Stop. Hammer time.

Or is it? In health and medicine, things aren't always what they appear.

There’s a saying.

If you only have a hammer… then every problem starts to look like a nail.

- Abraham Maslow (1966)

“Maslow’s Hammer”, as it’s coined, is a concept that refers to the over-reliance of a familiar tool.

If you are lucky enough to be the parent, aunt, uncle or other relative or friend of a small boy with a runaway hammer - you can probably relate! The original wording was actually, “Give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters needs a pounding”.

In health and medicine, sometimes it really does look like a nail. But just because two people present the same way does not mean it’s for the same reasons (i.e., when a friend recommends something that worked for them but didn’t have the desired effect on you).

One approach is to start with the root cause of the problem and then assess the most appropriate tools for each application. Going a step further, using a system for identifying the root cause(s) so that the process is reliably comprehensive means we might also need sanders, sealant, and a whole host of other tools in the tools kit.

And if you step back to see the bigger problem—namely, toxins disrupting our normal processes, genetics telling us we need more of one thing than other people, hormones that need to be coordinated, and all that impacts our performance level—then there are a host of tools that can be considered.

But if all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like hammer application. I think we’ve seen this in various medical scenarios.

My practice of naturopathic medicine uses a variety of tools and perspectives to address the root cause(s).