I've Had 6 Back Surgeries And Almost Died Here's What 40 Years of Medicine Actually Taught Me

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a sixteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The last surgery, Hail Mary surgery, I was pretty sick. I couldn't move. I couldn't sit up in bed. I was I'd lost 25 pounds. I was just a skeleton.

And the surgeon was like, look. We don't really know if we can help you, but otherwise, you're gonna die. And they're like, well, you have a five to ten chance of making it to the surgery.

Emma Krebs
Now that you've kind of had a second life, has it changed your view on like longevity, what that means to you?

Dr. Mark Hyman
The things that really matter come to the forefront like family, friends, community, your health. These are things that are just the most important things in life. Hey, everybody. Today, we're gonna do something different. I'm joined by my producer, Emma, and we're gonna do a little q and a for doctor Mark.

Emma Krebs
Mark, you spent your career helping other people figure out what's wrong with their health, but you've also had a pretty extraordinary health journey yourself. You've dealt with mercury poisoning, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, mold exposure, multiple injuries, and now you've had six back surgeries. So you've experimented with everything from functional medicine and supplements to some pretty cutting edge longevity therapies. Today, instead of you answering questions about our health, I wanted to turn the table and ask you questions about yours. So what you learned from being the patient, what you changed your mind about, what you've tried that worked and what didn't, and what thirty plus years in medicine has taught you about what actually matters for health.

Forty. Actually. Forty. Is it forty?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, next year, I'll be forty years being a doctor.

Emma Krebs
Wow. After spending decades of self obsessed with health and longevity, what act actually matters to you now? So I wanna start out by you taking us back to when your health journey first really fell apart. I believe you're 32. You're living in Idaho.

Kind of take us back to that moment and tell us what was happening then.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I was a family doctor. I was working in a small town. I lived at the end of this dirt road up on the top of a mountain, and there were five family doctors in this small town where we had a cashmere about 10,000 people. And I was the one who did the c sections, and I ran the ER one day a week. It was just like a lot.

So I delivered lots of babies, ran the ER, worked full time, had two little kids. My wife at the time was not mentally very well, and I took the burden of it all, literally on my back. And I was chopping wood and getting wood ready for the wood stove for the winter. And I, you know, was tired, exhausted, working really hard. I hadn't been exercising as much because I was just working too much.

And I was carrying a lot of heavy, heavy logs, piece of wood, into the house. And I just carried them in a way that was really biomechanically bad. And I herniated, really ruptured a disc. And the next day, that was like on a Sunday, the next day I had a baby that I was working to deliver that was a mother who was quite sick with preeclampsia, and I noticed that I was limping and I had no motor function in my foot. I didn't have any pain at the time.

And then within two or three days, I ended up like being rushed to the hospital, had a kind of pre emergency surgery to relieve the compression of the nerve, and and that was my first back surgery. So it was pretty rough. And and I was left with a permanent residual weakness in my calf. And so I it's I've managed okay with it, but it's it's it was the beginning of a long journey of back issues.

Emma Krebs
And you're only 32 at that time that that happened.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I'm

Emma Krebs
seeing. So at that time you were a physician, did you assume, like, being a doctor meant you'd be able to figure out what was wrong with you? Did it take you some time to kind of seek external help?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, I mean, at that moment, I I I was you know, I had motor weakness. I was very it was took it very seriously. And I then went to see the neurologist in the local town, is about 50 miles away in Lewiston, and and they immediately saw that I had a herni I had a herniated disc, an MRI, and had surgery. But the the thing was I I reherniated the disc, like, ten days later, and I went back, and they they weren't listening to me.

And I said, listen. Something's wrong. They weren't listening. And that's why I ended up with a permanent disability because they didn't go back in and operate. So it was my first experience of like, you know, doctors missing the ball and and actually causing a permanent lifelong problem that I've had, that they could have easily relieved if the doctor had been attentive, had listened to what I said, and paid attention.

And it's kind of unfortunate because doctors sometimes can be very stuck in their ways, and this time, it left me with a a problem. So I I I learned very quickly that I can't rely just on the, quote, experts to have all the answers.

Emma Krebs
What do you think when that happened, like, was your scariest symptom? I know you said you had lost function. Would you say that was the most concerning bit, or did you kind of see the feature that you might have had in front of you?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. I mean, I it was you know, I I I clearly was was very alarmed by losing motor function. That, you know, not being able to walk was a big thing. So that was my that was my biggest concern. And, you know, I I didn't I didn't even know how to navigate the the after effects because I I the surgery went well, but then I reherniated the disc, and that that led to sort of permanent issues.

And I should have had that handled right away. But when I went back to the doctor, they just sort of ignored me and said, it's fine. It's just you're just fine. Don't worry about it. It'll be fine.

And then it was fine.

Emma Krebs
How did you reherniate the disc? Were you just like going about life as usual, not kind of taking time to recover?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I I was in recovery. I was home for six weeks recovering, but the truth was I I picked up a log, like, ten days in and put it just one piece of wood and put it in the woodstove. And I think that that caused a reherniation. And that was just sort of it's like one moment in time that shapes your whole life.

But I I managed to, you know, continue to be active and ride my bike. I ran for years. I played tennis. I ski. I I do whatever I wanna do.

And, you know, I have a little bit of handicap, but I don't let that stop me.

Emma Krebs
I'm probably gonna circle back and jump around a bit, but that's two one surgery. Can you kind of lead me down to the other surgeries? Maybe, like, two through four.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, I did well from 1992 until 2020. And then I I always had a little bit of back pain here and there, but I didn't really have significant disc issues. And then I was chopping wood. Can't

Emma Krebs
There's a theme.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Thinking. There's a theme. Yeah. It was Memorial Day. We were we were making a fire, and we just wanna have a barbecue, whatever.

I don't remember exactly. And then I was like, oh, shit. I something's wrong. And I and I herniated l four five, and I had five one s l five s one before. I was like, oh, I I really I did something.

And I started feeling, you know, tingling and numbness and weakness. And then again, I had to have another surgery in June 2020 in COVID in New York City, which was very intense. And right after the surgery, I was in the recovery room, and I said they were about to send me home because it was gonna be like a deep outpatient procedure. It was a microdiscectomy. And he said the procedure went well.

When he came back in to see me, the surgeon who was the head of neurosurgery at Cornell said, look. I said, look. I'm not something's wrong. Like, I'm I'm in a lot of pain. Something's really wrong.

And he's like, oh, it's fine. It's fine. I didn't I think something's wrong. We gotta check. And so we did an MRI.

And they did an MRI. There was a big hematoma. There was a big blood clot that had just formed in my spine, which was very unusual. He said he he you know, he's a 60 year old neurosurgeon, head of neurosurgery. Last time I saw this was in my residency.

So it's very uncommon, but I got bad luck. So then I had to be rushed back to the surgery again, and it was a very hard, long recovery after that. So I had worked with Tom Brady's system of training bands, and I I worked on, you know, physical therapy and really kinda committed to it. And I built myself back up and ended up, you know, getting really fit after that and going to Maui and working out and riding my bike and getting back in my body again. So that was really amazing.

And and but it, you know, it just was like, wow. That was a big one. And that was like the third and second and third surgeries. And then fast forward to 2024, had another herniated disc, l three four, because my back was just sort of generating. And then had to have another surgery, which went okay, but I still had a lot of pain.

And then I ended up having an epidural injection to relieve some of the pain, and I got infected. And then I had an abscess, and I had another surgery. It left me kind of for dead, honestly, and it was really quite bad. The surgeon didn't really know how to operate on me, didn't know the technique, and wasn't willing to kind of tell me to go somewhere else. And I finally found another surgeon who's a top neurosurgeon in the country on complex spine surgery in California at UCSF, and they took me and they did another surgery.

So those were all the six surgeries. It was a lot.

Emma Krebs
I didn't realize that the majority of them had happened in the last six years as well, so that's a lot.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Five of them happened in the last, yeah, six years. Yeah. I mean, two of them were within very quick succession in one day, and then the last two were a month apart. Was like but I finally had, you know, a fusion and hardware in there, and I and actually, I'm pretty good. I'm hiking.

I'm I'm riding my bike. I'm I'm, you know, working out. So I, you know, I feel like I I I'm not a 100%, but I I feel like I'm I'm doing pretty good.

Emma Krebs
I will probably come back to that, like, hills Hail Mary surgery as you call it that you had, that kind of last one. But I wanna jump backwards kind of in time now. When did mir Mercury enter the picture within your health journey?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I I don't exactly know, but I lived in China for a year in 1994, and I ended up, you know, in the middle of the winter breathing in all this soot and black air and ended up, you know, accumulating a lot of mercury. Plus, I think I ate a lot of fish. I had fillings. I mean, who knows where I got ate tuna fish all the time when I was a kid. So I think, you know, there was a a real buildup, and I don't have the genetics to detoxify properly.

So I was doing really well. I came back from China. I was working in the ER. And then one day I I was up in Maine. I don't know what happened.

Something I ate something or I got something from the lake there. I was swimming in it, and I got a severe stomach infection, like severe bloating, pain, like just unbelievable. And from that day on, it was like, I just went into full chronic fatigue syndrome. And I didn't know what was going on. My gut was a mess.

I had severe brain fog. I couldn't sleep. My muscles were aching. I was exhausted. And I just didn't know what was happening.

I started getting rashes. I was out of immunity, weird symptoms. And nobody could help me. And I went to doctor after doctor. I went to Harvard.

I went to Columbia. Saw I had all these crazy symptoms, fasciculations and twitching of muscles. I had ALS. It was just quite, quite bad. And I could barely function, and I ended up having to really discover a different world of medicine, which was functional medicine.

And that helped me understand what was happening. I met a doctor who said maybe you have mercury issues. So I tested myself and he was right, and I had very, very, very high mercury. One of the highest I've seen actually in my practice. Doing this for forty, thirty years.

And and then I was able to get you know, chelate myself, treat myself, work on fixing my gut. And basically, it was how I learned functional medicine from the inside out because every system I had collapsed. You know, my gut collapsed, immune system was dysregulated, my mitochondria weren't working, I escalated muscle enzyme, CPK. My muscles are breaking down. I had hormonal dysregulation, adrenal dysfunction.

I mean, sex hormone dysfunction. Mean, everything was just completely screwed. So I basically learned functional medicine because chronic fatigue basically touches almost all aspects of your health and all of your biology. And I and it really helped me to understand not just on a conceptual level, but on the cellular level, what actually people are suffering through and able was able to heal myself and use that knowledge to really help my patients.

Emma Krebs
I have a couple more questions back there. One, I'm curious, what were you doing in China?

Dr. Mark Hyman
In China? Yeah. Well, I studied Buddhism in college and majored in Chinese and spoke pretty fluent Chinese and ended up kind of interacting with this guy who was building health clinics for foreigners in China because they had no health health clinics for Westerners. So I I was there to help develop relationship with the hospital and and design and develop a, you know, basically a primary care clinic for for expatriates, and that was that's what I was doing there.

Emma Krebs
And so how long were you in China for?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I was there for a year. Yeah. I was there for a year. And then

Emma Krebs
And then you came back to America, and you said the first symptom was severe stomach bolting. Is that correct?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. No. No. I came back to America, I was fine for a couple of So my body was able to cope my body was able to cope with it until some big insult happened. And so the insult was some stomach infection or gut infection, and then everything just collapsed.

So I literally collapsed from one day to the next. I went from riding my bike a 100 miles a day and remembering 30 without notes to not, you know, being able to walk up the stairs and not remembering where I was at the end of a sentence. So I had I had I had just complete breakdown, and I and I knew that it wasn't psychological. I mean, there was a lot of stress going on. I was going through divorce and getting custody of my kids.

It was like it was a lot. But I ended up, you know, really in a in a situation where, you know, my whole systems just collapsed, and I had to I had to figure out what was going on. And I was, you know, given Xanax, I was given like Prozac, I was given all these drugs for everything. I never took most of them, but the doctor was like, you've got depression, you've got irritable bowel, you've got this, you've got that. I'm like, no.

Something's going on. And they just they just weren't able to find it through their normal channels of of traditional medicine.

Emma Krebs
You said there earlier as well that you had found a doctor that had told you to get tested for mercury poisoning. Was that Jeffrey Bland? Like, where does he kind of enter your story?

Dr. Mark Hyman
No. Actually, I I I was a doctor at Kenya Ranch, and I met a nutritionist who said, you've got to come hear this guy speak. And I went to Boston and and heard Jeffrey Bland for the first time, and I realized, oh, either he's a genius or he's quack. If he's saying what he's saying is true, then it's really incumbent upon me to dive in and learn and figure out if there's truth in it because it's such a radical departure from what I learned. And at that point, was just desperate for help, so I I basically went down that rabbit hole.

And then I went to a conference, and I was, you know, flying to a functional medicine conference in Maui and ended up meeting this guy on the plane. He said, you know, he was a naturopath, I started telling him my symptoms and what's going on. He's like, oh, we should check. So that was what happened. And I was really serendipity.

Otherwise, I would not have known. But it took me it was a good year plus of being sick until I really actually found someone who said, maybe you should look at this. And, you know, no no doctor that I saw, a traditional doctor, ever said to me, oh, just maybe you have, I know, something going on that's underneath that's causing this, let's say, infection, or whether it's mercury or toxins or who knows what. I mean, there was so much. You know?

So

Emma Krebs
As a as a doctor and knowing all the information you know, how did you navigate that? Like, knowing there was more to it, there needed to be answers, you know, just being kind of that patient in a clinical setting, what was that experience like?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, I I really I I was a patient, and I had to and I I understood the helplessness and the the fear and the anxiety around not being able to get answers and what that felt like. And it was terrible. It was a really lonely, terrible experience to try to navigate all that on my own without any guidance or support. And so I feel like, you know, I'm in this moment where I was just having to kind of navigate almost in a vacuum.

And and what I learned really wasn't helping me, and I needed to go in a different direction. And that's really where I I dove down the rabbit hole of functional medicine. That's where I understood the body was designed differently than I learned in medical school that, you know, really, really deeply understood the map of the human body in a way that I never never learned. And that was applying it to my patients, and they were all getting better. And I was like, damn.

This stuff works. You know? People with autoimmune diseases, with gut issues, with mood issues, with metabolic health issues, with skin problems, with autism, with ADD, with dementia, with I mean, just you name it. It was quite incredible to see the the dramatic changes that happen in people's health. And I was like, what?

Because it was like, I was sort of shocked anytime someone would get better from doing the things that I said and following the principles of functional medicine. I was like, well, how did that happen? But once you begin to understand human biology, which we don't really in traditional medicine, then you can really start to use that map of this new biology to really help people get to the root cause of their their issues and help them, you know, help them actually where where traditional medicine can.

Emma Krebs
As devastating as I imagine and challenging your health journey was, that was pivotal, I guess, for your career and the work that you do now with your patients as

Dr. Mark Hyman
well. Totally.

Emma Krebs
Okay. I wanna jump back to the to the back situation and your back surgeries. I wanna go to that last one because I'm guessing that last surgery you've again, you've you've called it yourself the Hail Mary surgery. Was that the most challenging one? Because I wanna get into recovery and kind of hear about when maybe the most challenging point with your back was throughout your whole journey.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, I mean, clearly that last one. What's the word? Yeah. And I think that I really didn't understand at that moment, like, how sick I was. And it all happened very fast.

I mean, when you have a small space in your back and you get an infection and an abscess, it just takes off like wildfire. And so, you know, that last surgery, Hail Mary surgery was I was pretty sick. I was septic. I had an infection, fever. I couldn't move.

I couldn't sit up in bed. Was I'd lost 25 pounds. I was just a skeleton. And the surgeon was like, look. You know, I'd already been in bed for a month.

And he's like, look. We don't really know if we can help you, but otherwise, you're gonna die. So we should do the surgery. And I was like, okay. And they were like, well, you have a five to ten percent chance of making it through the surgery.

And I was like, well, okay. So I really had to see my family, say goodbye, my wife, my friends, you know, wrapping up loose ends of my business. You know, it was quite it was it was quite an intense experience. And then they went in and they they did a full fusion. They removed the abscess.

They cleaned it all up, washed it out. They, you know, put in big drains. I had a scar that was probably a foot and a half long on my back. You know, I was pretty weak. I couldn't walk.

I couldn't literally walk. The first day I got up after surgery, had a walker and I had a physical therapist behind me holding me up because my legs couldn't support my weight. And I had to literally build myself back up from that. And I put on 25 pounds of muscle in about eight or nine months of working really hard. And recovering was really hard.

I mean, I needed to use all the tools at my disposal. And at 65, I had no idea that I could actually recover at that age. It was something that actually was doable. I didn't know. I mean, I knew if I was younger, I'd probably be fine.

I'd been around the block, and I was like, what am I going to get back from this? And the truth is now I'm healthier than ever. I'm stronger than ever. I have no pain. I'm really doing well.

I have, like, a a commitment. Like, I I to me, to be able to say, you know, I'm extra, like, whatever. It it I have to do it. It's not it's not like a negotiable for me. It's it's I I have to move my body.

I have to stretch. I have to get strong every day, and I put that time in. It's just compounding interest. It's like anything you put you put in half an hour a day, it makes a difference over the course of a year and a half. And so that's really that's really important.

And then it taught me a lot about what what it takes to actually heal, recover. I used to took a lot of protein that I needed, a lot of nutrients that I needed, but I gave myself the time to rest. I mean, slept four hours a night for six weeks, so I had to recover my sleep. It was it was a lot. But, you know, I think it taught me that the body has this incredible repair capacity, this incredible renewal capacity, that all we have to do is really just do the right things.

We need to understand how the body works and provide the right inputs, and the body can thrive.

Emma Krebs
Going back to that moment when you were told, k. We're gonna go into this last surgery. We don't know what the outcome is going to be. Are you if it's not too personal, are you kind of able to share what was going through your mind in that moment just kind of potentially facing your own mortality and saying goodbye to your friends and family, what was that experience like for you?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it was weird because I was quite at peace with it all. I mean, I've lived a really good life. I've made a great contribution to the world. I have, you know, done well with my friends and my family, and I feel like I've I lived a full life. And so I was I was at peace, and I was okay with with pausing whatever was this incarnation and moving on if I had to.

I didn't want to, obviously, but I I was really quite at peace. And I thought, you know, this could be it. This really could be it. And and I just had to surrender to it. And it was very peaceful.

I wasn't I wasn't scared. I wasn't sad. I was, you know, a little sad, but I wasn't you know, it was yeah. It was it was an interesting thing to recognize that I knew I wasn't my thoughts. I wasn't my emotions.

I wasn't my body. That there there was something else that was inside of me that I felt like true, that I I felt at peace. And so I didn't I wasn't attached to this whole physical reality that we're in.

Emma Krebs
That's beautiful. Do you think that your experience with, like, spirituality, psychedelics, do you think those experiences kind of helped you come to that moment?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely. I mean, I've been, you know, on the spiritual path most of my life and studied Buddhism and used psychedelics and things like that. I began to really understand myself and my brain and my mind. And so it was really, yeah, really very, very powerful and very, you know, deep experience. So I I feel quite empowered and peace for how I went through it all and taught me a lot about, you know, how to think about life.

Emma Krebs
Now that you've kind of had a second life, you're like a cat that has nine lives coming out of that experience, how do you think that has it changed your view on like longevity, what that means to you, what healthy life means to you? I know you had said that exercise is now like a nonnegotiable. Is there anything else?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, the things that really matter come to the forefront, like family, friends, community, your health. These are things that are just the most important things in life. And we get distracted, and we get pulled in a million directions, but the the reality is that every day is precious, and we don't know how long we're gonna be here. And to me, it's really about just savoring every day and being in gratitude every day and, you know, actually meeting meeting the moment fully as opposed to, you know, just being distracted and jumping around and chasing something.

So it's just made me way more at peace and also much more committed to the things that really matter in my life.

Emma Krebs
Going back to the recovery piece, I know you had kind of given us some broad ideas about the things and the tools that helped you out, but I wanna get more specific. I know you said you increased, like, your protein intake, and you really learned a lot about that, sleep. Were there any other specific tools that you used coming out of that final surgery, I mean?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, yes. I mean, I I was I was I was using all the things that I knew from a nutrition perspective to improve my overall muscle gain again, which is a higher protein intake. I used creatine. I also used a lot of a lot of phytochemically rich foods that are anti inflammatory. And I also made sure that I was working on my microbiome because I'd been I was on a lot of antibiotics.

I was taking a lot of prebiotics and probiotics and trying to restore my gut health. Those are the main things that I focused on, food, exercise, sleep. And I also did a lot of physical therapy, a lot of body work, a lot of dry needling, just really to kind of get my tissues and body moving again. So I really at first, I couldn't even do anything. I could just lay on the floor and put a band around my knees and open my knees up, and that was it.

That was my whole exercise routine. You know, I could lift a five pound weight, and then now, you know, it's like I'm doing 50 pound weights or more. So I feel like it's just your body has has the capacity to kind of slowly rebuild itself after being even in a catastrophic situation like I was. And I think most people would give up. I think I I I have a very strong will and I have a very strong mind, and I was like, I know that I can climb out of this.

And the truth is that for most of the first six to seven, eight months, I was still in severe pain. I was still really weak. I was still really quite tired. And no matter how bad I felt, no matter how sick I was, no matter how exhausted, I would just make sure I got my physical therapy and I worked went to the gym and I did what I had to do despite, you know, feeling so badly. Like, it was absolutely critical.

So I think I think for people who, you know, often like, oh, I stubbed my toe. I'm not going to exercise. You know? I think, you know, there's always a way. There's always a way.

You know? And there's always something you can do. And whether it's just sitting in a chair or laying on a bed or there's ways you can move your body that actually will help you recover. So I think people often are too quick to just give up. For me, was just really this sort of desire to keep to get my body back.

And it was it was quite amazing to see, like, the transformation. It took it took like a while. I was I lost half my blood volume. I was super anemic. I it took a long time to be alive, make sure I had plenty of meat in order to actually to get my iron back up because I I was I lost half my blood.

And so I think, you know, just all these things work together to synergize. I took the right supplements. I took things to help, you know, my my my inflammation. So, yeah, it was it was a comprehensive plan, but I I was able to actually repair myself.

Emma Krebs
You've mentioned in that kind of recovery period that you navigated depression. I imagine, like, being your body having one experience and then knowing in your brain, you know, the vitality you still have, the passion and the drive for life, how did you kind of navigate through those darker moments of of of your mental health?

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's a great question. You know, I I had physiologic depression. So, you know, I wasn't psychologically depressed. And and it was really interesting to see the distinction because you can be depressed, but there's also a part of you that's not depressed. How do I explain that?

So the part of me that felt exhausted and depressed, no desire to do anything. But I also had this other part of me that knew that that was just it was like having a sprained ankle. Like, I knew I couldn't quite walk, but I knew I knew it was gonna get better. I knew that it wasn't me. Like, that it wasn't I didn't identify with the depression.

And it was physiological. So my thyroid was messed up. My hormone, my testosterone was very low. You know, all the things that my nutrient, I was very anemic. I mean, the things that were going on, inflammation in my body, all drive depression.

So it was a physiological depression, and I and I was able to really just have this other part of me that was aware and that knew and that wasn't afraid of it and knew that I would just have to keep going to walk my way through the rest of it, this this recovery to get to a place where I could feel good again. So it took it took quite a while. It took, you know, eight or nine months to really just hard work and feeling like crap all the time Yeah. To start to feel better. Yeah.

Emma Krebs
I imagine then knowing the reason kind of and, like, knowing it was situational was one helpful to, as you said, separate yourself from it. But then also, two, do you think that contributed to your drive and your motivation to be like, I gotta get through this. I gotta show up every day. I have to exercise.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it was really it was really just, you know, being steady and consistent, And, you know, it was a it was a powerful yeah. It was it was really a powerful moment of just, you know, locking into what I had to do. And I just had to do it. And it it it just I was lucky I had support, and I had, you know, people helping me, but it was it wasn't simple.

Emma Krebs
Switching gears slightly now and thinking more about like longevity and future and and our bodies changing and time passing. As you have gotten older, how has your relationship with your body changed?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I'm much more focused on taking care of it well. I think, you know, I don't think there's any any realm for, you know, kind of going off the reservation or letting myself go. I I can't go more than like two days without exercising. I make sure I eat really well.

I take my supplements. I'm focused on, you know, basics, you know, stress reduction, sleep habits, all the basic foundational things. It's sort of non negotiable. And for me, you know, it just it made me realize that at any age, you know, that we can recover, we can get healthy. And I've done this with so many patients, you know, in their really in their late sixties who are obese, diabetic, heart failure, kidneys going, liver going.

These people get better and they lose a 100 pounds, lose a 150 pounds. I mean, the body it's quite amazing when you see putting in the right inputs in how resilient we are. But most of us are just burdening our bodies and our minds with things that cause us to be sick. And that's all that's all optional for most of us.

Emma Krebs
Okay. You've called yourself a bit of a guinea pig in the past. I know you're always trying new things. I've seen your house. I've I've seen all the fun experiments you get up to.

I'm thinking back to when we were in Austin and you walked into the recording room with some device on your head. You were trying some sort of red light therapy.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Emma Krebs
I want to quickly rapid fire mention some experiences, tools. Sure. Sure. And I want you to let me know if you do actually personally use it. Cold plunges.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Absolutely. Absolutely. I use them. I think they're great for inflammation, for mitochondrial activation, for increased mental clarity, focus. I mean, so they're I think they're really can be a useful tool.

Not they're not great for everybody, but I I personally use them and like them.

Emma Krebs
What do you mean they're not great for everyone? What would be an example of someone they wouldn't be?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, if you're ill or you're you're thin or some women in their, you know, in their luteal phase or second half of their cycle, you know, it can be challenging, and and some women don't actually feel that great from it. So you have to pay attention to what your body likes and doesn't like.

Emma Krebs
And when do you do it around your training? Do do it before? Are you doing it after?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Usually, four you can do it before in the morning, or you can do it after four hours after. If you do it right after, you're gonna reduce the muscle gain that you're trying to achieve, so you won't get the hypertrophy or the increased muscle size.

Emma Krebs
So in contrast to that, what about the sauna?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Saunas are great. You can do a sauna after workout. I do saunas again almost every day if I if I can. There's a lot of science on the benefits of saunas and increases heat shock proteins that that kind of gets rid of all the damaged damaged proteins in your body. It helps your immune system, your innate immune system.

It helps your heart variability and metabolic health, cardiovascular health. It helps relieve, you know, a lot of toxins are excreted during during sweating. So there's a lot of benefits to it.

Emma Krebs
And so is it a dry tunnel you're in? How long are you usually in for?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I usually do like a couple of rounds of fifteen minutes. So fifteen minutes, cold plunge, fifteen minutes, cold plunge. So if I can do half an hour like that, you know, sometimes you can do more, but that's kind of a fair amount of time.

Emma Krebs
What about continuous glucose monitors? Do you use them?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I have used it in the past just to see as an example, just to learn about it. I'm really metabolically very healthy. I have low insulin. Have low blood sugar. I have low A1C.

I don't have any poor metabolic health markers, so I don't really need to track it. And I don't really eat much sugar storage anyway. So I think for people who are learning about their health, who have metabolic issues, who are overweight, I mean, look, ninety three percent of Americans are in poor metabolic health. I'm not in that ninety three percent, but that doesn't mean that everybody else is. And they probably would benefit from knowing what's going on, like at least a two or three week tracking of, okay.

Well, gee, I know if I eat a banana, my sugar spikes. Or jeez, if I eat, you know, apples, I'm fine. Or gosh, I'm, you know, eating pasta and I my my my sugar's fine. But if I eat bread, it's off the chart. You know?

Like, so, you know, you really wanna know what's happening in your body. Everybody's different, and you have to sort of find out what's right for you.

Emma Krebs
What about wearables? I believe there is at least one that you use. Can you share?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I wearables. I think they're important to track. You know, I think people get obsessed with them. They can kinda over overtake your life, and people get, you know, kinda all anxious about their numbers.

But as a way to see what's happening, what's impacting you, like, example, you know, I went and had sushi last night, and I had a little sake, and I don't really drink very much, maybe once a month or every couple months. And, yeah, I had a little bit of sake, but it definitely affected my sleep. And I'm like, oh, you know, that's interesting. I see that in my score from 93 to 70. And I'm like, oh, okay.

That's not good.

Emma Krebs
So is Mark's timing hungover today?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Maybe. I I I didn't see. I was like very restless. I I had a very restless night. So I don't know if I'm hungover.

I only had enough to get hungover, but I I'm very sensitive to it.

Emma Krebs
What about biological age testing?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Biological age testing is is a big complex field, and there are many, many ways to check your biological age through epigenetic clocks, through something called the need and pace, through calculating derivative calculations, through organ age. And there's just so many different clocks. They're all different. There there's a lot of science going on to determine, like, you know, what are valid, what are not.

If you use the same clock over and over again and you see changes in your health, you'll see, like, I got ten years older on function, health, biological age, which is a calculated number based on your biomarkers. So if there's inflammation, other things, it'll go up. So I got ten years older after my surgery. But then over the last year, I've been able to get ten years younger by Amazing. Reversing it.

So you can you know, as long as you're viewing the same measurement, you can you can kind of rely on the the delta. It's really about are you impacting it for the better or worse?

Emma Krebs
Another hot topic that everyone's talking about right now, especially online, is peptides. Do you use any peptides?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes. I think, you know, peptides are are really not something called new. They've been peptides that been around for a long time. Insulin is a peptide that's been used since the twenties, nineteen twenties. GLP-1s are peptides, so Ozempic, those are peptides.

And there's other peptides that are FDA approved, for example, for female sexual arousal disorder called Vyleesi, also known as PT-one hundred forty one. So there's a lot of peptides that are in the market that are FDA approved, that are prescribed by doctors, that are part of medicine. What's happening now is sort of this upsurge in interest in peptides for many different uses. The data is limited to mostly animals. There's, you know, safety data.

There's there's animal data. There's not a lot of large clinical trials. So it's really you're really kind of experimenting with yourself. But I can tell you there are that I do use them. Like for example, I use thymosin alpha one often when I travel.

I don't get sick, or if I'm getting sick, use that. BP one five seven is another peptide I'll often use for injury or repair of tissue. There and there are there are mitochondrial peptides. There's growth hormone secretagogues that help growth hormone release. There's ones that help testosterone.

There's ones that help libido. There's ones that help inflammation. There's ones that help fight infection. So there's there's so many different peptides. Thousands and thousands of peptides that the body makes, and these are things that the body uses to regulate itself.

So they're, like, they're they're not new, but there there's this interest in them in the way they're being prescribed as new. And the problem is there's a there's a, you know, compounding pharmacies that now make them that can be high quality. There are gray market sites which sell it, which is not great, which is, you know, kind of unregulated, those are getting shut down. There's a black market, which is sort of totally underground, like, you know, peptide market from China and stuff. So I think there's you wanna work with a doctor.

You wanna work with someone who understands peptides. You wanna work with a compounding pharmacy that's reputable. And and, know, you wanna do this judiciously and understand that you're experimenting because we just don't have the data on on on how these things work long term. Are they safe? You know, the animal data is limited.

We need more human data. So that that's really key. And the problem is these often are not patentable, so there's not a lot of interest and investment in them like Ozempic was because they modified it make it longer and they put in a pen and they were able to kind of tweak it. So it's like proprietary, but it's yeah. It's it's it's it's important to understand that there are are many risks to it and there's not a lot of data.

And you wanna if you wanna use them, be be aware of this and also use them with a trained practitioner who can help guide you.

Emma Krebs
I know you just did a really great valuable episode with Doctor. Tina Moore where you also went into this as well too, speaking specifically about, like, GLP ones, which we can also link in the show notes as well too. The next one we have is IV therapy. Is that something you personally use?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes. I mean, I think, you know, IV therapy was a really key thing for me in order to actually recover from my chronic fatigue. I use a lot of glutathione, vitamin c, b vitamin cocktails. I use a lot of things to help me detoxify. So IV therapy was was quite helpful for me.

I think there's lots of IVs that people can do. There's different therapies that you can do. There's minerals, there's vitamins, there's amino acids, there's phytochemicals, there's phospholipids, there's glutathione, there's chelators. It's a whole field of intravenous medical therapy. It's been around for quite a while.

It's not in traditional medicine, but I found it very helpful in a subset of patients who really do much better when they get IV therapy as part of their overall plan, but it's not just a standalone treatment.

Emma Krebs
Is there something people should be mindful of, like, if they are going to explore those kinds of therapies?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Again, you want to you know, you want to make sure you're working with a reputable doctor, that they check your blood work. In other words, you if get a high dose vitamin CIV, you want to make sure you check something called G6PD, which if you have its genetic variation, it can make IV vitamin C quite harmful. So you need to know what you're doing. You need to have a practitioner who's trained in this.

You need to do it in a reputable clinic or center where they're they follow sterile technique, where they source materials from the right pharmati pharmacies. So it is it's it's important to do it right. Next Health is actually a great company that we're affiliated with through my practice. I don't have any direct involvement, but they're they're they're where we work with the Ultra Wellness Center and our patients to help, you know, get therapies that that we don't offer there. And because they're in many, many cities.

We're just in Massachusetts. And so we we work collaborative with them. And they do a lot of IV therapy, and and they have a really great a great model.

Emma Krebs
The next one is red light therapy. And I do know you use this because I remember after your bike accident, we would meet with you, and it was fascinating to see how quickly you'd recovered. And I remember you mentioning at that time that was a huge marker in it. So can you explain your experience with red light therapy?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, light therapy reduces inflammation, activates mitochondria, increases ATP production, and tissue repair and healing. And so I I used it when I was in an accident and had a lot of bumps and bruises and scrapes, and it really accelerated wound healing tremendously. So I think for many, many purposes it can be helpful, but it's a great regime technique. And photobiomodulation is a well established medical procedure now, and there's a lot of literature about the benefits of it.

Emma Krebs
So do you just have the panels? How often are you using it? How long do

Dr. Mark Hyman
you Yeah. Use it I a big panel that goes over most of my body, and it usually goes for twenty minutes or so. You don't even have to do it that long. That could be very helpful.

Emma Krebs
The next one is stem cells.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Mean, cells are something that are, again, part of medicine that are undergoing a lot of research. They're being used in clinical practice in America. They're also being used in other countries in a different way because they can expand the cells, which we can't quite do, although some laws are changing around that now. So I think they're basically a part of what we call regenerative medicine, which is using things that are the body's own repair systems to optimize your health.

So for example, it will help to activate your own body's healing system and induce inflammation and increase tissue repair and kind of an improvement overall health. So I think for select patients it's expensive, but it can be helpful. I've had it in joints, I've had it in intravenously, and I think I am willing to experiment myself. Don't necessarily recommend it to all my patients. But I've noticed a difference, and it does help improve my overall well-being and health.

Emma Krebs
The last one we have is exosomes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Exosomes are part of stem cells. They're the active little packets of information and repair factors that are basically produced in stem cells, the exosomes then are excreted by the stem cells and then gets distributed throughout the body. So you can actually just take the exosomes directly. The benefit of that is you're not getting any of DNA of the stem cells. You're not potentially creating an inflammatory reaction.

You're using your own stem cells. You you often will they're older or if using umbilical stem cells, so some of this is a risk of an immune reaction. So there's always, you know, some downsides, but the exosomes are quite safe and are actually, you know, very helpful for inflammation. I remember when I had COVID and I had severe brain fog and I couldn't focus, I couldn't think, and I was just struggling for weeks after. And I did some intravenous exosomes and it went away immediately.

It was like quite amazing.

Emma Krebs
I wanna switch gears now, and I want to talk more about, like, the wellness industry. So you mentioned you've been in the industry for almost forty years now. Is that what you said at the start?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Well, I've been a doctor for forty years. I've been doing this for thirty years, functional medicine. Yeah.

Emma Krebs
So I'm sure you've seen many things over the decades, and you've seen it go from, like, functional medicine not being as popular and it being more of a niche movement to becoming now a massive industry. I wanna hear your thoughts on where it's going, what worries you, etcetera. So to start out, what's something that you're seeing in mainstream media, culture on social media that's making you cringe?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, that's a great question. I mean, just to be transparent before I answer that is, you know, I I am in the industry. I have founded Function Health that is helping people access their own biology and bringing it online. And and now there's something I believe is important that people get empowered with their own data. I, you have this podcast.

I have sponsors. I, you know, I I'm definitely part of it. So if I if I I just wanna be transparent about that. As far as the the things that makes me cringe, I think you know, what I think I I kind of see is this set of over indexing on the things that are secondary to health, not primary. And so the basic things of good nutrition and exercise and sleep and stress reduction and management, taking your basic supplements is is minimized while things like, you know, peptides or exosomes or stem cells or red light therapy or whatever is is overemphasized.

And I think that's a problem. So that that kind of makes me a little concerned where people are looking for a quick fix like Ozempic. Just take a shot, but don't bother learning about nutrition. Don't bother working out and build building and maintaining your muscle. So I think I think it's important for people to really understand that if they don't deal with the foundational things, all these other secondary enhancements around health or biohacking, it doesn't make any sense and it's kind of a waste of money.

You know? Going to McDonald's every day and doing red light therapy will not come out.

Emma Krebs
One of the questions we were gonna ask you is, is there such thing as people kind of going too much the other way now of over testing, over supplementing, over restricting their diets, and kind of maybe losing sight of, I guess, those those main principles, I guess. It's it's kind of you've answered that question for me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I think it's true. I mean, I think, look, the diagnostics are different. I think people need to know what's happening under the hood, and I think we're finding thing that people have not known about their health and are saving lives. It's real. And I and I've been doing extensive diagnostic testing on tens of thousands of people for decades, and there's so much that is being missed that is directly impacting people's quality of life, their health, and their risk of future disease.

There are things that are modifiable, that are fixable, that are treatable, and they're often totally ignored by traditional medicine. So I co founded Function Health in order to empower people with their own data to make it very affordable. It's a dollar a day. You get a really deep dive on your health. Of the A competitors say they're doing like 100 plus biomarkers or not.

They're doing derivative biomarkers, so they're calculating a triglyceride ratio and counting that as a biomarker. We're doing literally a 160 different blood tests for three sixty five dollars and that's for a year membership. And then of course, you're going to add on things, you can do imaging. But it empowers people with their data. And so I think that, you know, for me, I want I recognize that traditional medicine is not going to solve the people's problems.

That I believe function health with the help of AI and with all of a person's data, including their history, their family history, their EMR, their lab testing, their wearables, imaging, you put all that together, their genomics, stool testing, it creates a picture of health that's never been possible before. It still is important for people to focus on the foundational principles of diet, exercise, sleep, stress management, and optimizing their nutrient status and balancing their hormones. But, you know, there's so much more that can happen when you really know what's what's going on with your body. And people are walking around with with all sorts of stuff that they don't need to, that if they knew what was going on under the hood, they could they could really address and fix.

Emma Krebs
I'm fully with you that it's been so great to see the awareness of the wellness industry grow, and we are very involved in it. We believe in it. We're very passionate about it. But I do know there's also the rise with that of many different trends or maybe individuals who are not doctors that are claiming they're experts on things. So when something new emerges, when are you personally willing to experiment with it, be the guinea pig of it?

So how do you decide when there's enough evidence to experiment on something that's new and maybe cutting edge? And when does it kind of cross the line into maybe just like a trend or hype?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, it's I mean, there's different bars that I set for myself or my patients. So I may be willing to try things that are a little on the edge because I I am willing to be a guinea pig. I think for me, it's like, you know, what is the evidence? What is the basic biological mechanism and plausibility?

Does this make sense? Is there some data on it? Is it safety data? Is it animal data? Is there some directionality to it?

Now what are the risks of it? You know, if it's something that's higher risk, then it's no different. For example, I will happily take vitamin D and I know there's no really downside risk unless I overdose. I know it has a lot of benefit. I know there's evidence to it.

Same thing with creatine. I know there's no there's really no significant downside if you're healthy and can exercise with that, and it'll help your brain, it'll help your muscles. So there's things that I use that I feel are pretty solid. And then there's things that are emerging that, you know, we just don't know about. And for example, peptides are one of those things.

So will I experiment with those things? Yes. But again, I'm very aware that, you know, what's the risk reward? If something has a high risk, then I'm probably not going to do it. For example, metformin has been talked about as a drug to help with longevity.

Now I really look carefully at the research. And while it does do a really important thing, which is help with insulin resistance and blood sugar control, And it works on a particular enzyme called AMPK to activate it, which is good in longevity. It also inhibits something called mitochondrial complex one, which makes it hard to build muscle. So if you're taking metformin and you do strength training versus taking a placebo and do strength training after twelve weeks, the metformin group won't have built muscle. And the other group will.

And so to me, you know, there's a risk there. Now, I don't want to impact my ability to maintain or gain muscle as I age. So for me, I would never take metformin. Even though a lot people are doing it for longevity, I don't think it's a good idea given that that particular mechanism and mitochondria is so important. So that's kind of how I look at things.

I try to understand what is going on, what are the risks, how do I navigate this, and what makes sense. For example, getting an IV of vitamins is very low risk other than just the injection site or getting infection or bleeding, which can happen, but it's very rare. So I think I think I I do I do a hierarchy of of of risk. And if something is out of potential benefit and risk is low, cost is okay, you know, I'll do it. If something's gonna cost me a $100 and it's safe, I might not do it.

You know, there's not a lot of evidence. But, you know, if it cost me, you know, a $100, I might do it.

Emma Krebs
You mentioned their metformin, and overhyped is not the correct medical professional word, but you kind of mentioned essentially it was overhyped at the moment, or you saw, I guess, reasons to not do it. Is there something to counter that that you think is underrated right now that people are not pursuing enough or science isn't leaning into enough that you think they should.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is is there a treatment or or modality you think I would be would be helpful for people?

Emma Krebs
Yeah. That's kind of overlooked and and and not as popular at the moment.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, I think I think, you know, helping people really understand how to reset their gut is important. And I think it's not well understood in traditional medicine. People don't really know how to do it. Functional medicine has a whole methodology called the five R program that's really about resetting the gut and the microbiome.

So it's really important to really help people get the right kind of gut health in order to help their overall health. So that's kind of one thing I think is is pretty important that's often ignored. I think there are some other treatments out there that I I think are quite interesting that need a lot more research. One is called phospholipid exchange. And in in, you know, all of our toxins end up in our cells.

Our mitochondria are very stressed by our lives, and it's very hard to repair, rebuild our cells and tissues. It's more like a cellular repair methodology that's been developed called the PK protocol. And I've used it with a number of patients. I've used it myself. It's quite profound, I think, in terms of its ability to detoxify all the environmental chemicals we're exposed to, to rebuild our cell membranes, to improve our mitochondrial function, to reduce oxidative stress, inflammation.

And I and I found it very clinically useful. It's not something that is patentable. There's no big pharma company behind it. Nobody's putting a lot of money into researching it. But I used it with patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and health issues, chronic fatigue.

And it really can be a powerful modality. So I think that's something that I think is out there that doesn't have enough data or research that really should be focused on.

Emma Krebs
So we've kind of gone into we've been talking a lot to Doctor. Mark Hyman. And I wanna switch gears now, and I wanna learn more about Mark. Who is Mark when he's not being Doctor. Mark Hyman?

So I wanna know what are you up to when you are not busy working? What are you doing in your spare time?

Dr. Mark Hyman
What am I doing? I'm living. I'm trying to enjoy life. I exercise. I like to ride my bike.

I like to yoga. I like to be with my friends. I like to cook. I like to read. I like to dance.

I like to travel. I like to ski. I do a lot of things. I like to catch on with my family. My new grandson, I just, you know, saw.

He's very Congrats. Yes. I never never really lack for things to do or to enjoy. I think community is is very, very important to me. So connecting with people, building relationships, having the time to really invest in in the people you love is really important.

And I think that's something we we neglect in our society. We don't spend time and prioritize that. In Europe, they it's much more about like social connection and time together and enjoying life. And we're all just so driven and focused and on everything and on our devices. And I think for me, you know, I just had an amazing trip to Greenland with, you know, a whole bunch of friends and we got to dance and play and have fun and see part of the world that we no one had seen.

And and, you know, nobody had their devices on all the time. There was no service. We're out there in the middle of nowhere. And I and I felt like so happy, you know, just to be. It was just a time to be.

Emma Krebs
That's beautiful. So you mentioned there that you're with some of your closest friends. We wanna know what is something that your closest friends might tease you about?

Dr. Mark Hyman
We had a very we had a very fun thing on the boat where where we were gonna do the ten days. You talked to the whole boat, about a 150 people. And then after the first day, there was mutiny on the boat and and people were freaking out that they couldn't have their wine or their bread or their whatever they wanted. And so there was a whole buffet line, and there was the healthy, you know, food, and there was like the not doctor Hyman approved food. And so I had these signs in front of all the food that said, not doctor Hyman approved.

So, basically, people were making fun of me at all the thing about it's doctor Hyman approved, and and it was pretty funny.

Emma Krebs
Once they found out what the ten day detox actually was, they they got a little cold feet, I guess.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, yeah. Well, we Probably wasn't marketed the best way to them.

Emma Krebs
We wanna know what's something that you would say you're terrible at.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Singing. I can't play an instrument. I I like to sing, but it doesn't sound great. And I and I and I, you know, I don't have an I don't play an instrument. I could probably play a few chords on the guitar, but I would wish really I was I was able to do that.

It makes me so happy to hear the musicians.

Emma Krebs
Yeah. Music is is an amazing thing. What is something that people assume about you that's actually completely wrong?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I that's a great question. I actually don't know the answer to that one because I don't don't pay too much attention. I think people project onto me a lot of things, and I think people, you know, they idolize some idea version of me, and they don't realize I'm just a regular human. And, you know, I think they don't realize that I also eat ice cream and cookies.

Emma Krebs
I still like that answer, though. It's a good one. What's something you've become less serious about as you've gotten older?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Less serious? You mean less less focused on or less

Emma Krebs
You could take it either way, but let's say less focused on.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I was quite obsessed with with bringing functional medicine to the world. And I'm not any less obsessed about it, but I did it in a way that neglected my own well-being and drove myself really hard for a long time. And so I'm in a place now where it's much more important for me to just to just be at a pace that is sustainable and that that I can focus and do good work, but not have it consume my whole life. So in some ways, I'm less serious about, you know, just working fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day. Mhmm.

You know, settle for eight.

Emma Krebs
I imagine too when you're passionate about something, when it's had an impact on you personally, I remember talking to you. You you had said because we had I kind of asked you, like, you could have maintained being a doctor and practicing functional medicine, but at some point in your career, you decided to become more public. You decided to write a book. You decided to start sharing it more broadly, and I kind of asked what that turning point was. And correct me if I'm wrong, but you had kind of mentioned you you were just so it had had such an impact on your life.

You almost wanted to, like, scream it from the rooftops. Am I correct?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, you know, when I got sick and I was so ill, and then I discovered a model of medicine, a way of thinking that provided a different map for the body and helped me recover and helped my patients recover, I was simultaneously both excited and angry. And I was angry that I didn't learn this in medical school. I was angry that the system was so resistant to this way of thinking. And I know it's true.

You know? Yes. We need studies. Yes. We need more research.

Yes. We need, you know, better data. But I can tell you from treating thousands, literally tens of thousands of patients with this approach that it works. It doesn't work all the time for everybody completely. And yes, there's things that are hard to manage and deal with.

But for most of the things people suffer from today in the modern world, we have a much better roadmap with functional medicine and a much better way to help people recover from things that are often, quote, incurable. And we're doing a whole podcast series called The Incurables where people had things that were, you know, impossible to recover from like MS, and they get better. So these are the things that are really important for people to understand that there's actually a methodology. And so when I first sort of realized this, I was like, I I I have to tell the world. Like, I can't just do this and sit in my office.

I have to write a book. I have to tell the story, and then I have to write another one and another one. And the more I learned, the more I learned. And then, I was learning about metabolism, so I wrote Ultra Metabolism, my second book. And then I was seeing all these people with mental health issues and neurodegenerative issues get better from autism to Alzheimer's to ADD to depression to OCD to bipolar.

I was like, what the hell is going on here? And I wrote a book called The Ultramind Solution, which was really important and part of our brain shaping academy is about how do we take all that and bring that back into our discourse around how to help people with any kind of psychiatric or neurodegenerative issue. Because we now have the knowledge of how to do this, and I wrote this book just out of seeing the phenomena. You know, like Albert Santorgi, who's the guy who discovered vitamin C, said discovery consists in seeing what everybody else has seen and thinking what no one else has thought. So, you know, when I see a patient with MS, I'm not thinking this person has MS.

I'm thinking this person could have Lyme disease, could have mercury poisoning, could have gut issues, could have infections, could have a lot of things that are causing it. And my job is to really not just take it at face value. So that's really the thing that's driving me is I think we have to move forward and get people the solutions to these problems that they really have mostly been, you know, badly treated by traditional medicine. Not not that they're not trying to do a good job. They are.

They're using the best tools they have, but it's the wrong it's the wrong tool. Like, can't, you know, you can't open a can opener with this I mean, I can't open a can with a spoon. You know? Like, I mean, maybe you can. I don't know.

But tough. I have to like jam it in. But I think we just we just don't have the right tools. And so functional medicine is a whole different set of constructs, of lenses, of a map for the human body that's really focused on the laws of biology. The tools are agnostic.

It can be anything, but it can be drugs, can be surgery, it can be a vitamin, it can be probiotic, whatever Food is medicine. But it's really understanding how to apply those from a root cause perspective.

Emma Krebs
So we just talked about something that you have become less serious or focused on. I want to counter that with what's something you've become more serious or focused on as you've gotten older.

Dr. Mark Hyman
For my personal health or for my work in the world?

Emma Krebs
Whatever comes to mind first.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Well, the first thing that came to mind, I mean, other than doubling down on strength training, which I'd never did my whole life until I was 59, is is for me no. I'm 66, and I've spent my life trying to bring functional medicine into the world. I think it's happened in an incremental way, but it's not really still accessible to people. And I think that the thing I'm most excited about is how function health can really bring democratized health care at scale based on root cause medicine to millions, if not billions of people, and using AI to help navigate massive datasets into a coherent map of your body and what's happening now and what yours for in the future and how to work with all that in a way that it it really will transform medicine and health care in a way we've never seen before. So to me, this is as big a discovery as the Internet, as discovering bacteria, or just penicillin.

I mean, this is a huge, huge paradigm shift in medicine. It's like as big as the Earth is not flat a paradigm shift. So to me, it's never going to happen from the inside the institutions that hold onto it. It has to happen from the outside. And that's really what function health is.

It's like a way for people to access health care and health and their own health in a way that's never been possible before in human history. So that's what I'm most excited about.

Emma Krebs
So I wanna kind of wrap up with a couple final questions here. After more than thirty years, nearly forty years of practicing medicine, what do you understand about health today that you didn't understand when you first became a doctor?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, it's quite simple. I think when I first became a doctor, I sort of learned the body as a bunch of different discrete organs and specialties. And now I see the body as a network, as an interconnected web of functions that are in this beautiful dance and that get imbalanced when there's different insults. And that's really how we need to think about health. So that for me, that's that's the biggest shift.

Emma Krebs
Piggybacking off of that, you correct me if I'm wrong on this, but you began as a family physician in rural Idaho. That was your beginning, right, once you graduated? Okay. Yep. So you were you around 30, 32 at that point?

Dr. Mark Hyman
30. Most 30. I was 30.

Emma Krebs
30. Okay. If 30 year old Mark Hyman were sitting across from you right now

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Emma Krebs
What would surprise him the most about what you believe today?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Around medicine?

Emma Krebs
It could be a personal realization or or

Dr. Mark Hyman
I mean, for me, the biggest thing I would say that would surprise the 30 year old would be that that I would have been able to be part of something that is transforming all of health care medicine in a way that I never dreamed possible. I think just it would have astounded me to think that I could be part of a movement and even a company like Function Health that that can really transform medicine and health care at in a way that that that is as big as anything we've ever had in medicine.

Emma Krebs
You've recently become a grandfather, which is a big chapter in an individual's life. Has that changed what you want longevity for or what you think about your legacy should be?

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yes. I mean, I think it's important, you know, to think about how do how do I keep myself healthy so I can show up and be there for my grandson? And how how can I be a model for how to live and how to be in the world and how to love and how to, you know, just be a good human? And so for me, keeping myself in good shape and keeping my body working and and taking care of myself is this huge priority because, you know, now at this point in my life, get to, you know, enjoy all the blessings that that come after living a full good life. And I have tremendous abundance and friends and community and family, and I and I wanna be able to show up for it.

So, you know, for me, you know, like, it kinda reminded me last night, like, I had the sake. I liked it. It was okay. But, like, I don't really need to do that anymore. Like, I just it's probably not worth it in terms of the cost.

You know? So I think I think it's just it's just trying to just think about what are those things that really matter, and how do I wanna spend my time, and what's precious.

Emma Krebs
Okay. Have two more. First one is, of everything you've accomplished so far, what are you most proud of?

Dr. Mark Hyman
I am most proud of the persistence that I've had to stay true to what I believe and what I know is true, which is that that we got the wrong map for the body when I was in middle school, and there's a different map of the different understanding of human biology that that we have these laws of biology that were really not taught to us. And and to me, that's the thing I'm most proud of, that this whole field has advanced, that has moved forward, that now people know functional medicine. There are people all over the world doing functional medicine, and it was sort of a nonexistent thing when I was thirty years ago. And that, you know, also that, you know, to take function from nothing and an idea a few years ago to, you know, a substantial company that's changing people's lives.

Emma Krebs
Amazing. Our final question is, what are you still most curious about?

Dr. Mark Hyman
What am I still most curious about? I mean, I'm just I'm just fascinated by human biology. I'm just fascinated by by the mystery of how we're built and how we're made and how we work and how things relate and connect to one another. And I just I'm just sort of flabbergasted by the magic that's really the human body. And I just I still kinda wanna learn all the time.

How do things work? Why is this happening? What about this biology? And just kinda going down the rabbit hole of it's kinda nerdy rabbit hole of, like, you know, functional medicine in biology.

Emma Krebs
Well, after grilling you for over an hour here, I just wanna say thank you for your time, for your honesty, your openness, and for your willingness to answer all my questions, Mark. That's all I have for you today.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love that last video, you're gonna love the next one. Check it out here.