Mark Hyman MD

Dr. Mark Hyman

Mark Hyman MD has been a co-medical director of Canyon Ranch for ten years and is now the chairman of the Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and medical director of the UltraWellness Center, and director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. He is also the author of The Blood Sugar Solution 10-Day Detox Diet, The Blood Sugar Solution Cookbook, UltraMetabolism, The UltraMind Solution and the UltraSimple Diet and coauthor of UltraPrevention.

Functional Medicine

I don't know if you're familiar or not with the term "functional medicine".

I also don't know how the medical system works where you're from. Where I'm from, it used to be OK to bring up several issues during one appointment, but these days, if I go see my doctor, I can have a ten-minute appointment and bring up only one issue. For anything else, I need to make another appointment. So everything is separate. My headache, my sore throat and my stomach ache all get treated separately at different time with no connection being made between them.

Functional medicine centers, such as the ones that Dr. Mark Hyman is heading, do the opposite. They see the body as a single system with everything connected. They won't treat the headache in isolation, they will look at everything and find out why this is happening. This approach is more able to find and fix the actual problem rather than treating the symptoms of the problem like my doctor is left doing.

Naturopaths already work like that. One time I went to see a new naturopath - (I mean, new to me). I had five issues I wanted to bring up and thought I had five different problems. After the naturopath finished all his questions and investigation, he said, "This is what I think is happening." He started with "You have poor digestion, either from stress or a poor diet. The poor digestion causes this which causes that and this thing and the other thing and then this happens and that happens... and on he went with the story of what was going on in my system. He drew every problem I had mentioned into the scenario, and also included two issues that I hadn't mentioned! I was impressed. I didn't have five problems, I only had one. But it shows up in different parts of the body in different ways.

A doctor who is only letting you present one issue doesn't have a chance of finding out what's really wrong, but he might give you some medication to reduce the symptoms. Trouble with that is - medication tends to be somewhat toxic so it's hard on your liver so although you may temporarily feel better, you're actually going to be in worse shape because it doesn't deal with the problem and because medication really isn't good for you.

I'm quite happy that doctors like Dr. Mark Hyman are developing these functional medicine centers.

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Teresa has left the city life and lives in Prince Edward Island, Canada with her husband
and is wondering if raising chickens will be her next project.
She has 4 grown up children and 5 grandkids who try to visit when they won't
have to spend too much time dodging mosquitoes and black flies.
Teresa is a certified Strategic Interventionist through Robbins Madanes training,
a certified StrengthsFinder adviser,
and a life coach with a life-long interest in nutrition.
Teresa has a passion for helping others to find and fulfill
their full potential and to live with abundance.
She sees optimum health as a necessary part of this,
and besides, isn't this what you want?