Functional Medicine: Access the Future of Medicine Now

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. When I travel around the country, the question I get asked more than any other is, Where can I find a doctor who practices the type of medicine that you do? In fact, yesterday I was at a conference. I gave a lecture. on Ultra Wellness and Functional Medicine to a group of top health writers and publishers in America. And these are the people who deal with all the leading edge nutritional medical advice, the top thinkers, the creative people from Reader's Digest, Time Life, Rodale, and more. And even they did not know how to find a doctor who practiced this type of medicine. Even they really were unaware of the radical shift in our paradigm that I'm talking about. Now I get asked this question over and over again wherever I go and I speak about this new paradigm in medicine. that deals with the roots of illness and not just the symptoms. Everybody wants it and nobody can find it. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about this work and what I do and about my Ultra Wellness Center, which is a place where this kind of medicine can be found. Now, I'm on the board of directors of the Institute for Functional Medicine. This is a non-profit educational organization and it's dedicated to educating doctors and practitioners in this new medical paradigm. And we're working on so many exciting initiatives that I think are going to change medicine. We're creating a fellowship program to train doctors. We're collaborating on groundbreaking research at Harvard Medical School on functional medicine. And we also just finished a paradigm shifting textbook called the Textbook of Functional Medicine, in which I wrote a few chapters. I'd encourage you to buy this textbook and give it to your doctors. But it's still hard to find a qualified practitioner who really understands how to apply this model. It's really a radically new way of thinking about health and disease. It's not just another treatment method. You know, I recently spent some time with the father of functional medicine, Jeffrey Bland, and I asked him in his world travels, how many really high level experienced practitioners are out in practice? And he said, you know, there's really only a few dozen. And that's hardly enough to help all the people who need help, the 125 million Americans with chronic disease. Now, how did I learn this? Well, I was lucky enough to be in the early development of this medicine when I was working at Canyon Ranch. And I had the luxury of spending a lot of time with people and people who are willing to explore this new type of medicine. They saw me, they saw the nutritionists, they were willing to get testing on their nutritional status and metabolic status, and this allowed me to see deep into the roots of their illness. And they were willing to make lifestyle changes that they needed to make in order to address the causes of their disease, not just the symptoms. And so I also learned from the inside out because I learned how to deal and heal myself from chronic fatigue syndrome. And I've been able to help so many people for which diagnosis-based medicine fails. That's what I call the naming and blaming game where we name the symptoms or the disease for the problem instead of thinking about the cause. So I'm going to tell you about a patient who I recently saw again after a while after I treated her and it just reminded me and she was a physician. She ran a top government health agency but she struggled for 30 years with chronic fatigue, irritable bowel, colitis, depression, psoriasis, arthritis, sinusitis, severe muscle pain, brain fog and a 50 pound weight gain which led her to diabetes. So she was in bad shape and she was a well connected doctor and she had exhausted all the conventional channels for help and even a lot of the alternative therapies which didn't work. And they didn't work because there was no organized thinking or model with which to navigate to the cause of a problem. So she resigned herself to being disabled in her early 50s. And she should have been in the prime of her creative and work life. Now, a year later after using functional medicine to address the causes, I dealt with her gut dysfunction, I helped her detoxify from mercury, I fixed her mitochondria, I addressed the causes of her inflammation that was raging throughout her body and she's a completely new person. Now if some of you want to learn more about these underlying principles, you can watch the eight week video course that I teach on Ultra Wellness which talks a lot about these underlying principles in more detail. But she was the beneficiary of this type of medicine. Not only is she back to work full time, she's 50 pounds lighter but she's not depressed. she has no pain or fatigue, her digestive and sinus problems are gone, and she feels that she has her life back after 30 years. And her diabetes is over. So I want to emphasize that this is not alternative or integrative medicine. This is a fundamentally different type of thinking about health and disease. It's a science-based change in our world view. And the treatments that are used are grounded in nutrition, they're grounded in improved lifestyle, They're complemented by nutritional supplements, meds, or other treatments when we need it. It's not modality specific or treatment specific, but it's about a new way of thinking about problems. So as you might imagine, my work's becoming more known. And I've been trying to keep up with all the requests for appointments that come into my practice, which is the Ultra Wellness Center. And I want you to know that seeing patients and being a doctor is the heart and soul of my work. But I have to give myself a few days a week to work on changing the medical paradigm through the research, through professional education, through my writing, so I can help more people access this type of care. And that's when I realized I had to expand my medical practice and I had to bring in other doctors and nutritionists and more staff to help people that needed the care and couldn't find it anywhere else. Now over 90% of my practice comes from all over the world. There's CEOs, presidents, congressmen and women, kings, rabbis, doctors, lawyers, plumbers, secretaries, firefighters, nurses, everybody comes. And I've worked very hard over the last year to create a center of this new type of medicine. I've invested in a state-of-the-art electronic health record system, and I'm completing a totally revised practice website to serve all the needs of our patients. But most importantly, I want you to know I found the right people to help support this work, because I can't see all the patients that want to see me. So I've added two new doctors and another nutritionist who are highly experienced and skilled in functional medicine. We all work together, we collaborate, we support each other to give our patients the best care through reviewing their patients, all the patients together, we constantly update ourselves in the research, and we work as a team. We work as a team to support our patients through the help of our nutritionists and the nursing and coaching staff to help people transform their health. So really you should think that vibrant good health is not just an accident. It's not just good luck, but it should be a universal objective. And few people have the opportunity to experience it. At the Ultra Wellness Center, we are really committed to helping you reach optimal health by identifying the underlying causes of disease and treating them. And diet and lifestyle modifications in combination with nutrition and testing that's often very specialized, nutritional supplements that are customized and personalized to you, sometimes medications, all these things are used to create to address everybody's needs, everything from creating wellness to treating complex chronic medical problems. So all our physicians at the Ultra Wellness Center are board certified in family medicine and all are experienced in functional, integrative, and nutritional medicine. Our nutritionists have specialized training using food as medical therapy and we work closely together. And our collective wish is to have everybody say, I didn't know I could feel this good. You know, we treat the person, not the disease, and we deal with the core systems of the body. So really we can address any condition, often from a curative point of view, and at the very least from a supportive standpoint to help improve how you feel. And we do all sorts of things, from brain wellness to heart health, to detoxification, to healthy weight and metabolism, healthy aging. We deal with fatigue, diabetes, arthritis, migraines, sinus problems, asthma, allergies, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, sleep problems, depression, dementia, Parkinson's, cancer prevention, heavy metal toxicity, inflammatory bowel disease. We specialize in autoimmune problems, hormonal issues like thyroid, adrenal and female disorders, skin problems, eczema, psoriasis, reflux and so on and so on. So there's myself, there's Dr. Elizabeth Boham who is actually not only a physician but she's also a registered dietitian. Dr. Artis Fish, who's a fabulous primary care physician, has great experience in integrative and functional medicine. Kathy Swift, who I've been working with, who's a nutritionist for over 14 years, who was the nutrition director at Canyon Ranch. Nina Silver, who's my coaching and nursing staff, and she's been working with me for 15 years, working closely with my patients. Deborah Phillips is a nutritionist who's worked for 30 years in nutrition and is very experienced. We have a fabulous team and we're here to help you really feel good and get to the root of your health problems. So if you're interested in getting help or if you know anybody who might need help, you can give us a call. It's 413-637-9991. You know our website, www.UltraWellnessCenter.com, is still in development but you can poke around there for now. And we're in the Berkshires, in western Massachusetts, in the historic town of Lenox. It's very beautiful. So if you're looking to find help for chronic problems and there's nobody in your town and you'd like to get help, I've tried to build a team at the Ultra Wellness Center to help you improve your health and deal with chronic illness. So thanks for listening and I'll see you back next week. This is Dr. Hyman.