Dr. Mark Hyman outlines how functional medicine can scale through insurance-compatible practice models and corporate health programs. He recommends starting with one area like gut health rather than overhauling medicine all at once, and calls for changes in medical education and reimbursement policy.
I think if we can engage a little bit with that magic in life, things happen. And at the same time, I also would say that it's incumbent upon the Institute for Functional Medicine and other sort of groups that are leaders in the field to really come up with solution sets for practitioners that help them transition. It's really a transitional system that allows them to find a way within their practices to create models that work, that are insurance based, that are financially viable, that provide good care, but that, like I always say, change the way we do medicine and the medicine we do. So the delivery models and the content models have to change. And it's a process and it can be done incrementally and people can start very slowly. When I started, I just started with the gut. I just started with doing one thing. I'm going to work on learning the gut and fixing people's digestive tracts and doing elimination dyes and they would add on layers of oh, now I understand hormones and. And you don't have to do everything at once. You can just take one step at a time. But I think we do need, as a community to come up with real solutions for practitioners that allow them to do this in a way that isn't that disruptive, that can scale and that it's not. Everybody's going to have to recreate the wheel every time and reinvent a model that's effective. And I think we need to focus also we talked about this, Jeff, on policy and reimbursement, because doctors get paid to do things and they do those things, and if they get paid to do different things, they'll do different things. We need to create changes in corporate health that are driving some of the decisions around health and insurance. We've been talking to. We need to look at how we change our medical education, which we're working on at the Institute. So we need multiple platforms at the same time to be able to build the infrastructure that trains up a new generation of practitioners and provides them with real business and clinical models that work in real life, in real communities.
