We are losing 200,000 tons of soil every hour. Every year, we lose an amount of soil equivalent to the size of Nicaragua or North Korea. According to the United Nations, we have 60 harvests left before our soil is depleted and we can no longer grow food.
The fundamental idea of the body as an ecosystem. In medical schools, they teach that the body is made up of many separate parts, with a different doctor for each area of the body. But in reality, the body is an ecosystem. Everything is interconnected like a web. So when you pull the right threads, you don’t need to treat each issue separately with various medications—when you identify the root cause, everything can be corrected.
Functional–Holistic Medicine is essentially a methodology, a functional system—a completely different way of thinking about disease. It acts like a medical detective, connecting the dots among all these different factors. So basically, we look at a person’s history and try to understand how they arrived where they are today.
For example, starting from birth—whether it was a natural vaginal birth or a C-section, whether they were breastfed or bottle-fed, whether they had antibiotics, whether they had digestive issues, whether they traveled abroad, or whether something happened to their gut that caused it not to develop normally…
Then I ask about other exposures: toxins, heavy metals, and I ask many questions—what they ate, their lifestyle, what they did, how they slept, whether they exercised, and so on. I investigate whether the body is balanced across its systems. I focus on a system called the Matrix (which includes the cardiovascular system—heart, the gastrointestinal system, the nervous system, etc.). So essentially, when we examine you, we look at your antecedents, your triggers, and your lifestyle.
All of these factors are relevant as root causes. But there may also be predisposing factors—perhaps the gut was never very healthy to begin with, or the C-section, or the lack of breastfeeding, or antibiotics. Then we look at where things are balanced and where they’re not. When you have many negatives and not enough positives—things the body actually needs, like sleep, exercise, nutrition, relationships, social connection, love, all of that—the body begins to fail.
When the negatives outweigh the positives, your body collapses. We examine the seven systems to see whether they are in balance or not, because they relate to all diseases.
Dr. Mark Hyman
