We Can Detect Cancer Years Earlier—So Why Aren’t We? - Transcript

Dr. Mark Hyman
How should we really think about imaging today?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
These miraculous devices we've built are important to understand because they're gonna change our lives. Maybe we don't need to wait for a doctor to have already found a problem.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I kinda wanna talk about this whole idea of false positives, which is something that people will push back on.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
I think everybody should have a baseline.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You talked about this moment that we're in, which is comparable to the image of the telescope. Not just an incremental change, but more of a quantum change.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Wait a second. If we can see this stuff, maybe we don't need to wait for a doctor to have already found a problem. And I think that's this cusp that we're on where medical imaging is really changing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
My guest today began his career at Harvard and MIT, spent years as chief of innovation in radiology at NYU, and has developed imaging technologies used to guide the care of billions of people worldwide. He's now chief medical scientist at Function Health. This is doctor Daniel k Sodixon. A few weeks ago, I had a fall while riding my bike and I ended up with some pretty good road rash on my face. It reminded me how powerful some of our body's natural healing tools can be when we support them with the right things.

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Thank you

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
so much, Mark. It's great to be here.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I'm just, in awe of you. As I was preparing for this podcast, I was like, wow. This dude's, he's got quite a pedigree, and he is rethinking how we think and apply imaging. And we're gonna talk about that today, which is this sort of new craze of full body MRIs. What's the deal with it?

Should we be doing it? What are the benefits? What are the risks? What are we looking for? We're gonna cover all of it, and we're gonna talk about how to be proactive about your health.

And we're gonna talk about some of the changes in AI and medicine and some of the things that are happening on the horizon that are pretty sci fi and wild out there, like maybe MRIs everywhere in your chair, in your bed, whatever. I don't quite get it, but you went to Yale undergraduate, studied physics. You got your humanities bachelor's in in phys humanities as well from Yale. Then you got your Harvard Medical School degree, MIT degree in physics, PhD in physics. I'm like, you've kinda been around.

You were the head of MRI imaging at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center at Harvard. And now we're working together, which is so amazing. So, for those of you listening, Dan and I are part of a company called Functional Health. You might have heard me talk about it on the podcast. Dan is the chief science officer.

I'm the chief medical officer. And together, we're co directors of what's called the medical intelligence lab. And we're gonna talk about what that is, what it means, and why you need to care about it, and how it applies to you and your body and your health and your long term outlook for well-being, and how you can live a 100 healthy years with proactive health care. And that's what we're about. It's really empowering you with the data, the information, the knowledge to actually live a long healthy life.

And you feel good now. I always say, wanna feel a 100%, live a 100 healthy years. So that's the goal. I wanna sort of zoom out. You just wrote a book.

It just came out in October. The future of seeing. And it's really about the lenses we look at the world through, from the macrocosmic world of stars to the microscopic world of cells and microbes to all the imaging that we now have access to. We're just extending our capacity and our vision. And I'm sort of curious about what inspired you to write this book.

What are you hoping people understand from it? And and how how is sort of our our ability to see changed over human human evolutionary biology?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Great question, Mark. And first of all, let me just say the awe is mutual. But no, the reason I wrote the book was that there's this sort of weird paradox in imaging now. We lead more imaged lives than we ever have. Right?

I mean, you can't walk down a street without being imaged by a whole series of cameras.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right. Facial recognition.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
From in utero on, and yet the mechanisms of imaging are more hidden than ever. How many people actually understand how an MRI machine works, or a radio telescope works? So imaging kind of has an image problem, and what I wanted to do was give imaging back to people, to connect it to the biological vision that we evolved, to remind people that we're actually all creatures of imaging, and these miraculous devices we've built are important to understand because they're gonna change our lives.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We we really only understand the world through our senses, Right?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Mhmm.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the ability to extend our senses to look under the skin is pretty remarkable. I mean, vivisection, which is the human dissection of the body, was done in some, you know, ancient cultures, but often was not because the body was considered sacred. Like, in Chinese medicine, they never did that. And so they they would kinda have to intuit how things worked without actually knowing anything about what's happening on the inside. And now, you know, we had the the sort of crude imaging with X rays back at the turn of the last century, you know, and people used to go get shoes and they get X rays to kinda look at their feet, which was a bad idea.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Bad idea.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or people had, like, radiation X rays for their acne on their face. Bad idea. Caused a lot of cancer. So we've kind of had this sort of interesting history. And and and you you know, I'm old and older than you, but I you know, MRIs were kind of a new thing when I was in medical training.

It was in the early eighties, and it was just kind of coming on the horizon, our ability to kind of look deeper into things. We first had X rays, and then we had CT scanners. We have ultrasounds. We have MRI machines. There's other kinds of imaging out there as well.

How we how should we really think about imaging today? Because we see, you know, a lot of kind of hype out there. Kim Kardashian goes to get a scan, and everybody's like, oh, wow. You know, what is this about? I want a full body MRI.

How should we be thinking about this?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
So I think, first of all, you're absolutely correct that extending our senses is a really fundamental thesis of imaging. And I would argue that every time we extend our vision, we invariably expand our minds.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
We saw that from the Copernican revolution. Yeah. Basically, it was the results of imaging devices that forced us to reckon with the fact that we're living alone on this little rock in this vast universe. X rays completely took the world by storm, like you said, as did tomography later on. And so I

Dr. Mark Hyman
Tomography is what?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And and forgive me. Yes. Tomography

Dr. Mark Hyman
because none of us speak physics. Exactly.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
It's CAT scans, MRI machines, PET scans

Dr. Mark Hyman
Complicated assembly of images from different sources. Right?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And really, what it means, it comes from a weird Greek root, which stands for the writing of slices. And really, that's what all of these modern imaging devices are doing. They're slicing through the body every which way without making a single cut. Mhmm. I think when you've you know, you ask how to think about modern imaging, that's really what modern imaging is doing.

It's capable of basically dissecting the body without ever cutting into it, and it's become this integral tool in medicine that people use to diagnose disease, to guide surgery, all of that. But as you said, its use is starting to change, and people are realizing, wait a second, if we can see this stuff, maybe we can see it early. Maybe we don't need to wait for a doctor to have already found a problem, and I think that's this cusp that we're on where medical imaging is really changing.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Most doctors will only diagnose you when you have a symptom. That's right. Oh, I have stomach pain. Maybe we should get an MRI of your stomach, or I've got a head pain, or I'm losing vision, or I can't walk.

Maybe we should get an MRI of your brain. And what you're suggesting is that that might not be the right way to think about things. That's a proactive, preventive way to think about imaging. And, you know, we talk a lot in, you know, in in this space around what we call p four medicine, which is Leroy Hood's vision, who's a systems biologist of how we need to think about health, which is preventive. It's predictive, meaning you can kind of predict where you're going.

It's personalized, so it'd be different. And it's participatory, meaning we all have to kind of participate in our health, not just passive activity. What's what's happening now is is that the speed of imaging, the application of AI to imaging, the innovations in imaging, the deflationary cost of imaging are all starting to get hit at the same time. And you talked about this this sort of moment that we're in, which is comparable to the image of the telescope in terms of our understanding of, like, the technological change. It's not just an incremental change, more of a quantum change.

Can you kind of unpack that? Because I think most of us just think, oh, we go to the doctor, get imaging, or we got a symptom. But you're talk and even me, I'm the doctor, and I am still curious about it because I don't understand what what you're thinking about how this change is so revolutionary.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Let me attack that basically through a bit of a personal story, because I started out in kind of a traditional way of thinking about imaging. This is the tool you use to open up the body for inspection by doctors once we wanna find something wrong. And what happened is, over time, as I worked more and more on optimizing, for example, these MRI machines, making them faster, making them better, I realized that a lot of the time they were being used to chase after symptoms. That we were telling people remarkable, important information, but we were telling them too late. Like, oh gee, I'm sorry.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Sorry you're

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
getting that advanced invasive cancer. Is it any surprise that radiology departments don't get as many philanthropic donations as say surgery departments? We're the people who tell you you're sick. Right. And then we hand over to someone else to fix it.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And it started dawning on me that maybe there's a way we can use these tools, our kind of best tools for visualization, first, rather than last. But that involves overcoming a few obstacles. First of all, they're big and expensive. Mhmm. Right?

So a lot of people say, oh, we can't do imaging, you know, early because it's gonna rack

Dr. Mark Hyman
up medical Then

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
also, we have this weird problem that we see too much. If you put somebody in an MRI machine, you're gonna find a little ditzel here or there. There's always gonna be something you find which raises a question. And so this raises the whole big question of false positives.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Meaning that you see something on there that looks like something, but it's really nothing.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Exactly. Could

Dr. Mark Hyman
this be too worried about it, and then you chase it down,

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
it and creates

Dr. Mark Hyman
worry, and costs, and interventions, and

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
All of those things. And those are the entirely understandable reasons people haven't used imaging proactively in the past, for fear of running up those costs, and creating that anxiety, and giving people sort of these unnecessary tests. But as a physicist and a designer of machines, I started wondering, well, can we drive those false positive rates down? They're not God given, right? They're not somehow attached to the devices.

They have to do with the way we use the devices. And so what occurred to me after some time is, well, the problem is that we're not actually putting these images in context. We're used to getting these images and then looking at them that day, seeing what we see and saying, ah, you know, we're the wise philosophers, you know, peering at the images and saying, well, this is your future. Yeah. But if you wanna predict the future, you should know the past.

So what if we had previous images? What if we had a whole series of images Then over we could say, you know what, I see this thing here, but I know it's normal for you. And in fact, radiologists do this all the time. If they see something and it hasn't really changed from last time, they might say, you know what, I'm not too worried, come back in six months, come back in a year.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We call that an incidentaloma.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
That's right. That's right. But we can actually understand incidentalomas if we've seen them before. And so this notion of using imaging over time, and interpreting it in context, became a kind of a revelation for me.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. It's it's kind of a it's kind of a big leap, right, which is it's so outside of our traditional thinking in medicine, which is to minimize diagnostic test, to rely on history, and to kind of wait until people are symptomatic, or as you said, in advanced stages of disease before we actually do something, which is kind of too late. It's kind of getting too late to the party, and then you're you often can't really help people, or they have to go through a lot more ordeal and rigor in terms of treatment and expense and pain and suffering. What you're suggesting is that there's a way to use these technologies in a different way.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
That's right. Right? That's absolutely right.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And to use them in a way that measures things over time in a longitudinal way and allows you to see the change over time, and then the imaging becomes faster, smarter, better because it keeps tracking your biology over time, just like a lab test.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We do we do this with lab tests. We check your blood sugar, and, you know, maybe it's rising. We'll then intervene early, hopefully. Or you'll see your PSA, which is a prostate cancer test that, you know, made you slightly creeping up. And we watch it, and we can see over time how the change happens.

We do this. But in imaging, that's not something that really is done. And you're suggesting that's something we should do.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Absolutely. And in fact, it's interesting you say that it's not done because traditionally, it hasn't been. But quietly there's been this paradigm of imaging surveillance, say for tumors, that has been building up in medical circles, and hasn't necessarily been getting a lot of press. But, you know, if I go in and I have a moderate risk for prostate cancer, I may get an MRI every year, and be followed, that MRI will be interpreted in context, and when there's a sudden change in the findings, then my doctor might say, oh, you know what, we better go to biopsy, we better check it out. So people have actually realized this paradigm, but because imaging, people tend to think of as a snapshot, somehow that perspective hasn't pervaded, and people still say, well you don't want to do it in people of low risk, know, only do it in people with well established high risk, and my argument is, but most people out there in the world don't have a known risk.

Shouldn't we be casting a protective net around them too? Yeah. If we can figure out how to make sure we're not, you know, raising a false flag all the time.

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And I think we're we're touching on it now. I think it's important because my personal belief is that with the radically deflationary costs, with the potentially ubiquitous nature of these imaging technologies, which we'll talk about soon, with our ability to collect large personal health data sets from your lab testing to your medical history to gathering your EMR to wearables to all the omics, your genome, your podium, your microbiome, your metabolome, to gathering imaging data, able to aggregate that in a platform, a technology platform that allows you to track your biology over time and putting your biology online is is a revolution that we've never seen in medicine before. You and I, you know, as doctors, you know, we see patients, we get and I had a patient like this yesterday who's got a chart from here and a chart from there and a lab from here and a lab from there and imaging test from there and imaging test from there and a scope from here and a scope from there. And I'm literally, you know, having to aggregate all this. I'm having to gather all this data.

It takes, you know, hours of my time or my Yeah. Team's time to get it ready for me. It's not very user friendly for the doctor or for the consumer or patient. And what we're we're seeing now is with function health, which is I think why you've kind of left your big job at NYU. You had a big big fancy job there and joined Function Health as a chief science officer because you see the future.

I mean, you wrote a book called The Future of Seeing, and you see the future in a different way, which is where medicine is going, which is a proactive, longitudinal, large personal health data set tracked over time that can can understand that biology just doesn't change overnight. It's a continuum of dysfunction. It's slow and progressive over many, many decades sometimes that we now can see. For example, we can tell on imaging and maybe you can talk about this. Changes that can predict Alzheimer's decades decades before you forget your keys or you have a symptom.

Mhmm. Should we be doing that? And people are high risk. You know? There's there's ways of actually seeing changes that that are really important on on all these datasets, whether it's your blood sugar, your blood pressure, or your cholesterol, which we're kind of familiar with, or whether it's, you know, other things like, you know, if you have a a low vitamin D, maybe you're not symptomatic.

And and by tracking stuff over time, we can start to really understand the human body in a way we've never done before. I'm just setting this conversation up because I wanna dive into this this false positive conversation. I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other night. She's like, I don't wanna know. I've got Alzheimer's in my family, I don't wanna know if I have the gene for Alzheimer's.

I'm like I explained to her, look. You might have a a risk gene. So APOE four, which is a risk gene for Alzheimer's, is common. And, you know, if you have this gene or two copies of this gene from both of your parents, you're in a much higher risk of getting Alzheimer's. It doesn't mean you're going to get it.

It means you're at higher risk. And then you go, oh, okay. I know I can be propped about every other single thing that we know may influence the risk of getting Alzheimer's, from my diet to my exercise routine to my sleep management practices to my stress regulation, to the right nutrient levels that I need to make sure I maintain, the right hormone levels I need to maintain if I'm a woman or a man. Like, there's so much you can do. But she was like terrified to know.

I'm like, no. No. This is not a predestiny. This is a predisposition. And so in in that way, I think we can kind of remove some of the fear by realizing this with our scientific knowledge now, there's such a moment for empowerment around knowing your own data.

You know, I'd love given that sort of background, then and I want to sort of dive into the medical intelligence framework because I think the longitudinal scanning is sort of the answer to the false positives, and maybe there's more. But it's also the answer to understanding your health in a better way, and it's understanding how to apply the advances in AI and medicine and science to you personally through what we call medical intelligence, in our medical intelligence lab at Function Health. So to take us through, you know, a a skeptic's view, I'm I'm like Doctor. Harvard here. And I'm like, oh, you know, this is expensive.

It's it's too much to to do. You're gonna get all these red herrings. You're gonna chase down all these things. You're gonna cause unnecessary suffering and worry and anxiety. Why should everybody get an MRI every year?

Like a full body. I do it. You do it. We do it. For ourselves, you know, we want it for our families.

I just ordered on one of my staff members tonight because I think he needs it. But like, why why is this so important, and how do we get out of this this sort of fear mode or this worry mode about about too much information?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Even that framing is interesting, isn't it? Too much information. Right? I mean, there's sort of this sense that, oh my goodness, we'll see too much, we won't know what to do with it, so let's just close our eyes. And there was a time when that was appropriate, right?

I mean, people often say in medicine, if a test isn't gonna influence your treatment

Dr. Mark Hyman
Or your

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
decision making, yeah. Your decision making, then don't do the test. And that's actually entirely legitimate. But as you were gesturing towards, we live in a very different time than even just a few years ago.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Now we live in a time of big data and AI, when we can collate a large collection of data, and we can use AI to connect it over time, to look for subtle changes, for subtle patterns, at a scope that's hard for a single human mind to do. Mhmm. And so I think, you know, my recommendation isn't just go out and get a traditional MRI and have people read it in the same way they always did, looking only at today. Yeah. My recommendation is establish a baseline for yourself.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Mhmm.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And I think it's up to us in medical intelligence, and up to the broader community to figure out how we deal with this multifaceted data. And I'll give you just a couple of examples coming from work in my NYU lab before I made the jump to function. So we took an AI model and trained it to predict your risk of clinically significant prostate cancer in five years' time, based on today's images. Did an okay job about as well as humans, huge false positive rate, like sixty four percent So false not very good

Dr. Mark Hyman
at On the predicting MRIs for prostate cancer.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
On MRIs for prostate cancer, so not a very good prediction five years out. But then we did something interesting, we took that same model, and we fed it last time's images, and a year before, and a year before, and we also fed it some blood tests, and some clinical data. And lo and behold, the more prior information, and the more diverse the information we gave the model, the more the false positive rate dropped, until it was below ten percent. So an order of magnitude in false positive rate just by incorporating context. The second thing we

Dr. Mark Hyman
So in that sense, more information helps you make better decisions.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Exactly. So instead of, gee, we don't know what to do with it, let's close our eyes, the idea is, let's incorporate everything we know. Now we need to build the models to do it, but the example I just showed you shows that it is in fact possible. Mhmm. Even in a pretty simple prediction model, to incorporate context.

And you know, I mean, as a master of functional medicine, right, context is everything.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's everything, yeah.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
You can't just look at one organ system in isolation, you also can't just look at one time point in isolation.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You're looking at the patterns in the data over time.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Exactly.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Patterns in the data over time illuminate the real issues, and whether there's something to do or not to do.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
A 100%. As a, you know, academic or former academic, I need to say, you know, this paradigm is still evolving, so it's not like every MRI you get is gonna be put in context in this way. But in the future, that's exactly what we're aiming at. We want your MRI to be hand in hand with your blood tests, and your genetics, and your proteomics, and all of this, because that rich context is gonna eliminate many of those false positives and give you the guide you need.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And that's where we're really building a function, is a place where you can get access to your own biology. Before, you had to go through this firewall of doctors and insurance companies, and, you know, maybe they would order it, maybe they wouldn't order it. You you wouldn't be able to really know what's going on with your own biology. We have a dashboard for your car. Why wouldn't you have a dashboard for your body?

And we're talking about establishing, you know, like a those thousand point sensors. You know, go to your take your fancy electronic car in, and they they hook it up to the these machines, and they just run through all these tests. And I'm like, this is amazing. We don't have that for our body. Right.

You know? And we don't have the dashboard that tells us how to navigate what's going on in our life. And so we're often at the effect of things rather than being at the cause of our life, you know, in proactive way, empowering ourselves with the knowledge information to prevent disease and to find things early, and to actually reverse things before they become problematic. One one of the things that's also happened is the ability, I think, to to really improve the speed and the the access and the cost. So can you talk about that?

Because and I remember going to get my knee. I had a knee issue because I jumped off a golf cart, and I kinda tore my meniscus. And I was like, oh, my knees. So I'm gonna go get an MRI. And so I I went to get MRI, and was like $2,500 for my knee.

And now we're talking about $4.99 or $9.99 for a whole body MRI. So how how is that taking us down the road to making this more accessible and affordable? And also, you know, how do we how do we think about using that?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
So here's the really interesting thing. In the future, and I think it's actually pretty the near pretty near future, the more we image you, the faster we can scan you next time.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Is this actually the same machine?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
No. It doesn't. The faster and the cheaper we can scan you next time. And I'll I'll give you one other example that came out of work from from my lab. Basically, we found is if we've only if this is the first time we're seeing you, we need a requisite amount of data, we need the scanner to gather a certain number of views of the body to create those slices we need.

But if we've seen you before, this time we trained another neural network whose job is to take those different views and assemble them into a set of images. Mhmm. And we tried taking a drastically reduced set of views, 20 times less data, 30 times less data than you would need for a traditional image. In other words, 20 or 30 times faster. And we found that the neural network, if it had your prior scans, could generate a perfect high quality image 20 to 30 times faster, with 20 to 30 times less data.

Why? Because we already knew the rudiments about you and your anatomy. All we needed to look for was change. So once we have that baseline, not only can we predict your health better, but we can also scan you faster, and it turns out, another thing we tried was, what if we use worse data? What if we use data from a low power MRI machine?

Or maybe from an MRI machine we might build into a seat, that would otherwise give pretty lousy looking images. We did that simulation, and we found that actually we can get away with much worse data

Dr. Mark Hyman
Interesting.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
If we have that prior information about you. So once again, context is everything. If we have the context, maybe we don't need these big multi million dollar tubes. Yeah. Once we've seen you at least once, maybe we can put something in a chair, in a bed, in a CVS, in your home, at drastically reduced cost.

So more imaging, paradoxically, allows cheaper imaging.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But does you have to use the same machines? Like, had Siemens in one machine, or GE in another machine, can it kinda how do you how do they gather that data from the past?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
So there's a logistical challenge of how do you bring your past images from another machine into today's machine so But that it can do that's just logistics. I mean, nowadays, we have, you know, digital image transport systems and and so on. But what we found is it doesn't need to be the image doesn't need to be exactly the same last time as this time. In fact, we used different contrasts last time, and it still informs, you know, your imaging this time. So this is actually part of something, I think you may have referred to it before, that I call the everywhere scanner vision.

Yeah. If we have enough information about you, if we've done the advanced imaging, the advanced blood testing upfront, then for the interval scanning, maybe we can use cheap scanners, maybe we can even use constellations of wearable devices on your clothes, because all they need to do is measure change.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's amazing.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Which means we can move healthcare not only more proactive, but also make it more continuous.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Crazy. Sounded like what was that guy named? Bones from Star Trek? Yes. The guy on the the the the tricorder.

The tricorder. The scanner for the I

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
I would just tell you, the tricorder has been like a holy grail for imagers forever. Right? Because it's this tiny little handheld device, you wave it in front of something somebody, and you get everything you need. I actually think, and I talk about this in the book, I think the tricorder is a bit of a trick. I think it's actually not its own device doing imaging.

I think it has access to all of the records that Starfleet Academy had on you. Yeah. And all it's doing is looking for change.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. That's amazing. That's amazing. So people understand that they can get blood work and and know a lot about their bodies, and a lot of people have have joint function as members, and are learning so much, and we're seeing so much in the population that people are are discovering that saves their lives from cancer or figures out they have autoimmune disease or figures out they have other problems that are really fixable. How how does imaging differ from blood work?

And what are we looking for? Mhmm. Because people understand, I'm looking for my cholesterol, my blood sugar, my hormones, or my vitamin d level, or, you know, whatever, my blood count, and my immune system. But what what are we actually looking for, and how does it differ from blood work? And then last question, intro.

How do you how do you think the two together are better than either alone?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
So I think blood tests give you biological and chemical context. Right? It's the various biomarkers that your body is producing that tell us about the biological functioning and systems. Imaging is spatial context, right? I mean if we were just undifferentiated bags of chemistry, then blood tests would be enough, we wouldn't need to know anything more.

But we all know that bodies are sort of these complex bioweavings, and it matters what's where, when. And so imaging, as I see it, is what puts all of this chemistry in context, in spatial context, which leads naturally to the question of synergy. Like, you want both, right? You want to know what's where, and you also want to know what's the biological functioning in each position. And when you've got both, you sort of have this magic mixture, so what do we Structure function.

Structure function, exactly. And so what do you look for in imaging? Well, you look for tissue that's out of place, right? A tumor that might be growing where it shouldn't. You look for derangements of the brain that tell you hints of Alzheimer's disease, things like that.

Things that there may not be a circulating counterpart, there may not be something that was spit off and sent into the bloodstream, and so you can measure it in blood test. But you can see it in situ, you can see it where

Dr. Mark Hyman
it But if have an aneurysm, there's no blood test for that.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Exactly right. I I think this combination of biological, biochemical, and spatial context is really, you know, cooking with gas.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We are both part of function health, and we do imaging as part of the offerings we have. I I think it should be part of the, you know and ultimately just part of the thing that everybody does, which is not just the blood work, but also the imaging. What are we finding? Tell us some stories about what we're finding. Because, you know, you've been working with Ezra, which is a company that became part of Function for a long time.

And you you've seen a lot of stories. And we're seeing crazy stories of people what are people discovering, and what are they finding?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Absolutely. And I'll I'll preface it by saying, you know, I know there are gonna be some physicians out there who say, you know, any story I come out with, it's just an anecdote. It's not it's not, you know, randomized controlled trials and so on. I'll get back to that later because I think there's an answer for that too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Anic data.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Enecdata. But, no, I mean, the obvious things, clearly. We have found tumors that people didn't know they had.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And early, before it kills them. Exactly.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And that's the key. I mean, you know, our friend and colleague, Emigal, likes to say, we already have a cure for cancer, it's early detection. Yeah. Because most cancers, if you catch them early enough before they've become invasive, they're that much easier to get rid of with radiation, with with chemotherapy, with surgery. So we have found certainly prostate cancers, brain cancers, kidney cancers, at such an early stage that they weren't giving anybody symptoms.

That was the whole point. Mhmm. But what that meant is these people could then go in for therapy right away, long before these things would have been discovered. Yeah. And it is saving their lives.

There are any number of other kind of body areas where you can pick these things up. Ezra had a particular focus on cancer, which is sort of obvious, because early means life.

Dr. Mark Hyman
But we can see the changes in the brain function structure. Absolutely. We can look at brain size changes, we can look at the structural pieces of the brain that change over time that could be linked to different diseases, like dementia. We can also see interesting things in terms of body composition, fatty liver.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Cardiovascular health, right, coronary artery calcium scans have been shown actually with very good data to be predictive of cardiac cardiovascular risk.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And that we can see in a very straightforward way. Combine that with some of the cardiovascular biomarkers, and again, you're cooking with gas.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I think that's it. I think, you know, the combination's important. I remember don't know you remember that textbook we had in second year medical school called Robinson Cotran.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Oh, yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
The patho it's called the pathophysiologic base of disease. And I went back. I still have the my copy from, like, 1984.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Me too.

Dr. Mark Hyman
We have a colonoscopy. We have a mammogram. We have, you know, thing PSA we screen for, but, like, most cancers we don't even screen for. And when you combine that and those two, and I think emerging proteomic data, which is coming when proteo proteomics are basically proteins that the body makes, and these cancers spit off these proteins that we use sometimes already to detect cancer or follow progression like alpha fetoprotein or CEA, c a one twenty five for ovarian cancer. These are things that we've been using in medicine a long time, but they're they're used kinda late.

They're used to manage the disease. They're used to track progress. But if you combine these and using AI this is the this is the this is the amazing thing about the data. So this is this is coming soon. There these large these large databases of cancer survivors, and they have biobanks where they collected their blood.

They've been able to go back and say, okay. Well, let's look at all the patients with lung cancer, all the patients with pancreatic cancer, all the patients with colon cancer, all the patients with prostate cancer, all the patients with breast cancer. What do they have in common? I mean, within each cancer. And then they can go back and check this blood and screen five years ago and see these these proteins that get expressed.

And they're able to, through AI, make sense of all it. Because it's like if you've got, you know, millions of data points in the average doctor can't well, no doctor, even a brilliant doctor can't like you, can't sort through all that. And so using, like you said, big data and AI with with our understanding of biology, we're we're entering a new era of medicine. This is the era of medical intelligence. That's that's what I'm talking about when I say that.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
I agree entirely, and I've obviously voted with my feet to Can have I get back for just a second to the kind of clinical trials question? Yes. Because that is one of the things that gets thrown out a lot as a concern. Like, all of this is wonderful in principle. It makes sense, but where is the data, and should we be proceeding until we have the data?

And I actually want to go back to another time in history, the nineteen seventy's, when all of these tomographic imaging techniques, MRI, CT, PET, ultrasound, were being developed. Back then, the value of knowing what was where in the body was obvious. So there were a thousand CT scans in hospitals between 1971 when CT developed and 1979 when the inventors got the Nobel Prize for it. There were no large scale clinical trials showing the efficacy of seeing versus not seeing. Now, I'm not suggesting we should throw caution to the winds.

We should absolutely be gathering data as we go, and in fact, big data allows us in some ways to do almost real time trials as we go. But to say, listen, I'm not gonna do anything until the data is there, I think that's one extreme of a kind of spectrum that we should be thinking about. I think there's this kind of protective instinct, which I, as somebody in medicine, I believe in. But I don't wanna be protecting patients, protecting people from this new era that's coming. Wanna figure out how we how we make it happen as quickly as possible, and measure as we go.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. I mean, how do we not get ahead of ourselves? But, you know, in a perfect world, we would we would bring the cost way down. We'd allow people to access large datasets for themselves. We'd be able to track it over time.

We'd be able to see where they're headed and what to do about it, And that's really what Functional Health was designed to do. That's why we created the company, was to empower people to be the CEO of their own health, to be empowered to own their own data, to be able to have a data driven health care and medical system, and to use big data and and AI analytics to understand all this

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Yes.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Massive amounts of information. How many, like, how many gigabytes or terabytes is like a full dense MRI bot? It's like a lot. Right? You can't even sit on your computer.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
That's right. It's a bunch of gigabytes per person per session.

Dr. Mark Hyman
You know, what I what I wanna sort of have people understand is like, who should and when should somebody think about starting to get their first baseline MRI? Is it when you're 20, or 50, or a 100?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Right. Well again, it's hard to point to a data driven age because it varies for the particular thing you're looking for and all of that. I guess I would reframe it and say, I think everybody should have a baseline. A baseline scan because, you know, and okay, maybe not well, the body is still developing when you're five or 12 or something, although there's some argument there too. But the whole point is we want to be able to measure change in your body, we want to be able to know what's normal.

And so I think at the very least that reference scan, there's no reason for that not to be done early. Like in your twenties? In your twenties, as long as the people who are interpreting it aren't jumping the gun and freaking out at everything they see. So the problem with that first scan is we don't yet have the context. And so there's a tendency then to follow every lead if, and this is another sort of paradoxical thing, if we know that imaging is gonna be regular, then we don't have to freak out at every finding.

So in other words, we get a baseline and we say, okay, we're gonna see you again in a year or two years, to make sure we've established not just one point, but a trajectory. Even just that second scan is already gonna rule out most problems. So I think that, you know, we're heading to an era when people should have a baseline and a sense of trajectory relatively early so that we can establish this basis for change.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So then, how often should someone do a scan? Yearly, or I mean, for example, I'm 66, I kinda wanna do one every year. Right. Does that make sense? But what if I'm 35?

Do I wanna do one every year?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And again, the scientist in me is is pausing because, you know, I'm not I don't have studies to point to. But from sort of basic logic, my feeling is, yes, more frequently as you get older, and changes are more likely, a little less frequently when you're very young, and changes aren't that likely. We can, let's put it this way, if we can get the cost of something like an MRI scan down enough, and if we can make sure that we're not over calling things, then there's no reason not to have an absolutely regular scan, let's say every two years when you're younger, every one year when you're a little older. I want, and you know with the Everywhere scanner vision, I want imaging to be kind of an ongoing intimate part of our lives. Not this thing that we do just when we're worried are we sick?

I want it to be the thing that tells you you're you're still okay, not the thing that only tells you that something's wrong. Yeah. I want it to be a safety net, not, you know, an end stage tool.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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There'll be, like, tools and devices and things that we can have to put our biology online in real time and and see what's going on. And and it's kind of combined with this idea of an everywhere scanner is is really very futuristic. So talk about this idea of the everywhere scanner, and how it how it's gonna change how we think about Yeah. Our health and medicine.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
I really think of it almost like building ourselves a new augmented artificial sensory system. Right? We have multiple senses. In fact, you know what? It's not sci fi at all.

We already have continuous sensing. Yeah. We've got our entire nervous system. Yeah. We can sense temperature and pressure and pain and all of these things, and these sensors are woven throughout our body.

Yeah. The only problem is they're really not great at giving us early warning of internal things that are going wrong. They're really good at telling us, don't touch that hot stove now.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Yeah.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
But they're not giving us advanced warning of cancer, that's not what they evolved to do. I think what we're talking about with Everywhere Scanner, and with Abundant Sensors, is basically building that artificial nervous system that's giving us early warning of all kinds of other biological things that we just didn't happen to develop nerves for. And, you know, I think the body, quite frankly, it's a remarkable piece of engineering. I think we should pay attention to what it's built. Certainly in imaging, almost every innovation in vision that has evolved has been copied and improved upon with an artificial imaging device somewhere.

Every single thing that the eye does, we can learn from, and that the brain does in processing vision. Likewise, I think when we think about this network of continuous sensing Yeah. We should look at what the body's built and build on that.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It's kinda cool. I mean, I I rented a car recently, and the thing just senses everything. It's like I drive under a bridge and the Google Maps turns a different shade, or I'm driving down the road and there's no car in front of me, it turns the brights on. And when a car is coming, it turns the brights off. Or when, like, you know, every little like, I I literally took my hands off the stove and said, hey.

Put your hand on someone. It looked at my eyes. When I looked away for something, I was like, oh, make sure your eyes are on the road. I'm like, wow. This is car is, like, spying on me, but it's sensing everything all the time all around it.

And, you know, kind of like a a way a Waymo or a Tesla, which, you know, the self driving is the same thing. And so we're talking about is augmenting the sensing of our own biology through various kinds of tools, whether they're intermittent or continuous tools that allow us to put our biology in in a different context and to understand it over time and to not have this episodic often too late to the game diagnostics, which which unfortunately, you know, with medicine, when you find things too late, it's it's often hard to fix. Right? And and so I think particularly around cancer, you know, my father died of cancer. My sister died of cancer.

She had cancer twice. You know, I don't wanna die of cancer. I don't wanna I wanna live a long, healthy life. And I feel like it's one of those things that we now actually potentially with the the gallery test and liquid biopsies, the regular imaging, and even the proteomics that are coming, we literally could make cancer and dying of cancer a historical point.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
I I believe so, and I hope so.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's that's really the it's part of the mission of Functional Health is to do that and to relieve so much suffering. Because there's so much suffering with cancer, and I I know you I just you see it all the time, and it I I know it in my family, and I've seen my own relatives just wither away and die. And it's just it's such a heartbreak, and it's it's in some ways, you know, if we had this proactive, preventive approach to medicine, we wouldn't be in this situation.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Absolutely. And and my family has had that type of cancer history as well, and I I just wish that we had had these tools earlier.

Dr. Mark Hyman
It it's giving us insight into human biology in a way that we've never had before. And we're able to then, on top of that, apply the 39,000,000 scientific papers that have been published on PubMed to filter and understand all that information. They're they're taking the you know, all the sort of case studies we could apply, all the training that we've done based on root cause medicine into the system. And so when you put your data into function, you're you're actually putting your biology online. And combined with these large language models and the advances that those we're seeing every day, we're we're entering an era where we're we're really truly being able understand the body in a way we never have before, and look at the patterns in the data and create an early early assessment and continuous monitoring over time rather than this episodic kind of random checking to really know what's going on in your body, and then to be able to sort of understand the subtle changes, the differences, to look at the patterns in data, to learn and to advance science, to help individuals with their own issues.

It's really quite amazing. So I would love sort of you for you to unpack your vision of the what what we're doing with the medical intelligence lab, where where we're headed, and what we wanna build in the world. Because I think this is really foundation revolutionary to to medicine and science itself. I think it's gonna change everything we know about human health and biology.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
I think of it a little bit like a GPS for health. And if you unpack what a GPS does, it actually has a lot of the features that you talked about. First of all, you need a map, right? That's all of the accumulated medical knowledge Yeah. That you're talking about.

You need to know what the landscape is like that you're navigating through, otherwise you're going blind. But more than that, you also need to know your personal history. That's your biology that you've put online, right? Because if you don't know where you've come from, you you don't know what road you're on, you kinda need to know that individualized information, not just the collective information. And then the key thing, which I think we're really working hard on in the medical intelligence lab, is how do we create that guideline that gets you where you want to go, that travels with you, and make sure you get to 100 healthy years.

And that involves then taking all of these patterns that we've learned, the population wide patterns, and the individual patterns based on your data, and projecting them forward, and making predictions. Hey, listen, if you just keep on steering this way, you're headed for trouble. No, maybe you need to do a little course correction, change your diet, change your exercise, you know, go in for another test at this interval, that type of thing. And I think it is definitely a remarkable time when we can think about creating that sort of comprehensive GPS. You mentioned that big tech is already, you know, gunning for this space.

It's regardless of whether, you know, we in medicine are comfortable with it or not, I sort of see it as both our responsibility and our privilege to try to bring the science of medicine to that endeavor, rather than just feeding lots and lots of data to chatbots. Really trying to bring the collection of medical knowledge, and the knowledge about integration of body systems.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And the context as you're

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
talking about. And the context, and your individual context.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah, that's what I mean, yeah.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Exactly. To this problem, so that we're not just generating a nice sounding set of answers to questions, we're actually providing you with a guide. We're giving you that map to your health.

Dr. Mark Hyman
And it's those little course corrections that make the difference, right? If you see, know, if you track your blood sugar and you go, well, you know, it was seventies fasting, well then it's eighties next year. Or maybe the next year it's to go, like, to 85, and then maybe next year it's 89. Then oh, I'm getting worse metabolic disease, and I'm gonna I'm heading towards prediabetes and type two diabetes, even if I don't have the official diagnosis yet, and I can course correct.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
And in fact, going back to this model of biological senses, you had talked about the concern that some people legitimately have. Well, I don't wanna be anxious all the time, I don't wanna be thinking about the diseases I might develop. If you think about our senses, they evolve to protect us from harm in a similar way. We don't think about them all the time, we just get this burst of alarm if we step into a street and we see there's a car coming. Yeah.

But most of the time, the sensors are just operating in the background, keeping us alive.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Right.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
That's how I see this online biology and this network of sensors in the future. It's not constant alarm, it's just waking up and giving you a ping if you're about to step into the street with a car coming. Yeah. Medically. That type of safety net is something that even the most kind of squeamish people might be comfortable with.

It's just, you know, for the moment, don't do this because it's gonna harm you, but otherwise, live your life, and live your life well.

Dr. Mark Hyman
That's right, and I think I think we know so much now about how to prevent disease, and I think people are worried about finding out something that they can't do anything about. And I understand that. But most of the time, you know, your biology is changeable, and there are early detection signs that are as I mentioned, these biochemical changes, and these then turn into pathological early change we can see on scanning, that that that really give us a road map to what's happening with our health. And putting our head in the sand and not paying attention and not looking at our own personal data, it doesn't make any sense. Now you go, well, I'm not a doctor.

How do I make sense of it all? And, you know, yeah. You're right. It's if you don't know how to sort of make sense of it all, then it's a lot. But if you have the facilitation of a company like Functional Health that provides you with a guidance, provides you with the intelligence behind it to make sense of it, to create a ranked order priority list of what you have to address, to help you understand what the steps are you can take yourself when you need, you know, to do self care and when you need to see seek medical care and provide that whole continuum of care for you rather than just sort of waiting around until something's happening.

That's the thing most people don't realize is that disease doesn't just happen. It's occurring because of low grade changes over many decades. And the thing I wanna sort of sort of end with here is our bodies are this highly intelligent system that want to be healthy. Your body is not designed to be sick. It's not a design flaw.

We are are providing the conditions in our current modern society for the body to be sick with the crap food that we're having available. 73% of the food on grocery store shelves is not even technically food. It's ultra processed Frankenfoods. And we have enormous amount of environmental exposures and toxins that sometimes we can do things about and actually help our bodies detoxify. We have, you know, dysregulated circadian rhythms and sleep.

We have excess chronic stress. We have all these things, sedentary lifestyles. These are things that we are empowered to do something about. We have nutrient deficiencies, which you can do something about. And when you when you actually can know what's happening early, then you can you can make changes that really change that course and allow your body to provide the conditions that are gonna create health rather than simply waiting till you have to really treat some serious disease.

And this is this is a fundamental paradigm shift, is is the idea that disease isn't just some random phenomena. It's it's something you can predict from early indicators and then do something about. And I just saw a patient yesterday with Parkinson's disease. He'd been you know, had warning signs way early. He had tremendous amounts of environmental exposures from hobbies and being in the Navy as a chemical engineer and and in childhood.

And I'm like, this guy's you know, would be a sitting duck for some type of toxin related illness, and Parkinson's is a well known toxin related condition. And yet he had to wait until he got Parkinson's for someone like me to look at his history and go, well, gee, you know, we gotta we gotta get all this crap out of your system, and we've gotta detoxify you. And and and that was something that he didn't have to necessarily do if he'd been proactive and actually was able to measure the toxic load of his body early on. Same thing happened to me. I had heavy metal poisoning from in China, but I I wasn't I wasn't sick right away.

It was like this kind of slowly building up burden of toxins that then knocked me off my feet. But if I had known early, I could have done something about it and not ended up in this catastrophic illness. So I think we we we can actually see these changes over time. We can do something about them if we have the right information, and he just didn't have the right information. So that that's really why I think medical intelligence is such an important concept.

And and our medical intelligence lab at Functional Health and the science we're putting behind it and the effort we're putting behind really providing the best quality understanding information of your biology is is gonna change medicine and health care.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Hear, hear. No. And and listen, Marco, I mean, we started the conversation with the future of seeing. Right? In some ways, I think in a nutshell, the future of seeing involves actually looking.

Yeah. Now that we have the capability, now that we have the capability to see lots of your biology, now that we have the capability to use AI and other similar tools to integrate that, to connect it to knowledge that has been accumulated over all of these centuries, now is the time when we we need to start living with our eyes open, and living with that kind of guidance.

Dr. Mark Hyman
So The Future of Seeing, your book, which everybody should get a copy, where can they find it?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
They can find it at Columbia University Press or on Amazon, of course.

Dr. Mark Hyman
I love it. Columbia University Press. That's the future. I love it. Of course.

It's a great title, The Future of Seeing, because it's not literally just about imaging. And your book is about imaging, but it's also, you know, implies that the future of seeing is about the future of seeing deep into human biology in a way we've never been able to do historically, and it will transform medicine health care from the outside in. Because traditional health care is not changing anytime fast. The edifice is too solid, and the resistance is too much, and the old ideas die very hard. I mean, I think, you know, there's a book I read in college called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Yes.

And in this book, he talked about this idea of a paradigm shift. And he he that's where the word paradigm shift came from. And in in the book, he talks about this idea of normal science, that what we believe is just so embedded that we can't unsee it. In other words Mhmm. If you were living in, you know, 1400, the Earth was flat.

Mhmm. If you were living in the pre Galilean era, the Earth was the center of the universe. Right? This is something now that that we we we have to understand because we are we are living in a totally different era where we can actually see things that we never could see before. We can look where we never looked before.

I mean, look. I remember I mean, let's see. It was it was thirteen years after I graduated from medical school that we decoded the human genome. So, I mean, AIDS is in a very short time, and that was a billion dollars. Now it's $200 to g code your own personal genome.

That's where we're going. We're going to this massive personal data driven health care system, and I think in a way, we're we're disrupting health care because we're gonna empower people to be in a way their own health care agent. And then, yes, use medicine and use hospitals and use surgery and use doctors when you need them. Mhmm. But most of the things that we when you pick them up early, they're fundamentally things that are under our control.

It's what we eat. It's how we move. It's how we sleep. It's how we manage stress. It's our relationships.

It's our toxin exposure, which you can mitigate to some degree. Those are all the things that are driving the disturbances in our health. And those are things that that we can pick up in these early warning signs like your car. Okay. Your tire pressure's a little low, or your Mhmm.

Engine light's a little bigger. Whatever. Like, I don't know. These sensors are amazing on these cars. And and I wouldn't it be great to have that dashboard for your body?

And that's really what we're doing with function health, and it's just gonna get better and smarter. So I I encourage everybody to you know, not just because I I co founded the company, but I encourage everybody to think about how do you put your biology online so you can be proactive about your health and not get that that horrible sinking feeling in your stomach when you're in the doctor's office and they say, you've got metastatic cancer. You know, Chris Vanderbeak, I think I think it was his name, was this actor who recently died of cancer. And you know, he didn't need to. He really didn't need to.

You know, my sister didn't need to. My father didn't need to. And we I wish this technology was around then, and I think this really what we're talking about here, Dan. So any final thoughts or words for people listening?

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
I think you said it beautifully, Mark. I think, really, my final words are, in this remarkable era, keep your eyes open. Get that biology online, figure out how you can essentially have this new safety net that nobody in the history of humanity has had before.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you, Dan. Thank you for your work. I'm excited to work with you in building the medical intelligence lab and keep function evolving and helping it to actually help billions and millions of people.

I think we're just getting started, so people should stay tuned. You can learn more about Dan's work through his book, The Future of Seeing. Go to functionhealth.com to learn more. It's only a dollar a day to join as a member, and that will give you a deep dive on your biology. And you can get a full body MRI scan as a baseline through that website and even more deeper scans if you want for other things.

So I'm really excited about what we're doing together. I think combining the ability to gather your history data, your EMR, your wearables, imaging, lab data, all putting it together and helping people understand their biology is is really revolutionary. I'm so super excited about it.

Dr. Daniel K. Sodickson
Thank you so much, Mark. It's a it's a pleasure and a privilege to talk with you and to work with you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Amazing. Well, thanks, Dan.

Dr. Mark Hyman
If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Doctor Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on the doctor Hyman show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health where I am chief medical officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions.

Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests. This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com, and request to become a patient.

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