A short interview excerpt (May 2011 FMU) where Jeffrey Bland asks Dr. Mark Hyman about choosing family practice versus specializing. Dr. Hyman explains he never wanted to be a specialist and emphasizes a holistic view of the body and practice—seeing the patient as one integrated organism.
Was there ever a moment you said, you know, I think family practice is too much of a generalist. I need to really focus down. I need to become a specialist in a certain area. There's a motivation to really be the best of something in one discipline. Or did you always have this sense of the magic is in the bigger picture?
Yeah. I never wanted to be a specialist. It just never crossed my mind because I couldn't understand how you could separate out everything that we were one organism, one body, one soul, one being. And that was something that I just knew intuitively. And I didn't understand how you could kind of separate those things. And I knew there was a need for experts, but from my own personal sense of how I wanted to practice, it was completely in synergy with who I was and what I felt and how I thought about the world.
