The 7 Keys to UltraWellness: Discover Why You are Sick and How You Can Heal

Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Today I'm going to share with you how your body really works and how to discover why you're sick and how you can achieve what I call Ultra Wellness. I didn't know I was feeling so bad until I started feeling better. That's what my patients tell me every day. They go from being ill or just well to an experience of ultra wellness. Most people don't know how poorly they feel until they feel better. In fact, most of us don't recognize that annoying symptoms of fatigue, digestive problems, aches and pains, allergies and more are simply clues to impending disease that will disable or potentially kill us. Do you know that most heart disease starts in the womb? That you can detect brain changes in teenagers? that can predict the development of Alzheimer's, that blood tests in children can predict who will develop diabetes later in life, and that most cancers take over 30 years to grow to the size they can be detected. How can we address problems that we don't know we even have? One in three Americans has some type of chronic disease though, and most of the rest of us are headed toward one. Most of us don't feel as well as we should or could if we understood how to care for and feed our bodies the way they were designed. Now conventional medicine helps at the very end stage of disease. If you are very sick and have an emergency, break a bone or a raging infection, then yes, conventional acute care medicine is the right solution. As a former emergency room doctor and the husband of an orthopedic surgeon, I'm glad we have this care when we need it. But when I worked in the emergency room, I felt that was saving people just before or sometimes after they were washed downstream over the waterfall to their death. I began to ask what led them up to this point? What happened upstream in the process of disease and illness? What were the real causes of disease? If I could answer that question, then I thought I might be able to help prevent disease in the first place. You see, the early influences on my thinking, from Asian philosophy to nutritional biochemistry to the study of ecology and ecosystems all helped me form a new and different view of health and disease. I am one doctor who is part of a movement that is on the leading edge of the entire shift in our scientific model of disease. It is called Systems or Functional Medicine and it provides a way of understanding all the influence on our biology that are at the root of illness and how lifestyle and the environment interact with our genes to create imbalance or balance that are the real determinants of health and disease. This medical view does not reduce symptoms and diseases to their component parts and traditional specialties, but studies the entire ecology of the body and its environment. I have practiced this model for over 15 years and have seen miracle after miracle, day after day. People don't only get relief from symptoms, they get truly well. That's why I've called this approach to health Ultra Wellness. It is the answer to crisis we find ourselves in, an increasing epidemic of chronic disease and impending economic collapse as more of our resources are put toward caring for the chronically ill. Today, medicine is in a serious predicament. The way we understand health and disease no longer reflects biological reality or the biological laws of nature. We need to understand that diseases are not fixed things that you catch or just show up out of context but are related to the environment, your diet, your genes, and your lifestyle. We need to understand that our body is an ecosystem and is part of a larger ecosystem. And understanding how all those parts relate and what disturbs our ecological balance is more important than naming the disease and then blaming the name for the problem and taking a drug will fix the disease. For example, depression doesn't cause depression. It doesn't show up without a reason or a cause, but it is related to a web of forces that we can influence and affect. We are good at naming diseases and then blaming the name for the problem and then finding a drug that matches the name. I call this the naming and blaming game. What systems and functional medicine or ultra wellness is all about is thinking and linking. It's about seeing all the patterns and relationships that make sense of your whole story, your lifestyle, your stresses and genes and environment and how they interact with your biology to create imbalances that lead to disease. You see, our current way of thinking is outdated. It's wrong, and it will not help us address the declining health of us as individuals or a society. That's why we're making no progress and even backsliding when it comes to addressing chronic disease. Let's look at the data. Chronic disease affects 133 million Americans. That means in the average family of three, at least one person has a chronic disease. In fact, nearly every modern disease, from autoimmune diseases to allergic diseases, digestive problems, heart disease, cancer, obesity, diabetes, dementia, is increasing. One in three children born today will have type 2 diabetes. One in two people over 85 will develop dementia. These problems are increasing in the population at a dramatic rate and they affect everyone, either personally or through suffering of someone close to them. Every day in my office I see patients who feel alive again after expecting to suffer their whole life from chronic problems like bad digestion, headaches, fatigue, arthritis, allergies, hormonal problems, obesity, heart disease, depression, and more. And within a few months or even weeks, their lives open up again. This week alone, I spoke with a 27-year-old woman who could not lose weight and was constantly tired, who finally, effortlessly lost 20 pounds by treating her mercury poisoning. And there was a 78-year-old woman who felt she was on her way out with the dwindles and fatigue and memory loss and joint pains and bad digestion who now works out every day is full of energy simply by treating her nutritional deficiencies and helping her get back in balance. Or maybe the 30 year old woman with PMS, migraines, stomach aches, acne, and polycystic ovarian syndrome and infertility who is completely better after getting her system back in balance. Or the 47 year old woman with chronic sinus infections and fatigue who hadn't had a problem all winter. And that was just part of one day in my practice. The reality is that most of us don't know how bad we feel until we start feeling better. We accept chronic symptoms as a necessary part of life and that's just not necessary. We have the solutions that you're not hearing about. What I've learned in the past 20 years of seeing patients, studying the scientific literature and combining my knowledge and observations with other doctors who are also practicing systems in functional medicine and applying it in practice, I am committed to sharing what works with you. It's not perfect. nor can it address 100% of health problems 100% of the time, but it is a better mousetrap. This is the promise of Ultra Wellness, the opportunity to cure or dramatically improve chronic problems poorly addressed by conventional medicine and to discover vital, vibrant good health at any age. Now there are seven fundamental new principles, concepts or systems underlying all disease that help me navigate to the underlying causes of disease that will help you achieve ultra wellness. These concepts are the new roadmap in the landscape of health and disease, and I will share them with you so you can take advantage of them today. This is the medicine of the future now. So here they are. The first principle is we must understand how everything in our environment interacts with our genes to create health or disease, especially our diet and nutritional status. We also must look at air and water and microorganisms and exercise and trauma and psychosocial factors and environmental toxins that also affect our genes and health. Second, we must understand how our hormones and brain chemistry influence nearly every aspect of our health, why they get out of balance, and how to get them back in balance. Third, we must understand how most of us have a smoldering hidden inflammation inside of us that will kill us unless we understand how to control it. Fourth, we must understand our digestive system and how it's at the core of our health and why it breaks down and how to repair it. Fifth, we must understand how toxins and problems with our detoxification or waste management systems lead to chronic health problems and how to optimize our detoxification systems. Sixth, we must understand the importance of energy, how we make it, why we lose it and how to create more of it. And finally, seventh, we must understand how the mind interacts with the body and the body interacts with the mind to influence and affect every other system in the body. Remember, these are not really all separate systems. They are part of a web of function and physiology that is at the root of the way you feel of your health and disease. This revolutionary new way of thinking about health and disease will guide you towards something many of you have given up on experiencing: Ultra Wellness. Often when I explain this to people for the first time, They remark how simple and obvious this seems. Why didn't anyone explain it like this before? And it reminds me of T.H. Huxley's reaction to reading Darwin's Theory of Evolution and the Origin of Species. He said, How extremely stupid not to have thought of that.