Dr. Mark Hyman argues that conventional medicine misses the root causes of depression and anxiety. His book The UltraMind Solution proposes a functional medicine approach using lifestyle changes to improve brain health instead of relying solely on medication.
Hello, this is Dr. Mark Hyman. Welcome to my series of blogs on my new book, the UltraMind Solution. Are you one of the one in three Americans today struggling through life with a broken brain? Maybe you fear losing your job because you're tired, unfocused and attentive and your memory is failing so you can't properly perform your tasks at work. Maybe you feel depressed or hopeless or disconnected or disengaged from life. Or maybe you see your relationships breaking down because you're mentally and emotionally absent or numb. Or maybe you forget appointments or to go meet friends and you can't figure out in the world you forgot. If any of these apply to you, you're not alone. Because right now here in America, there's a rising tide of broken brains and conventional medicine can't cure it. This epidemic of conditions like depression, anxiety, bipolar disease, psychosis, attention deficit disorder, autism, dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, as well as more subtle symptoms like mood swings or sleep problems or poor concentration or just plain brain fog. Consider this, one in 10 Americans today are using antidepressants, while more than 8 million children are taking stimulants like Ritalin. Do you think there's something wrong with this picture? Is this part of the normal human condition? Are we defectively designed so that we can't be happy or concentrate or remember things without pills? I mean, is depression a Prozac deficiency? Is ADD a Ritalin deficiency? Is Alzheimer's an Aricept deficiency? I think not. But here's the really big news. These diseases don't really exist, at least not in the way we think they do. So let me explain. Let's say you have feelings of sadness and despair. We might say you have something called depression. But depression isn't the cause of your sadness or despair. It's just a name we use to group people together for the purposes of giving them all the same drug therapy. If you feel sad and despairing, then you have depression and you need an antidepressant. But do we know the reasons for these symptoms? Do we know the causes? Are they even the same from one person to another? Think about it. You and the person sitting next to you could have the exact same chronic symptoms, let's say headache. Maybe your pain is caused by drinking too much wine every night and their pain is caused by being hit on the head with a wine bottle every night. As you can imagine, these two chronic headaches can't be cured in the same way because their root causes are different, but that's exactly what the current medical community is doing. Drugs like antidepressants don't cure the disease, they just mask the symptoms. You see, we don't need to continue using these same drug treatments that don't work, that make things worse, or provide tons of side effects, or at best give just a little bit of relief. There is a proven medical solution, and it's called the UltraMind Solution. I know because I cured myself using this simple but powerful method. You see, my own brain broke one beautiful day back in 1996. In fact, I felt like I contracted ADD, depression and dementia all at once. The worse my body felt, the worse my brain worked. My eyes would get red and swollen and I couldn't focus. I had rashes or diarrhea and I couldn't remember what I just said. I couldn't feel joy and I was constantly exhausted. but yet had trouble sleeping. You see, I saw doctor after doctor after doctor. I saw a psychiatrist. No one could find the cause for my symptoms or agree on a diagnosis. Some said I had depression, others suggested chronic fatigue. Some said I had anxiety or fibromyalgia, but I decided I had to find the answers for myself. And by scouring the medical literature, consulting with doctors and scientists, and experimenting with my own body and mind, I finally came to understand that it wasn't just one thing that caused my brain to break, but the accumulation of many things. And the cure wasn't one magic pill, but it was balancing the seven core systems of my body, what I came to call the seven keys to ultra wellness. And here they are: Optimize nutrition, balance your hormones, cool off inflammation, fix your digestion, enhance detoxification, boost your energy metabolism, and calm your mind. These keys are the underlying causes of all illness. You see, it turns out that not only are your joint pains, skin rash, irritable bowel, and depression all connected, but the only way to find your way out of this mess of chronic disease is by using a new map, one that allows us to see how everything is connected. This new map is the basis of something called functional medicine and it's a rich new method of fundamental change in our thinking. A whole different paradigm, like the world is round, not flat kind of shift. It changes our approach to the very way we think about illness in the human body. And unlike our current medical system, you don't need expensive therapies or medications in order to join this revolution. You just need a fork, a pair of sneakers and an understanding of your body's seven key systems. This is the goal of my new book, the UltraMind Solution. I will teach you how to achieve optimal mental health and brain health without drugs or psychotherapy and if you're on drugs or use therapy, how to make those work much better. I believe that everyone deserves to live a life full of energy, vitality, pleasure and happiness. The Ultramind Solution will show you how to relieve your suffering so that you can live your life as you were meant to live it. But I don't want you to take my word for it. I want you to discover it for yourself. Now I want to remind you that you can get a free sneak preview of my new book, the Ultramind Solution at ultramind.com In my next blog I'm going to teach you How to Optimize youe Nutrition. Did you know that the most powerful tool you have to change your brain and your health is your fork? It turns out that food is the fastest acting and most powerful medicine you can take to change your life.
