Interview With Dr. Mark Hyman M.D. on the Functional Medicine Model

[Guest guest]

Interview With Dr. Mark Hyman M.D. on the Functional Medicine Model

_http://www.naturalnews.com/023369.html_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/023369.html)

 

NaturalNews) This interview is an excerpt from Kevin Gianni's The Healthiest

Year of Your Life Program which can be found at

(_http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com_

(http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com/) ) . In this excerpt,

Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D. shares on the Functional Medicine Model and his

experiences as a doctor and a patient that led him to embrace it.

 

The Healthiest Year of Your Life Excerpt with Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., a

best-selling author, a respected medical consultant and a leader in the field

of

functional medicine.

 

Kevin: Welcome, everyone, to this first installment of The Healthiest Year

of Your Life Program. You're in for a treat tonight, I promise. My guest is

Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., who is a respected medical consultant, New York Times

best-selling author and a leader in the emerging field of functional medicine.

Functional medicine is ideal medicine made real. It is a new medical model, a

more successful way of treating human illness and disease born of recent

technological and clinical advances applied in a fresh methodology. As Dr.

Hyman

says, " the future of medicine is available now. " Functional medicine moves

beyond diagnosis-based medicine to allow treatment of the underlying _causes of

disease_ (http://www.naturalnews.com/causes_of_disease.html) . It works with

the body's natural forces to achieve what Dr. Hyman calls ultra _wellness_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/wellness.html) , lifelong good health and vitality.

Doesn't that sound good?

 

So what I want to do now is welcome Dr. Hyman to the program. This is

exciting. You're one of my own personal heroes in terms of medicine and I've

read

all your books and I'm really excited to have you here.

 

Mark: Well, it's a great opportunity to be able to talk about the work I do

and it's really grown out of my own experience of being sick and my own

patients and learning a whole new field, called functional medicine.

 

Kevin: Well, why don't you talk a little bit about how you got here and your

story from when you first started and now, how it's developed into

functional medicine?

 

Mark: Well, actually my original development started way back when I was in

college where I was very interested in Chinese and Asian studies and actually

the ancient healing systems of China. I learned Chinese and then I actually

became a _yoga_ (http://www.naturalnews.com/yoga.html) teacher and way before

I went to _medical school_ (http://www.naturalnews.com/medical_school.html)

, I was very interested in health and was a vegetarian and actually thought I

was going to go into medicine to do this kind of work in the first place.

 

So I had this sort of in my mind right from the beginning and then I slowly

got into medical school and sort of got brainwashed a little bit and took on

the medical model fairly strongly, because it was a pretty convincing model.

 

Over the years, I began to realize that even if I was doing a great job with

this model I could only do so much for people. It was kind of like I was

putting my finger in the dam. In about my mid 30s, I went to China and actually

I was doing a project there, but I got sick. I got _mercury poisoning_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/mercury_poisoning.html) . I got back to the states

and a

number of different things happened and my whole body collapsed and I

developed chronic fatigue syndrome. It was through the process of my own

illness

and recovery and through my work as the medical director at Canyon Ranch that I

discovered a new way of treating and diagnosing illness that was based not

on symptoms, but based on the causes of illness. It was based on the

underlying issues that are really at the root of why we get sick and I realized

that

with putting your finger in the dam and simply treating symptoms you may quiet

them down briefly, but the disease, or the processes that are causing the

disease still are going on.

 

So for example, if you take a _high blood pressure_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/high_blood_pressure.html) pill your blood pressure

normalizes, but if

you stop the pill your _blood pressure_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/blood_pressure.html) goes up. So you really haven't

done anything to treat the high

blood pressure. All you've done is suppress the symptoms. So I began to

understand this not in sort of an academic way, but in a very real way to my

own

process of detoxification and healing, because I had no other way to get

better.

Conventional medicine didn't offer me any solutions other than " here take

some _Prozac_ (http://www.naturalnews.com/Prozac.html) " , or " take some drugs

that deal with this or that " , that were really not helpful anyway and so I got

very lucky at the time and I was working at Canyon Ranch and I was introduced

to the work of Jeffrey Bland, who is a nutritional biochemist, student of

Linus Pauling, who's been working over the last 35 years really reframing our

medical science in a way that allows us to understand things and how they work

together.

 

This is called systems biology and it's an understanding that there are

thousands and thousands of diseases, but there are really only about seven

underlying systems in the body that has to function in order for you to be

healthy

and those things, when they're not functioning create illness and the

treatment and the diagnosis has to be focused on those seven things. So the

rest of

the names in the things we call diseases really become more irrelevant as we

understand those seven causes. So you can have migraines, or _depression_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/depression.html) , or Alzheimer's disease, or heart

disease, or diabetes or irritable bowel, or whatever. Those are just names for

collections of symptoms and that any two people with exactly the same named

disease can have totally different problems. We have no way of knowing that

if you have depression, one person might have _mercury_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/mercury.html) poisoning. Another person might be

severely folate

deficient, or B12 deficient. Another person might have hypothyroid and you

can't

treat them all with Prozac. They're not suffering from a Prozac deficiency.

They are suffering from some fundamental, underlying imbalance that has to be

addressed in order for them to get better and the body has to get the things

it needs to function and thrive properly.

 

So this is sort of the evolution of functional medicine which has happened

over the last 15 years and we have just recently published a textbook of

functional medicine that lays out this paradigm in great detail. For those who

are

health practitioners, it's a wonderful resource, with over 20,000 scientific

references. I contributed a couple of chapters to that. Mine was a very

large chapter on the influence of diet on health, which is a big topic. It's a

really exciting model, because it's not just an idea. I'm a practicing

physician and every day I see patients in my office and I always say I get to

be a

witness to miracles.

 

Kevin: Wow. What's the difference between _integrative medicine_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/integrative_medicine.html) and alternative

medicine, as

opposed to functional medicine?

 

Mark: Great question. That's a great question and I think it's an important

question. Let me just go through the history of how we got to where we are.

We had _conventional medicine_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/conventional_medicine.html) , which is basically a

reductionistic science. It breaks things down

into component points, component parts. We have organ systems. We have

various diseases. Then came along holistic health, which said we should pay

attention to some other things, like mind-body effect and we should use some

other

treatments that help the body heal, like meditation, or yoga, or massage, or

energy healing and then there was sort of a movement in awareness of other

modalities, called _alternative medicine_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/alternative_medicine.html) , which included things

like Ayurveda and Chinese medicine,

which unto themselves are entire, whole healing systems with their own

philosophy and methodologies that are very different from conventional

medicine.

 

Then Andy Wilde came along and he said there's all these great things out

there that we're really not paying attention to that have been around for

centuries or even some newer techniques that can really help the body heal,

whether it's osteopathy, or _acupuncture_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/acupuncture.html) , or herbs and we should integrate

those treatments with conventional

approaches to kind of have the better outcome. So what that does is that it

says

'well, here are the conventional diagnoses; _migraine_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/migraine.html) , irritable bowel, depression,

arthritis, whatever.

We're going to use these treatments, these alternative therapies and integrate

them with conventional therapies'.

 

Now, I think that's a good advance, but I also think it's very limited,

because we're simply doing what I call, green medicine, in the sense where

we're

simply applying an herb instead of a drug. Someone that has a migraine

headache, you give them feverfew instead of Imitrex. Maybe that'll work and

maybe

it won't. Maybe it's a less toxic therapy, but it does nothing to help us

figure out if that person has a migraine, because they have a gluten allergy,

or

because their estrogen levels are imbalanced, or because they have a

mitochondrial defect and need high doses of riboflavin. The feverfew is not

going to

work. So you have to have a way of thinking to understand the architecture,

so functional medicine is the next step. It's the next evolution and it's a

way of using all therapies, whether they be conventional, or alternative, in a

way that allows you to think about things differently and allows you to get

to the problem, deal with the causes and help the body regain balance and it's

a really informational architectural model of a philosophy, or a theory

basically, of how things work. It's based on systems biology and allows us to

understand how things relate and connect. So it's not exclusive or inclusive of

any particular treatment, modality, test, anything, so surgery could be

functional medicine. It's really, 'what is the best treatment for this

particular

problem and how do we find that out', because in conventional medicine, or

integrative medicine we don't have that opportunity.

 

I've been in case conferences with patients in integrative medicine and you

take someone, for example, with _migraines_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/migraines.html) and you'll sit around the table

with various modalities like

acupuncturists, say well, they have a spleen chi deficiency and they need

acupuncture and an herbalist says they need this herb, feverfew. A nutritionist

may

say they shouldn't eat aspartame, because that can cause headaches. The other

one says maybe they're just really stressed out and need some mind-body

therapies and spiritual healing. So you're sort of getting a smorgasbord of

choices, but no organized way of how to use them and you can't use everything

on

everybody. So you have to figure out what is the root and you have to figure

out how to navigate to that problem.

 

Kevin: You say there are seven causes of disease, or illness. Are those the

basis of the functional medicine?

 

Mark: Absolutely. Those are what I call the seven keys to ultra wellness,

but they're also called the seven core imbalances of functional medicine. So I

simply borrowed them and made them accessible to lay people, because it's

very hard for people to understand mitochondrial and oxidative redox

imbalances,

or biotransformational dysfunction, but I try to translate these concepts

into things that people can actually get and understand and do something about.

 

Everybody gets that there's some nutritional imbalances. Everybody gets that

you can get inflammation. Everybody gets they might have _detox_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/detox.html) issues. Everybody gets that you might

have

trouble making energy in your body. Everybody gets they might have stress and

mind-body imbalances. Everybody gets that you can have hormonal problems. So

these are the base end, or digestive problems. These are the basic systems and

if those are not in balance, your body can't be healthy.

 

To read the rest of this transcript as well as access more information on

creating and living a healthy lifestyle and hear from other health experts just

like Dr. Mark Hyman, M.D., please visit

(_http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com_

(http://thehealthiestyearofyourlife.com/) ) .

 

 

 

About the author

Kevin Gianni is a health advocate, author and speaker. He has helped

thousands of people in over 85 countries learn how to take control of their

health--and keep it. To view his popular internet TV Show " The Renegade Health

Show "

(and get a free gift!) with commentary on _natural health issues, vegan and

raw food diets, holistic nutrition and more click here_

(http://www.therenegadehealthshow.com/) .

 

 

His book, _ " The Busy Person's Fitness Solution, " _

(http://www.liveawesome.com/public/452.cfm) is a step-by-step guide to _optimum

health_

(http://www.naturalnews.com/optimum_health.html) for the time and

energy-strapped. To find

out more about _abundance, optimum health and self motivation click here_

(http://www.fountainofyouthworldsummit.com/) ... or you're interested in the

_vegan and raw food diet and cutting edge holistic nutrition click here_

(http://www.rawsummitarchives.com/) . For access to free interviews, downloads

and a

_complete bodyweight exercise archive visit www.LiveAwesome.com_

(http://www.liveawesome.com/) .