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What it argues
Ultraprevention, written by Mark Hyman and Mark Liponis, is an early statement of the functional medicine approach to chronic disease. Published in 2003, it argues that conventional medicine is organized around treating symptoms after illness appears rather than identifying and addressing the upstream causes that produce those symptoms years or decades earlier. The authors call this reactive model "sick care" and propose a system that treats the body as an interconnected whole rather than a collection of organ-specific problems to be managed in specialist silos.
The book introduces five core imbalances — nutrition, inflammation, impaired immunity, toxins, and stress — that Hyman and Liponis argue underlie most chronic conditions including heart disease, diabetes, autoimmune disease, cancer, and depression. Rather than mapping symptoms to diagnoses and diagnoses to drugs, the functional medicine approach maps symptoms to root causes, which may be dietary, environmental, hormonal, or microbial. The same diagnosis in two patients may have different root causes and require different interventions.
What it gets right
- 1.
Conventional medicine treats symptoms after illness appears. Functional medicine identifies and addresses the upstream imbalances that cause those symptoms, often years before disease becomes diagnosable.
- 2.
Five core imbalances underlie most chronic disease: poor nutrition, chronic inflammation, impaired immunity, environmental toxins, and unresolved stress. Addressing them prevents more disease than any pharmaceutical intervention.
- 3.
The same diagnosis in two patients may have completely different root causes. Treatment without identifying the root cause is at best symptomatic and at worst counterproductive.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Mark Hyman is an American physician and one of the most prominent popularizers of functional medicine in the United States. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts, and has served as director of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine. He is the author of more than a dozen books, including The Blood Sugar Solution, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?, and Young Forever. Hyman writes for a general audience and has built a large following through media appearances, podcast appearances, and advocacy for dietary approaches to chronic disease prevention.
