Dr. Mark Hyman outlines seven roots of chronic illness: inflammation, hormone imbalance, digestion problems, poor detoxification, low energy, and mind-body disconnect. He argues functional medicine treats causes, not just symptoms, and offers a new model for lasting health.
Hi, this is Dr. Mark Hyman and I'm very excited to be here today to talk about the future of medicine. It's my favorite subject and I'm excited to do this in a new format which is my video blog. This is my first video blog. So I'm going to talk to you about something that is driving me and that it passionately affects what I do. It's the idea that we're on the edge of a new set of discoveries that's going to change the way we think about health and disease. These discoveries are not available to everyone and I'm trying to make them available to you through my work. Now, I discovered this personally by being sick. I was very sick. I had chronic fatigue syndrome and I also worked with thousands of patients at Canyon Ranch helping them deal with their illnesses. And through that I discovered a new way of thinking about health and disease. because we're facing a serious epidemic of chronic illness. We're facing 125 million Americans with chronic illness. We're facing 24 million people with autoimmune diseases. We're facing 65% of our population who's overweight. We're seeing one in two people over 65 having high blood pressure, one in two people over 85 having dementia, one in three children born today who are going to be diabetic. How do we deal with these things? How do we prevent our economy and our health from becoming bankrupt? Well, it's through a new conception of medicine called systems or functional medicine. What is it? What is it? It sounds like a new strange conception. It's not something you probably heard about before. You've probably heard about a few other things. I'm going to distinguish it from alternative or integrative medicine. Alternative medicine is the idea that there are some old systems like homeopathy, Chinese medicine, Ayurveda that we can apply to to conventional diagnoses to help you treat those illnesses. And that's okay, you can use that and I'm certainly all for that. Integrative medicine combines alternative medicine with conventional medicine. So it uses those alternative modalities to help treat conventional diagnoses. I call that green medicine. So green medicine would be taking an herb for a migraine or using acupuncture for arthritis, although it may help, it's not exactly a new paradigm. The new paradigm is called systems medicine, which is dealing with the root of illness. this is really the fundamental difference between what I do and what integrative or alternative medicine is because it's based on new scientific discoveries that teach us how everything in the body is connected. Now, I'll give you a quick example. I had a patient who came in with five different inflammatory diseases. He had colitis, asthma, reflux, high blood pressure, fat belly, hair loss, and autoimmune disease of his hair follicles. seen all the best doctors, on all the best medications, and no one had asked a very simple question, which was, what's at the root of illness? What's the underlying cause? What was causing his set of diseases? Are they all just sort of a coincidence that he had these different conditions? No. They were all caused by him eating something that his body didn't like, called gluten. So by getting to the root of the illness, we were able to get rid of all his diseases, have him stop his 15 medications, and be able to live a life again that was full and vibrant. And that's the promise of ultra wellness. So in order to understand this system we have to explain the seven roots of illness and the seven sources of ultra wellness because these will determine your health or disease. So what are these seven things? They're the environmental inputs. These are the things that are in the environment that are determining our health. Our diet, our lifestyle, stress, toxins, trauma, these things influence our genes and influence our disease states and determine our health and disease. So the environment interacting with your genes affects all the systems in your body and determines health and disease. Now these systems are critical to understand and they're really at the root of all illness. So you name the disease, these six things I'm going to talk to you about including the seven, including the environmental inputs, form the seven roots of illness and the seven keys to ultra wellness. So the first one is inflammation and immune system balance. So we've got to figure out what's causing inflammation in the body and get rid of it and we have to provide a way of cooling off inflammation and reducing the effects of inflammation in the body. The second key is to understand how to balance your hormones and neurotransmitters. Again, a very key aspect of your health. Next, we have to understand how to affect digestion and improve your digestive health because if you're not healthy in your gut, the rest of you can't be healthy. Next, we have to help you detoxify and get rid of waste products. If you don't detoxify and your waste backs up, you get sick. Next, you have to understand how to create energy, how to generate energy from food and oxygen inside your bodies and what impairs that and how to get it working right. And lastly, we have to understand the role of the mind-body and the body-mind, because it's a two-way street in affecting our health. Very critical. So you don't have to wait 20 years to take advantage of the discoveries. I've made them available to you through my work and will help you achieve ultra wellness. Now each week over the next seven weeks I will cover each of these seven roots of illness and the seven keys to ultra wellness. So to read more about this you can get the full explanation on my blog at www.ultrawellness.com www.ultrawellness.com/blog. So stay tuned and let me help you achieve ultra wellness.
