Excellent article, Mike - a superb example of how to properly use RCA in real life. I also developed a problem this year in one of my feet. Fortunately, we have a good sports medicine department here, and stretching exercises with massage seems to be doing the trick. (I'll also try going barefoot more - thanks for that tip.) But you made me really think about more fully investigating what caused it. You've given us a great foundation for digging deeper into any health-related condition that might pop up. How much unnecessary surgery and suffering could be avoided by asking a few "whys" up front.

Jeff

You are spot-on regarding the pursuit of the 5 Whys to get to the root cause of any medical problem and I like to believe I would also follow this course. In addition, I am all for trying simpler solutions prior to surgery - which should be a later or last resort where possible. However, I cringe ever-so-slightly at terms like "natural medicine". It sounds too much like an Appeal to Nature - a logical fallacy defined as "a claim that something is good or right because it is natural" Nature doesn't actually much care about humans.

There's really only one kind of medicine which should be used: that which has been shown to work. I had never heard of prolotherapy but found it on the Quackwatch web site as a "Questionable Treatment" with a link to a pages outlining why it was not covered by Medicare or Aetna for back pain. Sample statement: "...further studies are needed to show greater improvement in treating pain with prolotherapy because the statistical significance was only borderline when the experimental group was compared to the control group." As a statistical guy, I think you can appreciate that.

Keshav Ram Singhal, Ajmer (India)

Root Cause Analysis is always beneficial, whether it is related to health or any other problem. Nice article. Thanks.