How to fix our broken healthcare system

Hi, this is Dr. Hyman. Welcome to my blog. Jenny McCarthy has a big secret that she didn't tell you. Now, flying back from Seattle to Philadelphia this weekend after teaching doctors about functional medicine, and by the way, every doctor should attend this course called Applying Functional Medicine in Clinical Practice. I read a world changing book. This was Jenny McCarthy's book on autism, on her son, called Louder Than Words: A Mother's Healing Journey into Healing Autism. And I felt like she spoke to the biggest problem in medicine today, and it's the best kept secret in medicine. Jenny McCarthy is desperate to sell her secret, and this is her secret. There's a biomedical treatment for autism, but what she didn't say was that this biomedical treatment is functional medicine. It's the scientific principles and methods that form the basis for functional medicine and the seven keys to ultra wellness. After each treatment she gave him, her son emerged from his dark, locked-in world and he began to speak. And then he began to look into her eyes. And then he began to laugh. She witnessed miracle after miracle, as I do in my practice. And she asked, why is this approach a secret? Her doctor didn't tell her about each new treatment she tried on her son. Only other mothers of kids with autism told her about the treatments, like allergy elimination diets, B12, vitamins and minerals, antifungal medications, mercury detox. She wondered, why was this not headline news on 60 Minutes, CNN, 2020 and Oprah? How could we have these treatments and nobody know about them? I ask myself the same questions every day. I have patients come to my office like yesterday, for example, just one day, I had a 40-year-old woman with psoriatic arthritis who couldn't walk and after six months she's pain-free walking and lost 30 pounds. I had another woman come in who thought she was emotionally disturbed because she was chronically hungry and had inflammatory bowel disease. In one week she was completely better. Another patient who suffered five years of disabling autoimmune disease and arthritis and she had an infected root canal that was causing inflammation in her body and in two weeks her pain was gone. Or I had a 12 year old boy with severe ADD and autism who was violently angry all the time and completely out of control and when he was treated with the nutritional and metabolic approach, this biomedical treatment, he said, I feel like my brain is not short-circuiting all the time anymore. Or I had a 37 year old woman who had been depressed for a decade. and had been overweight with chronic fatigue and until she detoxified from mercury, she wasn't able to get better and she's now perfectly healthy. And that's just one day in my practice. This type of medicine should be on 60 Minutes, 20/20, Oprah, the front page of the New York Times, the covers of Time and Newsweek. It should be taught in every medical school. Millions of dollars of government funding and private donations should be granted or donated to promote research and education. And postgraduate courses in functional medicine should be available for your doctor and family doctor and every specialty in medicine. I'm telling you, millions of people are suffering needlessly because we have a system that maintains a status quo and supports research and benefits the existing paradigm. I mean, yesterday I was enraged when I read the New England Journal of Medicine, which wrote an article and an editorial on thimerosal and mercury. They said, and the USA Today and the New York Times report on this and showed that there was no damage from mercury in vaccines from kids who received it before 1999. Now, all the mercury has been taken out since then, but they didn't do the study right. And the reporters, I'm ashamed of them for their weak reporting. I mean, here's what they didn't report. One, that they excluded all kids with ADD and autism from the study. Now, these are kids with a genetic problem that make them unable to detoxify. These are the kids who can't detoxify. It's like doing a study to see if peanuts can be a cause of allergy, but excluding all the kids with allergy to peanuts from the study. Just bad science. And they didn't measure mercury levels in the children, just exposure. So if kids were good detoxifiers, of course they wouldn't have effects from the mercury. They should have measured the total body load of mercury in these children and then noted how that correlated with their neurologic effects or autism. Again, just bad science. Of course, they didn't report on the fact that vaccine manufacturers are the ones who funded the studies and the authors of the study. Now, Jenny McCarthy is a shining light that's telling the world about one little sliver of this potential for this new model of care, but there's so much more. Now, I'm on the board of directors and the faculty of the Institute for Functional Medicine. I receive no money for working for them except for a little nominal fee for teaching. and it's a nonprofit organization that's dedicated to educating professionals in this new model. And yet working very hard with a few extraordinary dedicated people, we've only trained 800 health professionals since 1999. There are 600,000 doctors, almost 70,000 nutritionists who belong to the American Dietetic Association, and they're not getting this. Doctors are looking for a new way to help their patients. They're sick of just prescribing drugs to suppress symptoms. And at this ADA conference where I gave a talk to 1,000 dietitians, they were desperate for this information. Now at the Institute for Functional Medicine, we're creating a certification program to help train professionals so more people can see qualified practitioners of this new medicine. And we're also working on research at Harvard to prove to the scientific community the power of this new model of care to address the 125 million, or one in three of you out there with chronic illness. Now, I know that there are about 10,000 professionals in the healthcare field who are reading this who have joined our Ultra Wellness Community. And I know there are a few hundred thousand other people reading this who know that the time has come for this type of medicine. But Jenny McCarthy can't do this by herself. And the big secret needs telling. We have the power to truly change things if we work together. And we can do a lot of things together if we work together over the next year. We can create certification programs for professionals. get the textbook of functional medicine in the hands of more doctors. We can create a whole new model for clinical practice and care that allows clinics to develop in each community and we can develop research that proves this model is effective and will save billions of dollars. The goal of the Institute for Functional Medicine is to raise $20 million over the next year to accomplish this goal. The more we have, the faster we can go and all of you can make it happen with very little effort. So I don't ask things of my community very often and I'm not asking for me. but I'm asking for the millions of suffering people who could benefit if we come together and work to create change. And if you know anyone who wants to see a different kind of health care, please send this along to him or her now and ask him or her to help. If each of you forward this to just 10 key people you know and ask for their help, then we could raise enough money overnight to transform medical education and research. That's the power of a grassroots community to create change. We can't wait for government or industry to bail us out. So here's what I'm asking. Please donate whatever you can. I mean, imagine if each of you reading this gave just $100 to the Institute for Functional Medicine to help create a comprehensive certification or fellowship program in functional medicine and help support research in functional medicine. Imagine how fast we could change things if everyone gave just a little bit. So our goal is to raise $20 million to change things almost overnight. It's a tax-deductible donation, $100 only from each of you. It's a 501 non-profit organization, so go to this link and donate online now. And remember the famous words from Margaret Mead: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.