Mark Hyman - Ultraprevention

For the last decade both of us have been interested in a new kind of medicine, one with a bias toward keeping patients healthy rather than diagnosing and treating disease.

Years before any affliction can be detected, biochemical imbalances exist in the body that trigger illness. These imbalances are chemical and energetic in origin and are affected by nutrients, genetics, and environment, as well as by thoughts and emotions.

To uncover these imbalances, we pay particular attention to the assessment of five key body functions: nutrition, metabolism, inflammation, detoxification, and oxidative stress (we call impairments of these functions sludge, burnout, heat, waste, and rust).

We have developed a six-week plan that corrects imbalances in these areas through medical treatment and lifestyle changes. The restoration of balance can prevent the development of disease.

We call our plan ultraprevention . It is a philosophy of diagnosis and treatment that derives from a scientific study of health. We firmly believe that ultraprevention represents the future of medicine. And we believe that ultraprevention will work for absolutely everyonewhether you are feeling very healthy, or you are feeling very sick, or anywhere in between.

This is because ultraprevention isnt about being sick and then becoming well. Its about being well and staying well. (Of course, if you are sick, ultraprevention can help you regain your health.)

Heres something else we believe: that the current medical model is fraught with dangerous mythsmyths that can actually create health problems. And we believe that most people (and, frankly, most doctors) know much less about health than they think, because they have fallen for these myths, such as the idea that (dietary) fat is a four-letter word, or that your genetic makeup is unchangeable.

Why did the two of us become so interested in the myths of modern medicine, and why have we worked so hard to find a system to correct them?

Because we have both been victims of these myths as much as anyone else. In a sense, both of us had to become very ill before we realized how to get better, and how to make others better, too.

My mother and father were free spirits, and we traveled and lived all over the world. Then my parents divorced, and I moved in with my grandparents until my mother remarried and we settled in Toronto. I returned to the United States to attend Cornell University, where I majored in Asian Studies.

Although Id been interested in Chinese medicine as a career, and became a yoga teacher while an undergraduate, I eventually decided to enter traditional medical school and enrolled at the University of Ottawa, where I also did my internship. However, I never lost my interest in alternative medicine.

After a residency in Santa Rosa, California, where I learned how to be a family doctor in a community practice serving indigents, immigrants, and the disenfranchised, I settled in Orofino, Idaho, in order to start a rural family practice. I longed to become the old-fashioned doctor, caring for my patients from birth to death. Orofino, a rustic logging community, gave me that opportunity. The Clearwater Valley Hospital was on the edge of the largest wilderness area in the lower forty-eight states, and there we took care of everything from delivering babies to dealing with trauma from logging accidents to performing minor surgery.

My patients were unusual. For instance: Franklin, a forty-year-old, four-hundred-pound Nez Perc Indian whose drooping breasts, thin black ponytail, and flushed, hairless cheeks made him indistinguishable from a woman. A drifter, he had left the valley of his ancestors for a modern lifestyle that had rewarded him with obesity, alcoholism, diabetes, and a drug addiction; he was now in my care after swallowing a few bottles of pills and forty-eight cans of beer to cope with a rocky romance.

We pumped Franklins stomach with a large tube nearly the size of a garden hose in the early predawn hours. Hardened to unappetizing sights, my stomach growled. Im hungry, I said to the nurse. Talking around the tube in his mouth, Franklin mumbled, Im hungry too.

After three years Id had enough, and moved to mainland China to develop a clinic whose goal was to connect Eastern and Western medicine. I turned out to be one of its most successful patients. While in Idaho Id ruptured a disk in my spine and had suffered paralysis, nerve damage, and minor pain. No one had been able to help. But in a Sino-Japanese hospital in Beijing, a Chinese doctor used various techniques including acupuncture, cupping, and Gua Sha, which involves rubbing a herbal tincture over the skin (with an object that feels like an ice scraper) to increase circulation.

Although my American neurologist, neurosurgeon, and rehabilitation surgeons had told me that I would never regain my strength or nerve function, my pain disappeared, my muscles enlarged in size, and my limp disappeared. Many years later, I am still pain-free and able to run, ski, and play ice hockey.

That was my first significant personal experience with alternative treatment. In the meantime, I had moved back to the mountains of western Massachusetts to raise my two children, and to support myself I ended up doing emergency room work in Springfield.