Uncovering the Root Causes of Your Cancer: How the Cancer Reset Roadmap™ Finds What Others Miss

If you’ve been diagnosed with cancer, chances are you’ve asked yourself “why me?” at least once.

And the answer might not be what you expect.

Did you know that fewer than 10% of all cancers are genetically based? Which means for the other 90%, there are specific conditions that allowed cancer to take hold in your body. Conditions that have nothing to do with chance or bad luck.

These are called root causes, and they’re specific to you. 

When you know the root causes of your cancer, you know exactly what your body needs to heal more fully and reduce your risk of cancer coming back. 

The good news is that no matter your diagnosis, your root causes can be found. And once you know what they are, you can start changing them.  

But most of the time, no one is helping you do that. 

In this blog post we’ll discuss:

• Why uncovering root causes is so important
• Why most doctors don’t do it
• How I uncover root causes inside the Cancer Reset Roadmap
• A case study of one of my clients with ovarian cancer and how we uncovered root causes that four other practitioners didn’t find.

Let’s get started.

Why Doesn’t My Doctor Do This?

Your oncologist is an expert at diagnosing and treating cancer, and that’s essential. But their job is to treat what’s there, not to figure out what let it grow in the first place.

What they have to manage is enormous. Keeping up with new treatments, assessing which treatment plan is best for you, recognizing when treatment plans need to change, managing scans, protocols, and clinical trials. 

And you want them to know all of those things inside and out. 

Think of it like building a house. You wouldn’t expect your general contractor to also be your master electrician, your plumber, and your structural engineer. Healing works the same way. You need your oncologist to be the master of diagnosis and treatment. 

And even if your oncologist wanted to go deeper, the system doesn’t make it easy. Appointments are short. Insurance dictates which tests get ordered and which don’t. There’s simply no time or structure built in for root cause investigation. 

Root cause investigation is its own specialty, and it’s almost never part of standard cancer care. 

I’ve seen this firsthand. When I was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma in 2010, I had access to excellent medical care. But not one person on my team asked why it happened. That question was left entirely to me.

One doctor even called it a “fluke” because I was otherwise in such good health, or so we thought. But more on that later.

In all my years of working exclusively with women with cancer, I’ve rarely had a client whose medical team had looked into her root causes. And many of them have not only oncologists, but also naturopaths and other practitioners they’ve been working with.

The diagnose and treat approach runs deep. Very few practitioners are trained to look beyond it. Which means for most women with cancer, their root causes never get addressed at all. 

That’s exactly what I help women do. And it’s why the Cancer Reset Roadmap exists.

In this post I’m going to show you exactly how I do it and why it’s different from anything you’ve seen before.

The Root Cause Review™: How We Systematically Uncover Your Root Causes Inside the Cancer Reset Roadmap™

The Cancer Reset Roadmap™ is a four-step program to help you heal more deeply and reduce your risk of cancer coming back. By the end of step four you’ll have a clear understanding of what your body needs, a simple plan to get there, and the confidence that you’re actually doing the right things. No willpower required.

Today we’re going deep into step two: the Root Cause Review™.

It’s a process specifically designed around you that goes much deeper than a single conversation or a series of lab tests.

Uncovering your root causes is a lot like building a good legal case. A good lawyer doesn’t stop at the first piece of evidence and call it done. They gather as much evidence as possible, follow every lead, and leave no stone unturned until the full picture is undeniable. That’s exactly how I approach uncovering your root causes.

Your personal history, symptoms, test results, and metrics each tell part of the story. We peel back one layer after another, and every piece of information we gather brings us closer to understanding what actually allowed cancer to take hold in your body.

We’re solving a mystery side by side. The order and combination of strategies we use depends entirely on what we uncover as we move through the process, because this is built around you, not a fixed protocol.

The Root Cause Review is made up of four core areas. In this blog post I’ll walk you through each one so you can see exactly what we look at and why it matters for your healing.

We always start with an in-depth conversation and a thorough review of your health history. Here’s what that looks like.

Getting to Know You, Not Just Your Diagnosis

From the moment we start working together, I want to know your whole story, and it looks nothing like a typical health history intake you might have had with your doctor or naturopath.

We look at what was going on in your life in the years before your diagnosis and any other signs your body has been sending that may have been missed by the medical system.

I’m always looking for clues, and in my experience they can show up in the most unexpected places.

We take a careful look at your past health, exposures, and experiences because the underlying conditions that allowed cancer to grow were almost certainly present long before your diagnosis.   

This conversation isn’t a one and done. Throughout our entire time together I’m constantly learning more about you, and you’re constantly learning more about yourself.

It’s hard to put the value of these conversations into words, but my client Theresa, who I’ve worked with for nine months, said it best. She told me that having someone willing to go this deep, every single time, was both why she felt so supported and why we’ve been able to uncover root causes that her oncologist, naturopath, and general practitioner were never able to find.

Let’s break down each step of the Root Cause Review together. I’ll show you what each step does and why it’s important, starting with the nutrition assessment.

1. The Nutrition Assessment: Uncovering Deficiencies and Imbalances

When it comes to cancer, “food is medicine” is a clinical reality, not a cliché.

But contrary to what you may have heard, there’s no single diet approach that works consistently for all people with all types of cancer. And even when a specific diet has been shown to help with a particular cancer type, it still doesn’t work for everyone. Here’s why:

Every tumor exists within its own unique environment, and we call this the tumor microenvironment. 

The conditions surrounding the tumor determine whether cancer can grow and thrive, or whether your body’s natural systems are able to keep it in check. Things like inflammation, blood sugar and insulin, immune function, and nutrient availability all play a role. 

And even with the same diagnosis, no two people have the same tumor microenvironment. Which means no two people have the same root causes either. This is true across all cancer types, including blood cancers.

And I learned this the hard way. 

Before my diagnosis, I ate exceptionally well. Probably in the top one percent of all humans. I was a dietitian and nutrition professor after all 😉.

After my diagnosis, I dialed it in even more. I cut out sugar, fasted, took handfuls of supplements, started juicing, and followed every cancer protocol I could find. 

And what happened next had me rethinking everything I had learned about health and nutrition… 

My cancer started to grow faster.

I could see it happening in real time, as new lymph nodes appeared literally every day. In the world of lymphoma, your enlarged lymph nodes are your tumors.

That’s when I knew I needed to look at things differently.

The right nutritional approach is never one size fits all. Because your tumor microenvironment is unique to you, your nutritional needs are too. No two women leave with the same nutrition plan.

That’s what targeted nutrition means, and it’s one of the most important things we uncover inside the Root Cause Review.

We will look at things like:

• Your exact diagnosis. Certain cancers prefer certain nutrient pathways. Some thrive on glucose. Some on fats. Some are highly sensitive to certain B vitamins. The specifics of your cancer matter enormously.
• Blood sugar and insulin. Poor blood sugar control and high insulin both signal cancer cells to grow. And even when your blood sugar looks normal, your insulin can still be running high enough to be a problem.
• Inflammation. Chronic inflammation supports cancer growth. What you eat, what you’re missing nutritionally, and what’s happening in your gut all affect how inflamed you are.
• Nutrient deficiencies and imbalances. Your body depends on specific nutrients for DNA repair, immune function, and detoxification. When they’re missing or out of balance, those processes break down.
• Your gut. Your gut health is central to your immune function, inflammation levels, and your ability to absorb the nutrients your body needs to heal.
• Your body’s ability to detoxify. If your detoxification pathways are overwhelmed, toxins accumulate and fuel cancer growth.

You might be wondering how we gather all of that information. Here’s how:

1. We start with a thorough review of your typical diet to identify nutrient deficiencies, imbalances, and where you might need more nutritional support. 
   
2. From there we review your existing labs through a cancer lens, because standard lab interpretation often misses important nutritional signals. A result can fall within the normal range and still be well below what your body needs to function optimally.
   
3. When your existing labs don’t give us the full picture, we run additional testing and track key metrics. This is often where the most important pieces of the puzzle surface, showing us things that standard lab work was never designed to look for.

2. I Look at Your Labs Differently: Here’s Why It Matters

Lab work is one of the most powerful tools I use for uncovering root causes, but probably not in the way you’d expect.

Here’s what I mean…

Why Normal Isn’t Good Enough

Have you ever received your lab results and scanned to see if anything falls outside the normal range? And when nothing does, you breathe a sigh of relief and move on. Your doctor is likely doing the same thing, but I never will. And here’s why…

Normal ranges are based on statistical averages, and those averages are drawn from a population that is largely unhealthy. In the US, cancer rates are rising faster than ever, and more Americans have a chronic disease than not. 

Based on those statistics, and the way doctors are trained to look at them, normal is not the same as healthy. It just means you’re not sick enough to be treated.

I have a much higher bar for my clients, so I never settle for normal. When it comes to cancer, optimal is always the goal.

Why I Go Deeper Than Standard Lab Work

Your doctor’s time is largely spent on treatment decisions, and the labs they order reflect that. 

If a basic lab result comes back normal, there’s no incentive to dig deeper. Insurance plays a big role too. Even if your doctor does want to investigate further, insurance often won’t pay for it if the standard lab is normal.

And that can end up hiding a root cause in plain sight. That’s why I’m always looking to make sure the right labs were run to see the full picture, and why we never look at a single lab in isolation. 

Fortunately, I partner with a licensed physician, so we can order any lab your doctor can run, which allows us to dig deeper. 

Let me explain what I mean…

Take blood sugar for example. You probably know it as your fasting glucose lab.

Inside the Cancer Reset Roadmap™, we don’t just look at fasting glucose alone to get a true picture of how your body is managing blood sugar and insulin. We look at all the relevant metabolic labs together: fasting glucose, fasting insulin, and hemoglobin A1c. Because each one tells a different part of the story. 

I see it all the time. You can have an optimal fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1c and still have dangerously high insulin. And chances are nobody has checked your insulin before.

High insulin causes cancer to grow faster. It’s also an early warning sign of insulin resistance, long before glucose ever looks abnormal. So looking at glucose alone can give a false sense of security and cause you to miss a critically important root cause.

The same principle applies across the board, whether we’re talking about thyroid health, inflammation, hormone balance… all of it. A deeper look almost always reveals something a standard panel would have missed entirely.

My mantra is test, don’t guess. 

It’s how I uncover your root causes, know what your body actually needs, and track what’s working. 

3. Advanced Testing and Real-Time Metrics

Labs can tell us some very important things, and they’re a key part of uncovering your root causes. But they don’t tell us everything we need to know.

Trying to understand the complete picture from labs alone is like trying to finish a puzzle with half the pieces missing.

Depending on your symptoms, your diagnosis, your health history, and what we uncover in the Root Cause Review, we run different functional tests. The specific tests we run depend entirely on what we find, but let me give you a couple of examples so you understand how this goes beyond what your doctor typically orders.

Your gut health and microbiome. This is something we can’t ignore when uncovering your root causes because your gut is so central to how your immune system functions, how well you absorb nutrients, and how inflamed you are. When it’s not working properly, all of those things can suffer. And all of them can fuel cancer growth.

Your detoxification system. If your detoxification pathways aren’t working properly, toxins build up, making it harder to heal and increasing your risk of cancer coming back.

And this is just skimming the surface. There are many more things we look at with functional testing that conventional labs can’t cover.

But even with all the functional testing available, we still can’t get all the information we need. That’s where real-time metrics come in. 

Real-time metrics like sleep patterns and nervous system balance give us clues that no lab test can capture. 

Some of the most significant things I’ve uncovered for clients came directly from this data. Here are a couple of examples…

Sleep patterns. We look not only at your total sleep, but at how long you spend in each phase of sleep, especially deep sleep. Deep sleep is when your body identifies and clears cancer cells and does most of its detoxification work. If you’re not getting enough deep sleep, all your hard work during the day likely isn’t translating into the healing you need at night.

Nervous system balance. We measure whether your nervous system is supporting your healing or contributing to the conditions that allow cancer to take hold and grow. When your nervous system is stuck in stress mode, your body is focused on short term survival and not on keeping cancer in check.

None of these tools is better than the others. They each reveal something the others can’t, and that’s exactly why we use all of them. 

4. Where It All Comes Together

Remember how this process can look like a legal case? This is where all the evidence comes together and we start connecting the dots. 

In the body, no system or organ operates in isolation. Even a root cause can have a root cause. 

For example, a nervous system stuck in stress mode and high inflammation aren’t necessarily two separate problems. They’re often interrelated.

Poor sleep and elevated cortisol (the stress hormone) work the same way, each one making the other worse, and both creating the kind of internal environment where cancer thrives.

That’s why it’s not enough to simply identify root causes. We need to understand how they relate to one another.

One root cause often contributes to several others. Address that one first, and the others begin to improve on their own.  

The priorities we uncover here are specific to you, your cancer, and this exact moment in your healing. There’s no generic answer waiting at the end of this process. Instead you end up with a complete picture of what’s actually been driving your cancer and what deserves attention first.

And that complete picture is crucial, because…

Once you understand your root causes, you can change the conditions that allowed cancer to grow, heal more deeply, and reduce your risk of recurrence. 

Let me show you exactly how this played out for one of my clients, Michael Ann. You’ll see how  we uncovered several key root causes that four other practitioners missed, including her oncologist.

What the Root Cause Review Looks Like in Practice: Meet Michael Ann

My client Michael Ann is vibrant and energetic with a great sense of humor. If you were to meet her, you’d never guess she’d just been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

Prior to working with me, she had an oncologist, a general practitioner, a naturopath, and an acupuncturist/Doctor of Chinese Medicine on her medical team. 

In other words, she had a full team already in her corner. Yet she still didn’t feel like anyone was looking deeply enough to uncover her root causes. She knew it would make all the difference, so she hired me and we got started right away.

Here’s how the uncovering process unfolded in the first two weeks we worked together:

When I reviewed the labs her doctor had already run, two things stood out right away: her inflammation was high, and so was her glucose.

Her doctor had only run one measure of inflammation, and stopped there. Michael Ann had no idea that looking further was even necessary. And why would she? No one had ever told her there was more to look for. 

So we looked deeper to better understand the extent of the inflammation and began investigating what was causing it. 

So often when someone sees an elevated inflammation marker like CRP, they’ll start taking anti-inflammatories or antioxidant supplements to bring the number down. But that does the body a disservice, because there’s always something causing the inflammation in the first place. 

And if we don’t find out what’s actually causing it, then we can’t fix it. And if we can’t fix it, the conditions that allow cancer to grow and thrive stay the same or get worse.

Her glucose was the same story. Despite it being elevated, nobody had checked her fasting insulin. We needed to see whether her elevated glucose was creating insulin resistance, and if so, how bad it was. Because when insulin is consistently high, it creates exactly the conditions that support cancer growth. 

As it turns out, her fasting insulin came back extremely high, confirming she was in fact dealing with insulin resistance. I wasn’t surprised, as I’ve seen this enough times to almost expect it. It also helped explain at least some of her high inflammation.

So now we knew that her body was very inflamed and her glucose and insulin were chronically high. Yet this couldn’t be explained away by her diet and lifestyle alone. I knew there had to be another reason.

That’s what made me look at her thyroid next. 

Certain thyroid conditions can cause an increase in inflammation and an increase in insulin, both of which support cancer growth. 

Her standard thyroid labs looked completely normal, which is why nobody had dug deeper. But that’s exactly how critical root causes get missed. (And exactly why Michael Ann reached out to me in the first place)

So we asked her doctor to run the complete thyroid panel. And sure enough, her thyroid antibodies were very high, which her doctor diagnosed as Hashimoto’s. 

Hashimoto’s is an autoimmune condition that targets the thyroid. With Hashimoto’s, the immune system is locked in an ongoing attack against the thyroid, and that constant drain leaves fewer resources available for identifying and clearing abnormal and cancerous cells. It also creates chronic inflammation which fuels cancer growth.

Her high thyroid antibodies despite normal TSH and T4 (the typical labs drawn when a doctor looks at thyroid) are a perfect example of why we have to look at the big picture and dig deeper when it makes sense to. 

Normal labs aren’t the same as optimal labs. Stopping at normal can mean missing the very thing driving her cancer.

And in her case, this wasn’t a minor piece of the puzzle. We were never going to solve her inflammation or her insulin resistance without solving her thyroid first.

Remember how I said sometimes even the root causes have root causes? We didn’t want to stop at Hashimoto’s, we wanted to figure out what made her susceptible to that.

Hashimoto’s can be a sign that the gut is permeable, what you might have heard called leaky gut. That’s why we immediately looked at her gut, and that’s still under investigation at the time of writing.

It can also be a sign that something else is straining or confusing the immune system. That’s when we started looking into some of the common culprits, and we’re still investigating that too. 

So you see, we keep peeling back the layers, one at a time, until we get to the real root of the issue. 

It takes time, but it’s so much more effective than applying band-aid solutions to symptoms or assuming everything is OK because we saw “normal” labs.

Besides digging for root causes, there are also certain labs and tests I always make sure to run for my clients because there’s so much evidence to support their importance. Vitamin D is one of them, and it turned out Michael Ann’s vitamin D was far too low.

Vitamin D improves survival rates and makes treatment more effective, and yet it’s rarely something doctors measure. It’s also one of those nutrients where you want to stay in the sweet spot of the range, because too low isn’t good, but neither is too high.

And that was just the first week. 

In week two, we looked at her sleep metrics and discovered her oxygen levels were dropping significantly while she slept. The majority of healing happens during sleep, and the body needs oxygen to do that work.

So within just two weeks, we uncovered four major root causes that none of her four practitioners had found, and we’re still actively investigating more.

Michael Ann’s story is just one example. Every woman is different, and the root cause process looks different for each person, depending on her health history, her diagnosis, and what her body reveals along the way.

Shortly after we started working together, Michael Ann texted me: “I can’t believe how much you have figured out!!” 

She went on to say that no one makes themselves as available to their clients as I do. Whenever she has a question, she reaches out via text or voice message and knows she’ll hear back from me without having to wait until the next appointment.

All of my clients get that same level of support. Because uncovering root causes requires constant communication, and I don’t want to slow the process down.

If that’s what we found for Michael Ann in two weeks, imagine what we might uncover for you.

Your Next Step: Book a Cancer Healing Assessment

Michael Ann had no idea any of these root causes existed before we started working together. Neither did her oncologist, her GP, her naturopath, her acupuncturist, and her Doctor of Chinese Medicine.

If you’re ready to uncover your root causes and finally have a clear, targeted plan for healing, I’d love to offer you a free Healing Clarity Assessment.

This is an in-depth conversation where we’ll go through your full health history, what was happening in your life before your diagnosis, and what may have been contributing to your cancer long before you heard those words.

I’ll take the time to hear your whole story in a way that most practitioners simply don’t have time for. I’ll help you start to see how different pieces of your health picture may be connected, not only to your cancer but to each other.

By the end of our time together, you’ll have a much clearer picture of what allowed cancer to take hold in your body and whether the Cancer Reset Roadmap™ is the right next step for you.

If you’re serious about getting to the bottom of your cancer and ready to take action, I’d love to help.