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Dr. Mark Hyman: The 7 Keys to UltraWellness: Discover Why You are Sick and How You Can Heal
“I didn’t know how bad I was feeling until I started feeling better.”
That is what my patients tell me every day. They go from being ill or just okay to experiencing UltraWellness.
Most people don’t know how poorly they feel until they feel better. In fact, most of us don’t recognize that fatigue, digestive problems, aches and pains, allergies, headaches, and more aren’t just annoying symptoms. They are early clues to impending diseases that can disable and kill us.
Most heart disease starts in the womb. You can detect brain changes in teenagers that can predict the development of Alzheimer’s disease. Blood tests in children can predict who will develop diabetes later in life. Most cancers take more than 30 years to grow to the size where they can be detected.
How can we address problems that we don’t even know we have?
There is an answer. It lies in the revolution that is happening in medicine today. That revolution is called functional medicine. I call it UltraWellness, and that is what you are going to learn about today …
How I Found the Real Cure for Chronic Illness
One in three Americans has some type of chronic disease — 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 only we understood how to care for and feed our bodies the way they were designed.
Conventional medicine helps at the very end stages of disease. If you are very sick, have an emergency, break a bone or have a raging infection, then, yes, conventional acute care medicine is the right solution. As former emergency room doctor and the husband of an orthopedic surgeon, I am glad we have this care when we need it.
But when I worked in the emergency room, I felt I was saving people just before (or sometimes after) they were washed DOWNSTREAM and over the waterfall to their death.
I began to wonder what led them 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.
The early influences on my thinking–from Asian philosophy, to nutritional biochemistry, to the study of ecology and ecosystems — all helped me form new and different view of health and disease.
I am one doctor who is part of a movement that is on the cutting edge of an entire shift in our scientific model of disease. It is called systems medicine, or functional medicine.
It provides a way of understanding all the influences on our biology that are at the root of illness and how our lifestyle and environment interact with our genes to create the imbalances or balances that are the real determinants of disease or health.
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 seen miracle after miracle, day after day. People don’t only get relief from symptoms, they get truly well. That is why I have called this approach to health UltraWellness.
It is the answer to the crisis we find ourselves in — an increasing epidemic of chronic disease and an 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 that just show up out of context, but are related to the environment, your diet, genes, and lifestyle.
Dr. Mark Hyman: The 7 Keys to UltraWellness: Discover Why You are Sick and How You Can Heal.
