Stop Chasing Protocols: The Foundations First Approach to Health
Guest Contributor: Dr. Alex Orton, ND at havenholistichealth.com
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Most alternative health approaches are dead ends.
Functional medicine.
Biohacking.
Esoteric protocols on internet forums.
On paper, these approaches look good. They are outside of the pharma model. They incorporate diet changes. And they often have plenty of success stories to back them up.
Yet I talk to people everyday that have seen multiple health providers, tried countless protocols, and paid thousands of dollars for labs and supplements with nothing to show for it.
It’s not for lack of trying. These individuals are highly motivated. They do their own research. They take action. But despite all their efforts, their health doesn’t get any better (if not gets worse).
It’s not because there’s something wrong with the person.
It’s because the approach itself sucks.
The vast majority of alternative health approaches are built on the same incoherent, disease-based paradigm as conventional medicine: treating the body like a broken machine that needs to be fixed.
…and there seem to be endless problems to fix.
Low testosterone. Mold. Heavy metals. Histamine. Oxalates. Iron overload. On and on…
Chasing problems with protocols is not going to lead to any meaningful long-term health improvement.
Because what happens if those protocols fail? Then it’s back to the drawing board.
Maybe it’s a hormone imbalance. Maybe it’s Lyme disease. Maybe it’s an MTHFR mutation...
I call this approach “throwing tomatoes at the wall to see what sticks.” You can chase symptoms and protocols endlessly doing this, without making any progress at all.
If you want your efforts to lead to results, you have to have the right framework, one that is coherent, holistic, and grounded in universal principles. Then you can actually get momentum and make real progress instead of spinning your tires.
The goal is to achieve optimal health and then maintain it long-term in the most efficient, practical, simplest way possible.
In order to do that, you need a system that can reliable get you there. This article will provide you with that system.
How Regular Doctors Can Treat You Like a Broken Car
Modern medicine treats the body like a machine. And this works really well with emergencies and physical injuries.
For example, if you are bleeding out because of a gunshot wound you need to slow the bleeding with drugs, mend the wound, and replace the lost blood.
Or if you blow out your knee, you need to identify the anatomical parts that are damaged and surgically repair them or replace them with new parts.
To put it simply, you find what’s broken and fix it, just like taking your car to a mechanic.
But this same mechanistic paradigm has been applied not just to emergencies but to all chronic disease.
Modern medicine has taken the concept of “broken parts” to the level of biochemical pathways, “receptors”, and genes. Every disease is assumed to result from some broken biological machinery, and solution is usually drugs.
The results of applying this mechanistic paradigm to chronic disease has been an abysmal failure. (Currently, 72% of Americans have at least one chronic disease.)
Holistic medicine has rapidly grown in popularity to offer an alternative to this failing system. But unfortunately, the vast majority of even “holistic” health approaches still fall into the same mechanistic trap.
Functional medicine doctors run more comprehensive “functional” testing beyond conventional bloodwork, like hormone panels, stool analyses, and genetic testing.
Then what do they do with this information?
Instead of using drugs, they use supplements to correct what’s abnormal:
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- Hormone replacement therapy.
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- Anti-microbial herbs to kill gut infections.
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- Methylated B-vitamins for MTHFR mutations.
Just like conventional medicine, this approach treats the body like a broken machine.
But the body is not a machine.
The body is a living, dynamic organism continuously adjusting to the countless changing environmental inputs it’s interacting with.
In fact, there are so many variables interacting with the body, you can look just about anywhere and find something “wrong” that you could try to fix.
In practice, functional medicine becomes an endless search to find broken parts through more and more testing. And each broken part is addressed with new protocols and supplements. The implicit assumption is that if you identify and fix enough broken parts, then the body will one day start working right.
That’s how people end up doing thousands of dollars of testing, taking hundreds of supplements, and just getting worse.
Your Inherent Super Power
It’s not that treating the body like a machine is inherently wrong. As I said, there are scenarios where this can be useful.
It’s just extremely limited because it leaves out the most critical aspect of healing: the life force.
Unlike the mechanistic, materialistic paradigm that dominates the health landscape, true holistic medicine is built on the premise that the body is intelligent and alive. That there is a vital force that animates and organizes all life.
You don’t have to make your heart beat or lungs breathe or thyroid release thyroid hormone. Your body is a self-regulating, self-healing organism. Life is always striving towards coherence and balance.
This may sound far out, but it’s easy to observe the life force in action:
If you get a cut, the body spontaneously mends it.
If you break a bone, the body knits it back together (once the bone is set).
But most fail to realize that the same ordering principle is at work in chronic illness. Under the correct conditions, the body will put itself back together and heal, even from severe degenerative disease.
From a vitalistic perspective, disease happens not because of some inherent dysfunction. Disease is an inevitable result of imbalances in your behaviors, lifestyle, and environment.
In other words, your body is not broken.
You just aren’t giving it what it needs to heal itself.
The body is designed to thrive within the conditions on this planet: nutrient-dense whole foods, clean air and water, low-stress lifestyle, loving relationships, movement, sunlight, sleep, hydration, etc.
If those conditions aren’t met, the body is then forced to compensate its function in order to manage these imbalances. Symptoms are the result of that compensatory response.
At first, symptoms manifest as functional problems, where labs and imaging may still appear to be “normal”. But overtime, these functional changes will lead to physical degeneration in the tissues (ex. ulcers, tumors, atrophy, etc.).
In conventional medical thinking, the symptom or disease is the problem itself. It’s the evidence that the body is broken.
In holistic thinking, symptoms are the intelligent response to deeper imbalances. They communicate to us that something is wrong. And they are designed to protect and maintain function under abnormal circumstances.
Therefore, the way to heal is not to zoom in and endlessly look for broken parts to fix.
It’s to zoom out and create the optimal environmental conditions for the body to heal itself.
The Root Cause of All Disease
The true root cause of disease always comes back to how we interact with the larger world: how we eat, live, move, sleep, think, and relate to ourselves and others.
We call this the Foundation of Health: the external circumstances that are required for optimal function.
You can think about the Foundation of Health as natural law. Just like the sun rises and sets every day, so we need to live a life in harmony with the natural conditions and rhythms of the earth.
We can organize the Foundation of Health into four main pillars:
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Detoxification: maintaining a low toxin environment (ex. clean food, water, air, home, products, etc.) and supporting the body’s natural detoxification channels
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Nutrition: providing the body with all the required calories, macronutrients, vitamins & minerals
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Lifestyle: living in alignment with nature through our everyday actions i.e. morning routine, movement/exercise, sunlight, grounding, time in nature, evening routine, sleep, etc.
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Mind: living your purpose, decreasing stress, and maintaining supportive relationships with yourself, others, and God
Disease happens as a natural and inevitable result of violating nature’s law i.e. imbalances in the Four Foundational Pillars of Health. This creates abnormal environmental conditions that the body has to compensate for, leading to dysfunction and ultimately disease.
We don’t need to micromanage biochemical pathways to heal. The body will take care of that on its own when the external conditions are optimized.
How to Think Like a Medical Genius
I don’t want to give the impression that the Foundation of Health should be focused on at the exclusion of everything else.
Prioritizing the Foundation of Health does not mean doing away with all other healing strategies. There is a time and a place for different interventions.
Treating local symptoms is not bad or wrong. If you have a heart attack, highly specific actions need to be taken to correct the dysfunction and save life.
Effective healing is about knowing what factors are most important for each individual and what to prioritize in what order.
Problems arise when you focus on superficial problems and ignore the deeper root causes that are creating them, especially with chronic disease.
In general, all health interventions can be categorized into four levels:
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Foundation / Environment
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Whole Body
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Organ Systems & Structure
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Specific (Local) Symptoms
We call this the Therapeutic Order. It helps us to visualize the scope, order, and importance of different health therapies.
The Foundation is at the base of the pyramid, made up of the Four Pillars of Health. Everything else is built upon them. They help maintain the proper conditions/environment by providing all of the elements our bodies require to thrive.
For this reason, Foundation level changes typically have the broadest & deepest impact. They are the most holistic, impacting the entire organism over the longest time horizon. And they are the safest, least invasive strategies.
Next, we have the Whole Body level. These therapies don’t change the environmental conditions, as does the Foundation level. But they do work with the entire organism holistically.
The field of bioenergetics, that sees health in terms of biological energy (a.k.a. metabolic rate, frequency, or voltage) is a Whole Body level approach. Increasing the metabolic rate of the organism has systemic effects that cannot be isolated to any one part or system.
Therapies like acupuncture, homeopathy, traditional herbalism, and bio-frequency treatments can all be considered Whole Body level interventions. They can have deep, transformational impact when applied correctly.
Next, we get more specific at the Organ System & Structure level. The human body is made up of a number of distinct systems that work together to maintain life: the digestive system, cardiovascular system, nervous system, lymphatic system, endocrine system, musculoskeletal system, etc.
Depending on each person’s unique constitution, and due to chronic stress, toxicity, or injury, certain organ systems & structures can become weak or dysfunctional and require specific support (ex. gut healing protocols, thyroid optimization, hormone balancing, and liver support.) When all systems are optimized, healing can happen faster and more effectively.
At the top of the pyramid is the Specific/Local Symptom level. The scope of this level is limited to only symptoms, conditions, or biomarkers, like acne, fatigue, headaches, SIBO, Lyme disease, high blood pressure, low testosterone, eczema, autoimmunity, high histamine, etc.
Conventional medicine operates exclusively at this level: diagnosing disease based on symptoms and labs, and then providing specific treatments to suppress those symptoms.
Most alternative and functional medicine approaches also operate at this level, by implementing strategies to alter biomarkers and “hack” the physiology.
Actions at the Local Symptom level usually have the most specific, short-term impact. They are also the most invasive, since they tend to suppress or alter the body’s natural functionality.
Again, it is not bad to implement strategies at this level. In fact, it can be necessary and even lifesaving. In general, any issue that severely impacts the quality of life will need to be addressed directly, like chronic pain, debilitating anxiety, severe histamine reactions, etc. In these cases, natural therapies should be prioritized over pharmaceuticals (if possible) to minimize side effects.
Everything has it’s time and place. By knowing the level of the health therapies you implement, you can set better expectations as to the scope of their impact.
In other words, you know what each therapy can do and what it can’t.
For example, there’s nothing wrong with balancing hormones (Organ System). But if you don’t address why your hormones became imbalanced in the first place (Foundation of Health) and support the overall metabolism that is dictating your hormones (Whole Body), then you won’t get very far.
No matter what combination of therapies you do, you must address the Foundation of Health. The root cause of disease is imbalance in the Foundation of Health by definition. Nothing else will stick long-term if you don’t address these imbalances and create the conditions for the body thrive in the first place.
How to get better results doing less
When you have a chronic problem, its very easy to go down the “medical rabbit hole” and start trying to fix what appears to be broken. People get attached to their diagnosis, or put all of their stake into protocols for this or that problem.
“If I just fix my thyroid, everything will be fine.”
“This mold protocol will solve all my problems.”
We see people everyday who have spent years and thousands of dollars chasing protocols, taking niche supplements, and buying expensive gadgets thinking that they hold the answer to long-term optimal health.
But most of these therapies are higher up on the Therapeutic Order at the Organ or Symptom level.
Many well-meaning, highly motivated, health-conscious people are trying to heal with fancy therapies and lose sight of the Foundation of Health upon which everything else rests.
You would be amazed how many people have seen multiple conventional specialists and functional doctors who all missed the most basic foundational health imbalances, like lack of sunlight, protein deficiency, dehydration, overworking, etc.
We use a simple approach with our clients that we call the Foundations First Framework™️:
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Identify and correct the imbalances in the Four Pillars of Health (Foundation).
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Support the overall metabolism (Whole Body) and weakened organ systems (Organ Systems & Structure) for more efficient & effective healing.
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Optimize & iterate the Foundation of Health over time for long-term, practical, sustainable health.*
*Only implement symptomatic / local support (Specific Symptoms) if needed for quality of life, safety, or for optimization (on top of a solid foundation).
Don’t waste your time chasing shiny objects. The vast majority of your time & effort should be spent on actions that have the greatest impact: the Foundation of Health.
Optimal long-term health is not about stacking more far-out protocols. It’s about staying consistent with the basics every day.
Spend your time doing the practices below for 90 days and see what happens for yourself.
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This guest blog post was written by Dr. Alex Orton, a naturopathic doctor with over 10 years of experience in holistic health.
Dr. Orton believes that true health isn’t created by chasing symptoms or rigid protocols, but by building a sustainable daily foundation where healing can happen naturally. He also places a strong emphasis on food quality both professionally and personally, and incorporates Nourish Food Club products into his own diet as part of a sustainable, real-food approach to health.
Dr. Orton is the co-founder of Haven Holistic Health, a personalized, doctor-led holistic health consulting practice for people who are tired of guessing, starting over, and managing symptoms without real progress. Through one-on-one guidance, advanced biomarker and food intolerance testing, and clear, realistic plans, Dr. Orton helps individuals create lasting health without extreme or unsustainable approaches.
Learn more and contact Dr. Alex Orton at havenholistichealth.com
Or, schedule a free virtual consult with Dr. Orton below to talk about your health goals.
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