever it was isn’t going away just because you stitch up the hole with a patch. My goodness.

What I’ve done, and what I think has been super helpful, is to construct a chart, a symptom “causation cascade” that allowed me to visualize what’s causing what. At least, to the best of my knowledge – obviously, this is my best stab at it based on what makes sense thinking through it and in light of my experience.

Here’s what I’ve found: whenever I’m analyzing my health symptoms, I have to start with two things: (1) is what’s happening a symptom or is it a cause? and (2)(a) if it’s a symptom, what’s what’s causing the result that just happened? (2)(b) if it’s a cause, how can I heal it – actually heal it (train and teach my body to overcome it), get to the root of it, not just suppress or displace it with some other liability.

Take, for example, cholesterol: the prevailing advice is that you should “lower your cholesterol,” because high cholesterol is bad. As such, cholesterol-lowering chemicals are routinely prescribed when high cholesterol is happening. The problem with that is the high cholesterol is a symptom – not a cause. High cholesterol isn’t “bad” (in some situations, like carnivore diet, it’s perfectly normal). High cholesterol is caused by something else – some other problem. Lowering your cholesterol by forcing your body with an external intervention (chemical) isn’t going to help anything (at least anything meaningful) because the high cholesterol isn’t a cause – it’s a symptom. (*The same is true for high blood pressure, fever, and a myriad other symptoms – symptoms are most often not “causes” in this sense).

On the other hand, if you identify the cause correctly, and heal that cause, your high cholesterol, blood pressure, fever, etc., will rectify itself, because the root cause has been straightened out.

Make no mistake: God designed our bodies perfectly – when our material is finally aligned perfectly (in heaven) we will be perfectly healthy. Here on earth, the material world is imperfect, and variations and imperfections occur that cascade to other imperfections, until eventually the material dimension of our being can no longer support its unity of form (i.e. we die). As such, we can be confident that, when seeking healing, there is always a cause that gave rise to our issue – always an underlying cause, caused by something else, caused by something else, and so on. We’ll never obtain perfect health – but that’s not what we’re called to. We’re called to health according to what is reasonable given our calling in life – remembering that our physical health is at the service of our mental health, which is at the service of our spiritual health (which is why it is doubtless a tactic of the enemy that so many toxic, crumby foods have become the norm – an inflamed gut makes a noisy, buzzing head which makes prayer and contemplation exponentially more difficult).

So, for what it’s worth, this is my causation cascade chart, starting from – as far as I’ve been able to tell – from the beginning:

Now, obviously this chart is incomplete (hopefully I won’t have to add much to it!) and over-simplified. But it’s illustrative of how I like to approach all this: in terms of peeling the “layers of the onion” back, causality by causality. I’m not here to make my tummy feel ok – I’m here to heal the thing that caused my stomach to burn (angry pancreas/liver) – and then, the thing that made that happen (covid spike poisoning) – and then the thing that made me susceptible to that (celiac) – then the thing that made me susceptible to that (leaky gut). Then we’ll see where we’re at.

At some point I may sit down, look at my tracking, and try to figure out a full-blown chart that tries to include everything (I’ll probably have to create a different format – the one above is a bit too linear, maybe use a Mind Map software or something). But for now, I find this helpful, in terms of getting to the root cause, and healing.