We Can Detect Cancer Years Earlier—So Why Aren’t We?

23:16Dr. Mark Hyman:So to take us through, you know, a skeptic's view, I'm like Dr. Harvard here, and I'm like, oh, you know, this is expensive. It's too much to do. You're going to get all these red herrings. You're going to chase down all these things. You're going to cause unnecessary suffering and worry and anxiety. Why should everybody get an MRI every year? Like a full body. I do it. You do it. We do it. For ourselves, you know, we want it for our families. I just ordered it on one of my staff members tonight because I think he needs it. But like, why is this so important? And how do we get out of this sort of fear mode or this worry mode about too much information?

23:53Even that framing is interesting, isn't it? too much information, right? I mean, there's sort of this sense that, oh my goodness, we'll see too much. We won't know what to do with it. So let's just close our eyes. And there was a time when that was appropriate, right? I mean, people often say in medicine, if a test isn't going to influence your treatment, your plan, your decision-making, then don't do the test. And that's actually entirely legitimate. But as you were gesturing towards, we live in a very different time than even just a few years ago. Now we live in a time of big data and AI when we can collate a large collection of data and we can use AI to connect it over time, to look for subtle changes, for subtle patterns at a scope that's hard for a single human mind to do.

24:49And so I think, you know, my recommendation isn't just go out and get a traditional MRI and have people read it in the same way they always did, looking only at today. My recommendation is establish a baseline for yourself. And I think it's up to us in medical intelligence and up to the broader community to figure out how we deal with this multifaceted data. And I'll give you just a couple of examples coming from work in my NYU lab before I made the jump to function. So we took an AI model and trained it to predict your risk of clinically significant prostate cancer in five years time based on today's images.

25:32Did an okay job about as well as humans. Huge false positive rate, like 64 % false positives. So not very good at predicting on the MRIs for prostate cancer. So not a very good prediction five years out. But then we did something interesting. We took that same model and we fed it last time's images and a year before and a year before, and we also fed it some blood tests and some clinical data. And lo and behold, the more prior information and the more diverse the information we gave the model, the more the false positive rate dropped until it was below 10%. So an order of magnitude reduction in false positive rate just by incorporating context.

26:16Dr. Mark Hyman:The second thing we do... So in that sense, more information helps you make better decisions. Exactly. So instead of, gee, we don't know what to do with it, let's close our eyes. The idea is let's incorporate everything we know. Now we need to build the models to do it, but the example I just showed you shows that it is in fact possible, even in a pretty simple prediction model, to incorporate context. And you know, I mean, as a master of functional medicine, right? Context is everything. It's everything, yeah. You can't just look at one organ system in isolation. You also can't just look at one time point in isolation.

26:50Dr. Mark Hyman:You can look at the patterns in the data over time. Exactly. Patterns in the data over time illuminate the real issues and whether there's something to do or not to do. A hundred percent. As a, you know, academic or former academic, I need to say, you know, this paradigm is still evolving. So it's not like every MRI you get is going to be put in context in this way. But in the future, that's exactly what we're aiming at. We want your MRI to be, you know, hand in hand with your blood tests and your genetics and your proteomics and all of this, because that rich context is going to eliminate many of those false positives and give you the guide you need.

27:30Dr. Mark Hyman:And that's where we're really building a function, which is a place where you can get access to your own biology. Before you had to go through this firewall of doctors and insurance companies and, you know, maybe they would order it, maybe they wouldn't order it. You wouldn't be able to really know what's going on with your own biology. You have a dashboard for your car. Why wouldn't you have a dashboard for your body? And we're talking about establishing, you know, like a, those thousand point sensors, you know, go to your, take your fancy electronic car in and they hook it up to the, these machines and they just run through all these tests.

28:00Dr. Mark Hyman:And I'm like, this is amazing. We don't have that for our body, you know? And we don't have the dashboard that tells us how to navigate what's going on in our life. And so we're often at the effect of things rather than being at the cause of our life, you know, in proactive way, empowering ourselves with the knowledge information to prevent disease and to find things early and to actually reverse things before they become problematic. One of the things that's also happened is the ability, I think, to really improve the speed and the access and the cost. So can you talk about that? And I remember going to get my knee.

28:36Dr. Mark Hyman:I had a knee issue because I jumped off a golf cart and I kind of tore my meniscus. And I was like, oh, my knee's sore. I'm going to go get an MRI. And so I went to get an MRI and it was like$2 ,500 for my knee. And now we're talking about$4.99 or$9.99 for a whole body MRI. So how is that taking us down the road to making this more accessible and affordable? And also, you know, how do we think about using that? So here's the really interesting thing. In the future, and I think it's actually pretty near future, the more we image you, the faster we can scan you next time. Is this actually the same machine?

29:16No. It doesn't. The faster and the cheaper we can scan you next time. And I'll give you one other example that came out of work from my lab. Basically, what we found is if we've only, if this is the first time we're seeing you, we need a requisite amount of data. We need the scanner to gather a certain number of views of the body to create those slices we need. But if we've seen you before, this time we trained another neural network whose job is to take those different views and assemble them into a set of images. And we tried taking a drastically reduced set of views, 20 times less data, 30 times less data than you would need for a traditional image.

30:00In other words, 20 or 30 times faster. And we found that the neural network, if it had your prior scans, could generate a perfect high-quality image 20 to 30 times faster with 20 to 30 times less data. Why? Because we already knew the rudiments about you and your anatomy. All we needed to look for was change. So once we have that baseline, not only can we predict your health better, but we can also scan you faster. And it turns out, another thing we tried was, what if we use worse data? What if we use data from a low power MRI machine? Or maybe from an MRI machine we might build into a seat. that would otherwise give pretty lousy looking images.

30:44We did that simulation and we found that actually we can get away with much worse data.

30:50Dr. Mark Hyman:Interesting. If we have that prior information about you. So once again, context is everything. If we have the context, maybe we don't need these big multi-million dollar tubes. Yeah. Once we've seen you at least once, maybe we can put something in a chair, in a bed, in a CVS, in your home at drastically reduced cost. So more imaging, paradoxically, allows cheaper imaging. But does you have to use the same machines? Like you had Siemens in one machine or GE in another machine. Can it kind of, how do you, how does it gather that data from the past? So there's a logistical challenge of how do you bring your past images from another machine into today's machine so that it can do this.

31:33But that's just logistics. I mean, nowadays we have, you know, digital image transport systems and so on. But what we found is it doesn't need to be, the image doesn't need to be exactly the same last time as this time. In fact, we used different contrasts last time and it still informs, you know, your imaging this time. So this is actually part of something I think you may have referred to it before that I call the everywhere scanner vision.

31:59Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. If we have enough information about you, if we've done the advanced imaging, the advanced blood testing up front, Then for the interval scanning, maybe we can use cheap scanners. Maybe we can even use constellations of wearable devices on your clothes because all they need to do is measure change. That's amazing. Which means we can move healthcare not only more proactive, but also make it more continuous. Crazy. It's kind of like, what was the guy named Bones from Star Trek? Yes, yes. The guy with the tricorder scanner. I would just tell you the tricorder has been like a holy grail for imagers forever, right?

32:41Because it's this tiny little handheld device. You wave it in front of somebody and you get everything you need. I actually think, and I talk about this in the book, I think the tricorder is a bit of a trick. I think it's actually not its own device doing imaging. I think it has access to all of the records that Starfleet Academy had on you. And all it's doing is looking for change.

33:04Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, that's amazing. That's amazing. So people understand that they can get blood work and know a lot about their bodies. And a lot of people have joined function as members and are learning so much. And we're seeing so much in the population that people are discovering that saves their lives from cancer or figures out they have autoimmune disease or figures out they have other problems that are really fixable. how does imaging differ from blood work and what are we looking for? Because people are like, oh, I'm looking for my cholesterol, my blood sugar, my hormones, or my vitamin D level, or, you know, whatever, my blood count and my immune system.

33:39Dr. Mark Hyman:But what are we actually looking for and how does it differ from blood work? And then last question, intro, how do you think the two together are better than either alone? So I think blood tests give you biological and chemical context, right? It's the various biomarkers that your body is producing that tell us about the biological functioning and systems. Imaging is spatial context, right? I mean, if we were just undifferentiated bags of chemistry, then blood tests would be enough. We wouldn't need to know anything more. But we all know that bodies are sort of these complex bio-weavings, and it matters what's where, when.

34:20and so imaging as i see it is what puts all of this chemistry in context in spatial context which leads naturally to the question of synergy like you want both right you want to know what's where and you also want to know what's the biological functioning in each position and when you've got both you sort of have this magic mixture so what do we structure function Structure function, exactly. And so what do you look for in imaging? Well, you look for tissue that's out of place, right? A tumor that might be growing where it shouldn't. You look for derangements of the brain that tell you hints of Alzheimer's disease, things like that.

35:05Things that there may not be a circulating counterpart. There may not be something that was spit off and sent into the bloodstream, and so you can measure it in a blood test. But you can see it in situ. You can see it where it is.

35:16Dr. Mark Hyman:If you have an aneurysm, there's no blood test for that. Exactly right. I think this combination of biological, biochemical, and spatial context is really, you know, cooking with gas. We are both part of Function Health, and we do imaging as part of the offerings we have. I think it should be part of the, you know, ultimately just part of the thing that everybody does, which is not just the blood work, but also the imaging. What are we finding? Tell us some stories about what we're finding. Because, you know, you've been working with Ezra, which was a company that became part of Function for a long time.

35:49Dr. Mark Hyman:And you've seen a lot of stories. And we're seeing crazy stories of what are people discovering and what are they finding? Absolutely. And I'll preface it by saying, you know, I know there are going to be some physicians out there who say, you know, any story I come out with, it's just an anecdote. It's not, you know, randomized controlled trials and so on. I'll get back to that later because I think there's an answer for that. Anicdata. Anicdata. But no, I mean, the obvious things, clearly, we have found tumors that people didn't know they had. And early before it kills them. Exactly. And that's the key.

36:21I mean, you know, our friend and colleague, Emmy Gall, likes to say, we already have a cure for cancer. It's early detection.

36:28Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah. Because most cancers, if you catch them early enough before they've become invasive, they're that much easier to get rid of with radiation, with chemotherapy, with surgery. So we have found certainly prostate cancers, brain cancers, kidney cancers at such an early stage that they weren't giving anybody symptoms. That was the whole point. But what that meant is these people could then go in for therapy right away, long before these things would have been discovered. and it is saving their lives. There are any number of other kind of body areas where you can pick these things up. Ezra had a particular focus on cancer, which is sort of obvious because early means life.

37:11Dr. Mark Hyman:But we can see the change in the brain function structure. Absolutely. We can look at brain size changes. We can look at the structural pieces of the brain that change over time that could be linked to different diseases like dementia. We can also see, you know, interesting things in terms of body composition, fatty liver. cardiovascular health, right? Coronary artery calcium scans have been shown actually with very good data to be predictive of cardiovascular risk. And that we can see in a very straightforward way. Combine that with some of the cardiovascular biomarkers, and again, you're cooking with gas.

37:45Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I think that's it. I think, you know, the combination is important. And I remember, I don't know if you remember that textbook we had in second year medical school called robbins and co-trient oh yes the patho is called the pathophysiologic base of disease and i went back i still have the cop my copy from like 1984 me too we have a mammogram we have you know think psa we screen for but like most cancers we don't even screen for and when you combine that and those two and i think emerging proteomic data which is coming when proteo proteomics are basically proteins that the body makes and these cancers spit off these proteins that we use sometimes are ready to detect cancer or follow progression like alpha protein or cea and cea 125 for orbearing cancer these are things that we've been using in medicine a long time but they're used kind of late they're used to manage the disease used to track progress but if you combine these and using ai and this is the this is the this is the amazing thing about the data um this is this is coming soon these large these large databases of cancer survivors and they have biobanks where they collected their blood.

38:47Dr. Mark Hyman:They've been able to go back and say, okay, well, let's look at all the patients with lung cancer, all the patients with pancreatic cancer, all the patients with colon cancer, all the patients with prostate cancer, all the patients with breast cancer. What do they have in common? I mean, within each cancer. And then they can go back and check this blood and screen five years ago and see these proteins that get expressed. And they're able to, through AI, make sense of all that. Because it's like, if you've got, you know, millions of data points in the average doctor can't, well, no doctor, even a brilliant doctor like you can't sort through all that.

39:16Dr. Mark Hyman:And so using, like you said, big data and AI with our understanding of biology, we're entering a new era of medicine. This is the era of medical intelligence. That's what I'm talking about when I say that. I agree entirely. And I've obviously voted with my feet to that effect. Can I get back for just a second to the kind of clinical trials question? Because that is one of the things that gets thrown out a lot as a concern like okay all of this is wonderful in principle it makes sense but where's the data and should we be proceeding until we have the data and i actually want to go back to another time in history the 1970s when all of these tomographic imaging techniques mri CT, PET, ultrasound were being developed, back then, the value of knowing what was where in the body was obvious.

40:08So there were a thousand CT scans in hospitals between 1971 when CT developed and 1979 when the inventors got the Nobel Prize for it. There were no large-scale clinical trials showing the efficacy of seeing versus not seeing. Now, I'm not suggesting we should throw caution to the winds. We should absolutely be gathering data as we go. And in fact, big data allows us in some ways to do almost real-time trials as we go. But to say, listen, I'm not going to do anything until the data is there, I think that's one extreme of a kind of spectrum that we should be thinking about. I think there's this kind of protective instinct, which as somebody in medicine, I believe in.

41:03But I don't want to be protecting patients, protecting people from this new era that's coming. I want to figure out how we make it happen as quickly as possible and measure as we go.

41:16Dr. Mark Hyman:Yeah, I mean, how do we not get ahead of ourselves? But, you know, in a perfect world, we would bring the cost way down. We'd allow people to access large data sets of themselves. We'd be able to track that over time. We'd be able to see where they're headed and what to do about it. And that's really what Function Health was designed to do. That's why we created the company, was to empower people to be the CEO of their own health, to be empowered to own their own data, to be able to have a data-driven healthcare and medical system, and to use big data and AI analytics to understand all this massive amounts of information.

41:47Dr. Mark Hyman:How many gigabytes or terabytes is like a full dense MRI bot? It's like a lot, right? You can't even sit on your computer. That's right. It's a bunch of gigabytes per person per session. You know, what I want to sort of have people understand is like, who should and when should somebody think about starting to get their first baseline MRI? Is it when you're 20 or 50 or 100? Right. Well, again, it's hard to point to a data-driven age because it varies for the particular thing you're looking for and all of that. I guess I would reframe it and say, I think everybody should have a baseline. a baseline scan because you know and okay maybe not well the body is still developing when you're you know five or twelve or something although you know there's some argument there too but the whole point is we want to be able to measure change in your body we want to be able to know what's normal and so i think at the very least that reference scan there's no reason for that not to be done early like in your 20s in your 20s as long as the people who are interpreting it aren't jumping the gun and freaking out at everything they see so the problem with that first scan is we don't yet have the context and so there's a tendency then to follow every lead if and and this is another sort of paradoxical thing.

43:19If we know that imaging is going to be regular, then we don't have to freak out at every finding. So in other words, we get a baseline and we say, okay, we're going to see you again in a year or two years to make sure we've established not just one point, but a trajectory. Even just that second scan is already going to rule out most problems. So I think that, You know, we're heading to an era when people should have a baseline and a sense of trajectory relatively early so that we can establish this basis for change.

43:55Dr. Mark Hyman:So then how often should someone do a scan? Yearly? Or, I mean, for example, I'm 66. I kind of want to do one every year. Right. Does that make sense? But what if I'm 35? Do I want to do one every year? And again, the scientist in me is pausing because I don't have studies to point to, but from sort of basic logic, my feeling is, yes, more frequently as you get older and changes are more likely, a little less frequently when you're very young and changes aren't that likely. if we can let's put it this way if we can get the cost of something like an mri scan down enough and if we can make sure that we're not over calling things then there's no reason not to have an absolutely regular scan let's say two years every two years when you're younger every one year when you're a little older i want and you know with the everywhere scanner vision I want imaging to be kind of an ongoing, intimate part of our lives.

44:56Not this thing that we do just when we're worried, are we sick? I want it to be the thing that tells you you're still okay. Not the thing that only tells you that something's wrong. I want it to be a safety net, not, you know, an end-stage tool.

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47:07Dr. Mark Hyman:For an exclusive offer, visit bioptimizers.com slash hymen and use the code hymen to get 15 % off. Subscribe and you'll get extra discounts, free gifts and guaranteed monthly supply. That's B-I-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S.com slash hymen and use the code hymen today. There'll be like tools and devices and things that we can have to put our biology online in real time and see what's going on. And it's kind of combined with this idea of an everywhere scanner is really very futuristic. So talk about this idea of the everywhere scanner and how it's going to change how we think about our health and medicine.

47:44I really think of it almost like building ourselves a new augmented artificial sensory system, right? We have multiple senses. In fact, you know what? It's not sci-fi at all. We already have continuous sensing. We've got our entire nervous system. We can sense temperature and pressure and pain and all of these things. And these sensors are woven throughout our body. The only problem is they're really not great at giving us early warning of internal things that are going wrong. They're really good at telling us, don't touch that hot stove now. But they're not giving us advanced warning of cancer.

48:29That's not what they evolved to do. I think what we're talking about with Everywhere Scanner and with Abundant Sensors is basically building that artificial nervous system that's giving us early warning of all kinds of other biological things that we just didn't happen to develop nerves for. And, you know, I think the body, quite frankly, it's a remarkable piece of engineering I think we should pay attention to what it's built. Certainly in imaging, almost every innovation in vision that has evolved has been copied and improved upon with an artificial imaging device somewhere. Every single thing that the eye does, we can learn from, and that the brain does in processing vision.

49:18Likewise, I think when we think about this network of continuous sensing, we should look at what the body's built and build on that.

49:26Dr. Mark Hyman:It's kind of cool. I mean, I rented a car recently and the thing just senses everything. It's like I drive under a bridge and the Google Maps turns a different shade or I'm driving down the road and there's no car in front of me, it turns the brights on. And when a car is coming, it turns the brights off. Or when, like, you know, every little, like I literally took my hands off the ceiling and said, hey, put your hand on someone. It looked in my eyes when I looked away for something, I was like, oh, make sure your eyes are on the road. I'm like, wow, this car is like spying on me, but it's sensing everything all the time, all around it.

49:55Dr. Mark Hyman:And, you know, kind of like a Waymo or a Tesla, which, you know, the self-driving is the same thing. And so we're talking about is augmenting the sensing of our own biology through various kinds of tools, whether they're intermittent or continuous tools that allow us to put our biology in a different context and to understand it over time and to not have this episodic, often too late to the game diagnostics, which unfortunately, you know, with medicine, when you find things too late, it's often hard to fix, right? And so I think particularly around cancer, you know, my father died of cancer, my sister died of cancer, she had cancer twice.

50:35Dr. Mark Hyman:You know, I don't want to die of cancer. I want to live a long, healthy life. And I feel like Like it's one of those things that we now actually potentially with the gallery test and liquid biopsies, the regular imaging, and even the proteomics that are coming, we literally could make cancer and dying of cancer a historical foot. I believe so. And I hope so. That's really the part of the mission of Function Health is to do that and to relieve so much suffering because there's so much suffering with cancer. And I, you know, I just, you see it all the time and I know it in my family and I've seen my own relatives just wither away and die.

51:10Dr. Mark Hyman:And it's just, it's such a heartbreak. And it's, in some ways, you know, if we had this proactive preventive approach to medicine, we wouldn't be in this situation. And my family has had that type of cancer history as well. And I just wish that we had had these tools earlier. It's giving us insight into human biology in a way that we've never had before. And we're able to then, on top of that, apply the 39 million scientific papers that have been published on PubMed to filter and understand all that information. They're taking the, you know, all the sort of case studies we can apply, all the training that we've done based on root cause medicine into the system.

51:54Dr. Mark Hyman:and so when you put your data into function you're you're actually putting your biology online and combined with these large language models and the advances that those we're seeing every day we're we're entering an era where we're we're really truly being able to understand the body in a way we never have before and look at the patterns in the data and create an early early assessment and continuous monitoring over time rather than this episodic kind of random checking to really know what's going on in your body. And then to be able to sort of understand the subtle changes, the differences, to look at the patterns in data, to learn and to advance science, to help individuals with their own issues.

52:35Dr. Mark Hyman:It's really quite amazing. So I would love sort of for you to unpack your vision of what we're doing with the medical intelligence lab, where we're headed and what we want to build in the world. Because I think this is really foundationally revolutionary to medicine and science itself. I think it's going to change everything we know about human health and biology. I think of it a little bit like a GPS for health. And if you unpack what a GPS does, it actually has a lot of the features that you talked about. First of all, you need a map, right? That's all of the accumulated medical knowledge that you're talking about.

53:09You need to know what the landscape is like that you're navigating through. Otherwise, you're going blind. But more than that, you also need to know your personal history. That's your biology that you've put online, right? Because if you don't know where you've come from, you know, you don't know what road you're on. I mean, you kind of need to know that individualized information, not just the collective information. And then the key thing, which I think we're really working hard on in the medical intelligence lab, is how do we create that guideline that gets you where you want to go, that travels with you and makes sure you get to 100 healthy years.

53:49And that involves then taking all of these patterns that we've learned, the population-wide patterns and the individual patterns based on your data, and projecting them forward and making predictions. Hey, listen, if you just keep on steering this way, you're headed for trouble. No, maybe you need to do a little course correction. Change your diet, change your exercise, you know, go in for another test at this interval, that type of thing. And I think it is definitely a remarkable time when we can think about creating that sort of comprehensive GPS. You mentioned that big tech is already, you know, gunning for this space.

54:32It's happening regardless of whether, you know, we in medicine are comfortable with it or not. I sort of see it as both our responsibility and our privilege to try to bring the science of medicine to that endeavor rather than just feeding lots and lots of data to chatbots. really trying to bring the collection of medical knowledge and the knowledge about integration of body systems. And the context, as you're talking about. And the context and your individual context. Yeah, that's what I mean, yeah. Exactly. To this problem so that we're not just generating a nice-sounding set of answers to questions.

55:18We're actually providing you with a guide. We're giving you that map to your health.

55:22Dr. Mark Hyman:And it's those little course corrections that make the difference, right? If you see, you know, if you track your blood sugar and you go, well, you know, it was 70s fasting, well, then it's 80s next year. Maybe the next year it's to go like to 85 and then maybe the next year is 89. And then, oh, I'm getting worse metabolic disease and I'm going to, I'm heading towards prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, even if I don't have the official diagnosis yet. And I can course correct. And in fact, going back to this model of biological senses, you had talked about the concern that some people legitimately have.

55:55Well, I don't want to be anxious all the time. I don't want to be thinking about the diseases I might develop. If you think about our senses, they evolved to protect us from harm in a similar way. We don't think about them all the time. We just get this burst of alarm if we step into a street and we see there's a car coming. Yeah. But most of the time, the senses are just operating in the background, keeping us alive. That's how I see this online biology and this network of sensors in the future. It's not constant alarm. It's just waking up and giving you a ping if you're about to step into the street with a car coming medically.

56:33That type of safety net is something that even the most kind of squeamish people might be comfortable with. It's just, you know, for the moment, don't do this because it's going to harm you, but otherwise live your life and live your life well.

56:47Dr. Mark Hyman:That's right. And I think we know so much now about how to prevent disease. And I think people are worried about finding out something that they can't do anything about. And I understand that. But most of the time, you know, your biology is changeable. And there are early detection signs that are, as I mentioned, these biochemical changes and then turn into pathological early changes we can see on scanning that really give us a roadmap to what's happening with our health. and it putting our head in the sand and not paying attention and not looking at our own personal data it doesn't make any sense now you go well i'm not a doctor how do i make sense of it all i mean yeah you're right it's if you don't know how to sort of make sense of it all then it's a lot but if you have the facilitation of a company like function health that provides you with the guidance provides you with the intelligence behind it to make sense of it to create a ranked order priority list of what you have to address to help you understand what the steps are you can take yourself when you need you know to do self-care and when you need to see seek medical care and provide that whole continuum of care for you rather than just sort of waiting around until something's happening that's the thing most people don't realize is that disease doesn't just happen it's occurring because of low-grade changes over many decades and the thing i want to sort of So to end with here is our bodies are this highly intelligent system that want to be healthy.

58:11Dr. Mark Hyman:Your body is not designed to be sick. It's not a design flaw. We are providing the conditions in our current modern society for the body to be sick with the crap food that we're having available. 73 % of the food on grocery store shelves is not even technically food. It's ultra processed frankenfoods. and foods. And we have enormous amount of environmental exposures and toxins that sometimes we can do things about and actually help our bodies detoxify. We have, you know, dysregulated circadian rhythms and sleep. We have excess chronic stress. We have all these things, sedentary lifestyles. These are things that we are empowered to do something about.

58:48Dr. Mark Hyman:We have nutrient deficiencies, which you can do something about. And when you, when you actually can know what's happening early, then you can, you can make changes that really change that course and allow your body to provide the conditions that are going to create health rather than simply waiting until you have to really treat some serious disease. And this is a fundamental paradigm shift is the idea that disease isn't just some random phenomena. It's something you can predict from early indicators and then do something about. I just saw a patient yesterday with Parkinson's disease. He'd been, you know, had warning signs way early.

59:24Dr. Mark Hyman:He had tremendous amounts of environmental exposures from hobbies and being in the Navy as a chemical engineer and, and in childhood. And I'm like, this guy's, you know, would be a sitting duck for some type of toxin related illness. And Parkinson's is a well-known toxin related condition. And yet he had to wait until he got Parkinson's for someone like me to look at his history and go, well, Jeek, you know, we gotta, we gotta get all this crap out of your system and we've got to detoxify you. And, and, and that was something that he didn't have to necessarily do if he'd been proactive and actually was able to measure the toxic load of his body early on.

1:00:03Dr. Mark Hyman:Same thing happened to me. I had heavy metal poisoning from China, but I wasn't sick right away. It was like this kind of slowly building up burden of toxins that then knocked me off my feet. But if I had known earlier, I could have done something about it and not ended up in this catastrophic illness. So I think we can actually see these changes over time. We can do something about them if we have the right information. And he just didn't have the right information. So that's really why I think medical intelligence is such an important concept. And in our medical intelligence lab at Function Health and the science we're putting behind it and the effort we're putting behind really providing the best quality understanding information of your biology is going to change medicine and healthcare.

1:00:42Hear, hear. No, and listen, Mark, I mean, we started the conversation with the future of seeing, right? In some ways, I think in a nutshell, the future of seeing involves actually looking. now that we have the capability, now that we have the capability to see lots of your biology, now that we have the capability to use AI and other similar tools to integrate that, to connect it to knowledge that has been accumulated over all of these centuries, now is the time when we need to start living with our eyes open and living with that kind of guidance.

1:01:18Dr. Mark Hyman:So The Future of Seeing, your book, which everybody should get a copy, where can they find it? They can find it at Columbia University Press or on Amazon, of course. I love it. Columbia University Press. That's beautiful. I love it. Of course. It's a great title, The Future of Seeing, because it's not literally just about imaging. Your book is about imaging, but it's also, you know, it implies that the future of seeing is about the future of seeing deep into human biology in a way we've never been able to do historically, and it will transform medicine and healthcare from the outside in, because traditional healthcare is not changing anytime fast.

1:01:50Dr. Mark Hyman:The edifice is too solid and the resistance is too much and the old ideas die very hard. I mean, I think, you know, there's a book I read in college called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. And in this book, he talked about this idea of a paradigm shift. And he, that's where the word paradigm shift came from. And in the book, he talks about this idea of normal science, that what we believe is just so embedded that we can't unsee it. In other words, if you were living in, you know, 1400, the earth was flat. If you were living in the pre-Galilean era, the earth was the center of the universe, right?

1:02:30Dr. Mark Hyman:This is something now that we have to understand because we are living in a totally different era where we can actually see things that we never could see before. We can look where we never looked before. I mean, look, I remember, I mean, let's see, it was 13 years after I graduated from medical school that we decoded the human genome. So, I mean, this is in a very short time, and that was a billion dollars. Now it's$200 to decode your own personal genome. That's where we're going. We're going to this massive, personal, data-driven healthcare system. And I think in a way we're disrupting healthcare because we're going to empower people to be in a way their own healthcare agent.

1:03:21Dr. Mark Hyman:And then yes, use medicine and use hospitals and use surgery and use doctors when you need them. But most of the things that we, you pick them up early, they're fundamentally things that are under our control. It's what we eat. It's how we move. It's how we sleep. It's how we manage stress. It's our relationships. It's our toxin exposures, which you can mitigate to some degree. those are all the things that are driving disturbances in our health and those are things that we can pick up in these early warning signs like your car okay your tire pressure is a little low or your engine light is a little thing or whatever like I don't know these sensors are amazing on these cars and wouldn't it be great to have that dashboard for your body and that's really what we're doing with Clunction Health and it's just going to get better and smarter so I encourage everybody to you know not just because I co-founded the company but I encourage everybody to think about how do you put your biology online so you can be proactive about your health and not get that, that horrible sinking feeling in your stomach when you're in the doctor's office and they say, you've got metastatic cancer.

1:04:16Dr. Mark Hyman:You know, Chris Vanderbeek, I think, I think his name was this actor who recently died of cancer. And, you know, he didn't need to, he really didn't need to, you know, my sister didn't need to, my father didn't need to. And we, I wish this technology was around then. And I think this really what we're talking about here, Dan. So any final thoughts or words for people listening? I think you said it beautifully, Mark. I think really my final words are, in this remarkable era, keep your eyes open. Get that biology online. Figure out how you can essentially have this new safety net that nobody in the history of humanity has had before.

1:04:57Yeah.

1:04:58Dr. Mark Hyman:Amazing. Well, thank you, Dan. Thank you for your work. I'm excited to work with you building the medical intelligence lab and keep function involving and helping it to actually help billions and millions of people. Uh, I think we're just getting started. So, uh, people should stay tuned. You can learn more about Dan's work through his book, the future of seeing, uh, go to functionhealth.com to learn more. It's only a dollar a day to join as a member. And that will give you a deep dive on your biology and you can get a full body MRI scan as a baseline through that website and even more deeper scans if you want for other things.

1:05:30Dr. Mark Hyman:So I'm really excited about what we're doing together. I think combining the, the, be able to gather your history data, your EMR, your wearables, imaging, lab data, all putting it together and helping people understand their biology is, is really revolutionary. I'm super, super excited about it. Thank you so much, Mark. It's a, it's a pleasure and a privilege to talk with you and to work with you. Amazing. Well, thanks Dan. If you love this podcast, please share it with someone else you think would also enjoy it. You can find me on all social media channels at Dr. Mark Hyman. Please reach out.

1:05:59Dr. Mark Hyman:I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to The Dr. Hyman Show wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Dr. Mark Hyman for video versions of this podcast and more. Thank you so much again for tuning in. We'll see you next time on The Dr. Hyman Show. This podcast is separate from my clinical practice at the Ultra Wellness Center, my work at Cleveland Clinic, and Function Health, where I am Chief Medical Officer. This podcast represents my opinions and my guests' opinions. Neither myself nor the podcast endorses the views or statements of my guests.

1:06:28Dr. Mark Hyman:This podcast is for educational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional care by a doctor or other qualified medical professional. This podcast is provided with the understanding that it does not constitute medical or other professional advice or services. If you're looking for help in your journey, please seek out a qualified medical practitioner. And if you're looking for a functional medicine practitioner, visit my clinic, the Ultra Wellness Center at ultrawellnesscenter.com and request to become a patient. It's important to have someone in your corner who is a trained, licensed healthcare practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health.

1:07:02Dr. Mark Hyman:This podcast is free as part of my mission to bring practical ways of improving health to the public. So I'd like to express gratitude to sponsors that made today's podcast possible. Thanks so much again for listening.