“The current health care model (truthfully a sick care model) focuses on naming diseases and suppressing symptoms. Some cures are possible with surgery and some with medication, but they are the exceptions. That is why 80 percent of what ails Americans and increasingly the global population is “chronic” disease—disease that requires long-term “management but is rarely cured. From migraines to multiple sclerosis, from diabetes to dementia, from asthma to autism, from cancer to colitis. Why is it that we are advancing science and technology so rapidly in medicine and yet all chronic illness is on the rise, creating devastation for families, societies, economies, and nations? Doing more of the same will not solve our chronic disease problem, nor will it provide a road map to creating optimal health and longevity.

If you have pain in your head, you are likely to receive a diagnosis of a “headache,” but this could be a symptom of many different things. Giving pain medication might help the headache but won’t address the root cause or causes. There are many things that can hurt your head, but only so many ways it can say “ouch.” It could be you have a migraine, or a brain “tumor, or an aneurysm, or are allergic to gluten, or are just stressed-out or dehydrated. Without understanding what causes the pain in the first place, you’ll end up with a lifetime of pain, medication, frustration, doctors’ bills, and both a figurative and literal headache. Treating symptoms is currently how we approach most diseases like cancer, heart disease, dementia, diabetes, autoimmune disease, and more. But we are not making headway, as the incidence of these diseases continues to rise. Doing more of the same won’t fix the problem.

For example, more than $2 billion has been spent on more than 400 studies aiming to treat and cure Alzheimer’s, and not a single truly useful medication has been discovered (at best, a few showed delayed admission to a nursing home by a few months). What about the why? Why does Alzheimer’s exist?”

“ What is the cause? Preventing this disease in the first place, and even reversing it by identifying and understanding the root causes, is far more important than merely delaying the onset of symptoms by a few months.
For the last 30 years functional medicine has incorporated the advances in systems biology and network medicine into a practical clinical model to reverse disease and create optimal health. It has been mostly on the margins of medicine, but in 2014 the legendary CEO of Cleveland Clinic, Toby Cosgrove, invited me to start the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine to bring this paradigm to the forefront of health care. Functional medicine is a way of connecting the dots, an approach that has taken the underlying science of the body’s systems and networks and turned it into a practical, scalable clinical model for assessing disturbances in the systems that give rise to disease, and for optimizing those networks to create health and longevity.
Functional medicine forces us to reimagine disease and treatment. Most diseases of aging result from the same underlying correctable imbalances. Too much or too little of the things that drive imbalances in our body’s seven physiological systems drive the hallmarks of aging and the diseases that result from those fixable dysfunctions.

For example, what do Alzheimer’s, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and even some cases of infertility and depression have in common? All can result from an imbalance in blood sugar and insulin resistance. This problem is, as we will see, at the root of much of the aging process. It now affects more than nine in ten Americans and is the result of our “highly processed high-sugar and high-starch diet and sedentary lifestyle. Doctors miss up to 90 percent of cases. It’s also nearly 100 percent reversible.
What causes insulin resistance? Too much starch and sugar! Described simply, when you eat anything that breaks down into sugar—like bread, pastas, crackers, desserts, sugar-sweetened beverages, and starches like rice and potatoes—your pancreas releases insulin, a hormone that’s responsible for taking the sugar (glucose) from your bloodstream and delivering it to your cells for energy. The more starch and sugar you eat, the more insulin you produce in order to clear the sugars from your bloodstream. Insulin is the fat-storage hormone. Over time, your cells become resistant to the effects of insulin, requiring more and more to keep your blood sugar normal. Higher insulin results in a cascade of “harmful effects. Storage of dangerous belly fat, loss of muscle, increased hunger and sugar cravings, inflammation, high blood pressure, worsening cholesterol profile (low HDL, high triglycerides, small LDL particles), fatty liver, altered sex hormones and sexual dysfunction, depression, memory loss, increased blood clotting, and ultimately type 2 diabetes, heart attacks, strokes, dementia, and cancer. Treating all these conditions separately with medication becomes unnecessary when we reverse insulin resistance, when we address the root cause. These are not separate problems. They are more like branches on a tree with the same roots and trunk. Functional medicine addresses the soil and roots, not the branches and leaves (symptoms and diseases). In fact, I almost never treat disease; I create health in “my patients and the diseases just disappear.”

Excerpt From
Young Forever
Dr. Mark Hyman
https://books.apple.com/us/book/young-forever/id6442940363
This material may be protected by copyright.