Dr. Mark Hyman

The beautiful thing about what's emerging in science is we have a model now of understanding not only what disease is,

but what health is.

What we want to look at is not just the normal ranges of your lab tests and not just the typical lab tests that doctors do in a checkup, which is like 20-something labs that really only are abnormal if you're about to die, like if your liver fails or kidney fails or your electrolytes are off balance or, you know, your blood count is super low.

I mean, these are things that we use in the hospital, and they're very helpful in acute medicine.

But for a checkup, they're pretty useless and mostly don't show anything.

In fact, the annual checkup is pretty

currently done has been scientifically shown to be pretty much useless.

So what we really want to do is understand the root cause, not just a symptomatic approach.

And we want to look at what the body is doing.

Now, I co-founded a company called Function Health to really help empower people to be the CEO of their own health, to understand what's going on under the hood, to have agency over their health, to be the CEO of their own health, and look deeper into the root causes of

into subtle disturbances that can lead to symptoms later or diseases, or even to find out things that are currently going on that you may not know about.

I mean, you could have diabetes and not know it.

You could have an autoimmune disease and have subtle symptoms that you don't know about that are not tracking.

And the beautiful thing about function is it helps you look at things over time, not just a snapshot in time, but a continuous longitudinal deep data set on what's going on with your body.

Now, your health's always changing, and that's true throughout your life.

You're going through different phases, ages, experiences, and the only way to really understand what's happening inside your body is through doing comprehensive diagnostic testing on a regular basis, not just once a year, not when something goes wrong,

consistently longitudinally so you can track things, catch problems early, and stay ahead of the problem.

And this way, you know, you can honestly prevent most of the diseases.

We're able to look at very rare signs of metabolic dysfunction, for example, like where they're heading for diabetes or Alzheimer's risk or obviously cardiovascular risk, hormonal dysfunction.

and nutritional diseases and deficiencies that are really common that often would lead to problems later on.