Dr. Mark Hyman

We're gonna walk through the simple steps you can take to repair your body, whether you had surgery and you're recovering from that, or you had a sprain or a pulled muscle, or you just had an unfortunate bike accident like I did that wasn't my fault.

But let's talk about what healing mode actually means.

It's not passive.

It's an active process that your body does, and it needs energy.

It needs increased energy reserves, increased nutrients, increased blood flow,

It needs inflammatory triggers that are removed and basically a low inflammatory environment.

So there's a bunch of phases that happen with healing.

The first phase is inflammation.

That's normal.

Redness, swelling, pain, heat, common when you have an injury like a sprained ankle.

And that brings all the cytokines, the stem cells, the fibroblasts, the repair signals, all that stuff, the white blood cells, clean up the mess.

It's a good thing in the short term, but if it goes on too long, it's not good.

And so what do you have to do?

Well, you have to do the next step, which is to bring in the tissue repair component.

This is collagen, fibroblasts, helps rebuild tissue.

The next step is remodeling where you increase strength and flexibility.

And when this process doesn't go well, it's usually because there's some increased level of inflammation in the body, or you don't have enough of the right nutrients or enough protein, or you have too much stress in your system or not getting enough sleep or rest, or you have too much metabolic dysfunction because

You know, one of the things that people don't realize is that healing is impaired if you have prediabetes or diabetes or insulin resistance to some degree.

In fact, diabetic foot ulcers are really common.

Why?