Modern medicine tends to compartmentalize each illness. A typical patient might, for example, be diagnosed separately and at different times with high blood pressure, arthritis, gout, and depression. But increasingly, it is becoming clear that many of these diseases are in fact all downstream of the same few root causes, namely visceral fat, insulin resistance, and systemic inflammation. And while genetics do play an important role in our health (some people for example just never seem to develop diabetes no matter how poorly they eat or how obese they get; others do become diabetic after just a modest weight gain), lifestyle is by far the biggest driver of these issues.
So rather than viewing a patient as having several different chronic illnesses, it is more accurate to look for root causes, and understand that things like high blood pressure, high blood sugar, arthritis, and so forth are in turn downstream of those. Fix the root causes, and all of the other issues get better.
