Cardiologists are kept very busy prescribing statin drugs, beta-blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitors, and blood thinners to their heart disease patients. The problem is that none of those medications can treat the underlying cause of a patient’s condition.

Worse yet, these medications are expensive and all of them are associated with serious adverse effects on people’s health. And cardiologists aren’t the only doctors prescribing medications that don’t treat the cause of patients’ illness.

In fact, most conventional doctors do the exact same thing.

This method of treatment stems from the medical training paradigm that has prevailed for more than 100 years. In medical schools, doctors are trained to make a diagnosis and then prescribe the appropriate drug to treat the diagnosis.

The problem is that 95 percent of commonly prescribed drugs do nothing to treat the underlying cause of a patient’s condition. They only address the symptoms.

I don’t discount the importance of establishing a diagnosis. That should be the first step any doctor takes when seeing a sick patient.

But the next step to helping the patient overcome his or her condition is to recognize what is causing the problem, and then come up with a treatment program to address and rectify the cause of the illness.