Must-watch: Dr Mark Hyman’s TEDMED talk

I thought this was a really interesting talk! I've often felt frustrated coming out of a doctors office because I was told "what" I might have but not "why" — I love the idea of a more personalized approach to medicine… great ideas here! I really hope these ideas come to fruition soon, I think we'll see lots of improvement in health! Thanks for posting this!

I love this! I wish society would support this kind of medicine and it would if conditions always improved as fast as for the kid he mentioned. But when it comes to mechanisms involving the mind, personality et.c. change in general takes time and society doesn't have patience for that today. Things are not allowed to take time anymore – in fact we're not really even allowed to be sick. The last few years commercials have popped up on tv for loperamide when you have diarrhea, antacids when you have reflux (so you can continue to eat pizza as often as you like ), sprays to make your runny clogged up nose work as usual and painkillers for your sore throat! In many cases it seems the drugs work against the body's own defense mechanisms which is crazy. If you have an infection your body should fight it and when it does you get symptoms…

Have to admit I am on Nexium since my stomach went crazy from stress and digestive disorder and my symptoms were so severe that diet didn't help and I am very thankful for this drug as it gave me my life back and allowed me to eat most of the things I like. Note however that this doesn't mean pizza necessarily but rather the healthy foods I couldn't have before, like bell peppers, raw onion, lemon juice et.c.

I can only think of one negative thing with the holistic approach and that is that although it empowers you to make a difference in your own life and make your situation better, for an over analyzing person like myself, it is very hard to draw the line and know where to stop. I find I often start to worry and obsess, like what if this is dangerous for me, what if this food isn't optimal, what if my drugs are damaging me, what if,…. And thinking of causes for conditions it's easy to see that my type A "good girl" personality and performance anxiety contributed strongly to my bowel disorder et.c. – it's harder for me to guess why I got an autoimmune paralysis as a child, living a very happy life and never having any problems with my immune system such as allergies et.c. I get a bit overwhelmed and find that I could dig endlessly into alternative medicine, psychology et.c. and getting obsessed enough to miss out on life.

When you have a life threatening condition you have to stop, slow down and focus 100% on optimizing your health, but I find it very hard to know where to stop when you have something less serious and you have a family to take care of and a job to go to.

I guess it would help a lot if there were functional medicine clinics to go to to take the guess work out of this! It will also be necessary with a different approach in the future because of the increasing problems with antibiotic resistance. It might no longer be possible to perform treatments where you compromise a person's immune system for example.

I loved this! So glad that this common-sense approach has finally started to be accepted and be a bit more… well… common. I know it isn't entrenched yet, but when I hear people like Dr. Hyman, I feel a bit of relief. It may be slow, but it is progress.