Doctors are seldom taught the cause of a chronic disease in medical school.  Medical students memorize thousands of named diseases, findings, and syndromes; and the co-morbid conditions for each. They learn to observe, document and treat symptoms.  Medicine has divided diseases, symptoms, and syndromes into so many differently named diseases, that no one person can know it all, which requires specialization after medical school.

Specialization makes the quantity of medical knowledge more manageable, and at the same time impedes discovery of the root causes of chronic disease.  The root causes of chronic disease may have occurred years or decades prior to the diagnosis, may have been seen or treated by a different specialty, or knowledge of the root cause is not within the specialists’ scope of knowledge.

The cause of chronic disease cannot be discovered in one specialty alone.  The cause of chronic disease can be discovered through collaboration and use of cross-specialty knowledge, to recognize patterns in chronic disease, and formulate reasonable hypotheses based on scientific knowledge across specialties. Animals and humans get the same diseases, and humans and animals transmit the pathogens and parasites to each other; thus, veterinary knowledge must be incorporated into the collaboration.