Office Hours: The Blood Tests That Actually Matter for Your Health

Mark Hyman, MD

Dr. Mark Hyman is leading a health revolution—one focused on using food as medicine to support longevity, energy, mental clarity, happiness, and so much more. Mark Hyman, MD is a practicing family physician and an internationally recognized leader, speaker, educator, and advocate in the field of Functional Medicine. He is the founder and director of The UltraWellness Center, Founder and Senior Advisor for the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, a sixteen-time New York Times best-selling author, and Board President for Clinical Affairs for The Institute for Functional Medicine. He is the founder and chairman of the Food Fix Campaign, dedicated to transforming our food and agriculture system through policy.

He is a co-founder and the Chief Medical Officer of Function Health. He is the host of one of the leading health podcasts, The Dr. Hyman Show with 150+ million downloads. Dr. Hyman is a regular medical contributor to several television shows and networks, including CBS This Morning, Today, Good Morning America, The View, Fox, and CNN.

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Full Transcript

Automatically generated. Please forgive any typos or errors in the following transcript. It was generated by a third party and has not been subsequently reviewed by our team.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Welcome to Office Hours. This is our dedicated one on one space to go deeper, get clear, and explore what truly moves the needle for your health. I'm doctor Mark Hyman, and each week, we're gonna pull back the curtain and share the insights, the research, the lessons that don't always make it into our conversations with guests. Because at the end of the day, you are the CEO of your own health. And for many of you, your family's health too.

And you might not feel it all the time, but you have far more power and agency than you realize. I'm glad you're here. Imagine spending hundreds, maybe even a thousand dollars on your blood work, only for your doctor to look you in the eye and say, everything's normal, you're fine, but you're not fine. You're exhausted, you have brain fog, you can't lose weight. And that frustrating gap between what the lab says and what your body is screaming is the very reason we created this episode.

We're gonna show you why those quote normal ranges are actually broken and not accurate, And how to find the real hidden story your blood is telling you.

Dr. Mark Hyman
Whether you're using a function or just looking at labs your doctor ordered. This is about helping you make sense of your numbers so you can

Dr. Mark Hyman
be proactive about your health. I always say if you go to the doctor and you get a checkup and you feel like crap, and your doctor says, well, your exam's fine, your labs are fine, there's only two possibilities there. One, either you're crazy or your doctor's missing something. And I don't think you're crazy, and the truth is your doctor's missing something. So let me tell you why understanding labs are important and why understanding how to use them, how to interpret them is even more important.

So lab tests are powerful tools for understanding what's going on underneath the hood in your body. They can help you identify things that are cooking along the continuum disease. It doesn't just happen from one day to the next that you get sick. You get sick slowly, invisibly, presymptomatic, asymptomatic until one day you start to get symptoms, and then eventually you get a disease. And then you need a drug.

And then it's just a chronic vicious cycle from there. And the key here is to understand labs in the context of your biology and how to optimize your health through tuning your system up. It's like all the systems in your car. Everything's gotta be tuned up right for your car to run right. You need the right air in the tires.

You need the right chewing for your steering wheel. You need I don't know. I'm not a mechanic. But anyway, you get what I'm saying. And the idea is that, you know, we don't really do that to our bodies.

We don't have a dashboard for understanding what's happening. Well, this is what we need to do. We need to have a dashboard. 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 your blood count is super low. I mean, 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 that is currently done has been scientifically shown to be pretty much useless. So and what we really wanna do is understand the root cause, not just a symptomatic approach.

And we wanna look at what's the body's doing. I I cofounded a company called Function Health to really help empower people to be the CEO on 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, into subtle disturbances that can lead to symptoms later, diseases, or even to find out things that are currently going on that you may not know about. And you 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 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 dataset on what's going on with your body. Now your health is 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 once 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, in very rare earlier, 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. So most of us are walking around with these blind spots.

We don't really know we have these problems. We think we're fine. We don't really know what's going on, and we think how we feel is kind of normal. We just have these subtle symptoms, or it's kind of just how we are. And I call it the FLC syndrome, when we feel like crap.

And and we think it's normal. Oh, we should have, you know, headaches, or we should have joint pain, or we should have sinus issues, or we should have migraines, or we should be tired, or I should have irritable bowel, or I'm a little depressed, or whatever. These are things we come to accept as just part of who we are. They're really not. They're just signs of imbalances.

And so we don't really wanna guess, we wanna test. And that's what I would say. Test, don't guess. And and we want to use real data, including your medical history, and your lab data, and lots of other information we're collecting with function health, including wearables, and your genetics eventually, stool testing. And this is really where we have access to stuff that you never had access before unless you went to the doctor and had him or her and know what the order, which they usually don't because they're only looking for acute disease, and understand how to interpret them, which they don't.

And the insurance pay for them, which they won't. So you're kind of stuck in a system that doesn't allow you to be proact about your health, but that's why we co founded Function was to help really create that platform where you can do this. And when you look under the hood, you do full body lab testing, just comprehensive testing of every system in your body, not necessarily looking for disease, but also looking for imbalances that lead to disease, doing advanced full body MRI imaging, which we now offer through Ezra as part of Function. You go to function.com and and learn all about this. You get real insights and clarity about what's going on with your health.

You can take back control. You start being preventive and proactive instead of just being in a reactive system. We have a reactive medical system, not a proactive system, and that needs to change. We wait until you have a disease, and then we, you know, give you a treatment. I had a patient once who had a blood sugar of like 115, which was heading towards diabetes.

And I said, Hey, did your doctor ever check you on this? And he said, Oh, yeah. We checked it. What did the doctor say? Well, he said, We'll follow it.

And then when he gets to the diabetes range, we'll give him medication. And I'm like, that is the worst approach. You want to be the opposite of that. And and really, Function Health was created out of this need for at least what I believe, you know, on our on the cofounding believe, was for people to be able to actually have access to their own health data and to own it. And and we we, with Function, can test literally hundreds and hundreds of biomarkers for a dollar a day, which is just really affordable for most people.

This is less than a cup of coffee a day. You can get a comprehensive assessment of over a 110 biomarkers twice a year, and even add on other tests that are advanced tests for looking for Alzheimer's, autoimmune disease, or allergies, or other things you might want to look at, mold. And it'll tell you what's going on. It'll help you reveal these patterns, it'll give you the clues of what's going on in your body, and it'll help guide you with what we call medical intelligence, which is a system that allows you to filter all of your personal health data, including your history, your lab data, your wearables, everything, into a system that also is almost omniscient. In other words, it it knows all the scientific literature, it's been trained by hundreds of knowledge experts, it looks at the data through machine learning AI, and it helps you to understand where you are, where you're going, and what to do about it in a way we never had possible before, in a way that's way smarter than most doctors, and honestly, smarter than me.

You know, I've been doing functional medicine and doing this for forty years. It's really so good in terms of understanding what's happening and the pattern. So let's talk about the problem with lab tests in general. The first problem is you get your lab back, and your doctor goes, well, they're normal. They're normal.

What the hell does normal mean? Normal is essentially it's a scientific term that means two standard deviations from the mean. So when you look at the, you know, the average of the population, do two standard deviations separate from that. That's what's normal. So it could be if you're two or 92, you know, that's a big range of people, and we wanna look at what's what's optimal, not what's normal.

And and and and just to help you understand this, if if you were to land in America, and you were to say, you know, what is the normal weight of Americans, it's overweight. Because seventy five percent of us are overweight. It's abnormal to be thin in America today. But it doesn't mean it's good. It just means it's called normal.

So we wanna get away from saying, oh, your labs are normal. You're fine. We wanna look at what is optimal? What is an optimal lab range? In other words, your vitamin d on the lab says it's 29, that's low.

If it's 31, that's good. But actually it should be more like 50 as optimal. So even though lab rat strain changes are showing you a number that seems like it's normal, let's say your lab range is thirty one, that's not good. You're gonna get more bone loss, more immune function, your risk for autoimmune disease, risk for heart disease, dementia, cancers, all go up if your vitamin D levels are not over 50. I mean, if you if you had a COVID infection in your lab, a vitamin D was over 50, there were zero deaths in that population.

Zero. So we need to look at what's optimal, not what's just normal. So the conventional lab ranges just missed this early dysfunction. Like like, other words, we keep we keep shifting the goalposts. You just talk about hypertension, then we talk about prehypertension, we talk about diabetes, then we talk about prediabetes, we talk about autoimmune disease, we talk about pre autoimmune disease.

Well, it's not pre anything. These are just early disturbances that are leading you on that path. So if your blood sugar is normal, it's 70 to a 100. But what if you're 99? That's not really optimal.

It should be probably between seventy and eighty eighty seven according to literature because after that, your risk goes up. When doctors order tests, they're just ordering things that that are really, like I said, only abnormal if you're in the hospital. They got your CBC, which is your blood count. So if you're anemic, well, great. I mean, I I had surgery.

Was anemic. I needed to check my blood count. It was low. I got a blood transfusion. You know, that's that's good.

It's helpful. And you can see if you have an infection, high white count. But you have to be kinda sick, really sick. It doesn't really look for chronic illness. Your basic metabolic panel is your blood sugar, electrolytes, liver, kidneys.

I mean, those are really things that are only abnormal, your calcium. These are abnormal when you're really sick. Cholesterol, they check for sure, but, you know, again, the the way they check it is really outdated and almost meaningless. That's the one kind of thing they're looking at in their screening, but it's basically a reaction. If you have high cholesterol, take a statin, which is not always the right answer.

So a lot of things also that are symptoms that get missed, you know, have have clues in your lab tests. Right? So fatigue. It could be so many things that are causing that. It could be thyroid.

It could be autoimmune disease. It could be low b vitamins. It could be low vitamin d. Brain fog, same thing. And weight gain, you know, you you may you're struggling with weight gain.

Why? Maybe you may have normal blood sugar, but your insulin levels might be sky high. Or you might have depression or mood changes, but you might have very low folate or b twelve, which may be showing up through our advanced testing of of homocysteine and methylmalonic acid, which are the better test to check for b twelve and folate. Or maybe you have low omega three fats, which we check, and that can lead to, obviously, depression if you have low omega three. So joint pain, same thing.

Maybe you have gluten sensitivity. Maybe you have a high CRP that's showing that you have an autoimmune disease or an autoimmune marker. Skin issues, also same thing. There's so many things that we can test. You might have dairy allergy.

You might have gluten issues. You might have insulin resistance if you have acne, which we can tell. So all these things that seem bone normal actually have things that we can find on your lab test and then help you fix. Now thyroid is a great example. Most doctors don't check thyroid as a routine screening test.

If they do, they only check one out of five important tests that you need to look at your thyroid. Five. They only do one. And it's called TSH. And that can be, quote, normal, but the range in there is point five to five.

Now Mhmm. That's not actually good because according to the American College of Endocrinology, it should be anything over three and a half should be considered a slow thyroid. But again, most doctors don't treat that, don't look at it. And maybe they don't look at the whole picture. They don't tell the whole story.

You wanna look at the the actual thyroid hormones because TSH is just checking your brain and seeing if it's making the stimulant for your thyroid, the thyroid stimulating hormone. But the t three, if you have low t three, that's the active hormone that actually does the work in the body. Maybe low because there's a conversion problem from t three to four, and that can be for a lot of reasons like selenium deficiency or mercury poisoning or yeast overgrowth or toxins. All a lot of things can affect it. And you can also have a high reverse t three, which again is another test we do, which is kind of like a break on your thyroid.

It can happen from chronic disease. So you might have normal looking thyroid, but your reverse t three is high, and your basic thyroid's not working. You can also have thyroid antibodies. A lot of people have thyroid antibodies, which we check, and thirteen percent of function members have elevated thyroid antibodies. And I bet you a lot of those people are not treated.

There are incidental findings that they didn't know they had that are causing subtle symptoms. It could be, oh, my hair's a little dry, or my nails are cracking, or my skin's dry, or a little fluid retention, or a little depressed, or my cholesterol's a little high, or I'm a little constipated, or my sex drive's a little low, or very, very subtle symptoms of thyroid dysfunction or I'm not sleeping. And you might have an autoimmune thyroid condition that's not even actually showing up on the other test. And so your TSH could look normal, but you're basically low thyroid function. So you might feel these symptoms.

Right? Brain fog, fatigue, weight gain, constipation, depression, but you're told that, you know, it's normal, and maybe it's in your head. But the truth is there's something going on. And if you look deeply, and this is why we we we've done this, and we've we've basically developed a lab panel based on the most common things that people are suffering from that doctors are missing, that have a impact on improving their health in the long term. And so when we look at what's going on, we look at all the patterns in the data.

It's not just one analyte. We look at everything together. And you don't want to just look at that, but you want to look at we actually can do an advanced test for insulin resistance where we look at markers that are just now available. But also your liver function test may be abnormal. Your kidney function might be abnormal.

You might have protein urine. You might have low testosterone if you're a man. You might have high testosterone if you're a woman. You might have a other issues like high uric acid. You might have inflammation on high CRP.

You can see these patterns that that kinda tell you a story. It's not just one lab test, but how are these all connected? And the key is you wanna understand how your body is just one big system, and everything affects everything. So when you really look at at what function's doing, it's really providing you with a deep, comprehensive picture of your biology in the moment, and then longitudinally over time. And it helps you understand where those patterns are, where you where your personal health is, and and how to understand what's going on, and then how to optimize things and get them into an optimal range, not just normal range.

And and and in doing that, people will have a profound improvement in their overall health. It's really quite remarkable what happens when you start to tune people up. Even the simplest things. I mean, you're just low in vitamin d, you know, you could be getting more frequent infections and colds. You could be having seasonal affective disorder or the winter blues.

You could have muscle aches and pains. You could have all sorts of things that are subtle, but when you correct it, you feel better. And the FLC syndrome or feel like crap really improves. Alright. So let's get into it.

What are the core labs that everybody should know about and should track in their bodies? Right? And what do they tell you? I mean, you can only, you know, run a a few tests to truly understand what's going on in your body. What would be giving you the most valuable information and why?

So let's break it down into the big categories of what we track and what we need to track. The first is metabolic health. And when I say metabolic health, I mean blood sugar regulation and insulin. This is what's driving most of the disease in America today, Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, dementia, aging itself, weight gain, obesity, I mean, the list goes on. So the things that we track are fasting glucose, which most doctors will check on your checkup.

We also check a one c even if you're not diabetic because it changes slowly. And as I said, anything from over five starting to increase can be a concern. And we check your fasting insulin, which is really important because that's the first thing to go up. Before your blood sugar a one c go up, your insulin goes up fasting, and it's really important to look at that. So you wanna look at what the optimum range is for blood sugar, not that reference range.

And the optimum range is probably 70 to 85, not like up to a 100. Now if you go to a 100 to one twenty six, that's diabetes. One twenty six is diabetes. But it's a continuum of dysfunction. And when you fix your metabolic health, it improves everything, your energy, your mood, longevity.

It's the key to longevity is understanding what's going on with your metabolic health. And if you have insulin resistance, you might have belly fat and weight gain, sugar cravings, you might feel crashes up and down with your energy after meals, like hypoglycemic. You might have brain fog, tired, and you might have many, many other symptoms too, like diseases. But those are symptoms that are common, and and often people just dismiss those. But when you look at the full function health panel, it includes all this metabolic testing we're talking about, but it also includes, and we'll talk about in a minute, special cholesterol testing that most doctors don't do that has been around for about forty years, but still hasn't been adopted because it takes decades for things for like like, better innovations to get into medicine.

The next big category we wanna look at is inflammation because inflammation, again, is one of the biggest drivers of chronic illness, and it and the major cause is metabolic dysfunction, which is related to blood sugar, but there are other causes. When we look at your inflammation levels, something called HSCRP, which is a cytokine or molecule the liver makes that is related to inflammation. We look at ferritin, which can be an iron storage marker. But if it's high, it also is an inflammation marker. We also get your blood count and and your white count and your white cells.

And all those tell a lot of from a story about what's going on with your immune system and inflammation. So we can tell if there's low grade inflammation, and this underlies most chronic conditions. So when you identify inflammation earlier, you can find out the cause. What is the cause? It can be toxins, poor diet, stress, allergens, you know, microbes, change in your microbiome.

But it these this creates this quiet, silent, deadly killer of inflammation. And that leads to pretty much, as I said, almost all the diseases of aging. In fact, one of the hallmarks of aging is inflammaging, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity, dementia, stroke, kidney disease. These are all inflammatory diseases, even hypertension, inflammatory diseases. And if we figure out the cause of inflammation, we can get it sorted.

It'll also help us track autoimmune diseases as well. They're really important. And a lot of people are gonna have vague symptoms of inflammation. They just might not feel good. They might be achy.

They might be tired. They might have brain fog. They could obviously have weight gain because of that. Inflammation from any cause will cause weight gain. For example, if you have a gut issue and you have bad bugs in your gut and they're producing inflammatory molecules, you can gain weight independent of having a crappy diet because it'll just drive inflammation.

Alright. Let's talk about cholesterol. Cholesterol is one of those things that, you know, doctors check. Everybody gets it. It's standard, but they don't do the right test.

And they miss doing a whole bunch of tests that are really, really important. So yes, we look at total cholesterol and HDL and LDL and triglycerides, but we look at the quality of those particles and cholesterol molecules. We look at the size of them, and we look at the number of them. And it tells us a very different picture of what's going on. So you're gonna have perfectly normal cholesterol, but it can be made up of all the worst particles, and your risk of heart disease is really bad.

Or you can have a really high cholesterol, and it's made up of all the good particles, and not a lot of them, and you're totally fine. So you you can't really tell what's going on with your heart, cholesterol, or disease risk without doing the right cholesterol test. And Function Health does that. Now we also test other things that doctors miss. We look at ApoB, probably one of the most important predictors of heart disease risk, which is a sort of measure of all the small and bad particles in your blood.

We also look at something called lipoprotein little a or LPA, little a, and that that's a genetically determined cholesterol marker, but it can be managed and treated. And it's important to know because you have to manage your other risks more aggressively, and a lot of people have it, and doctors miss it, and then they'll look for it. Now the thing about heart disease is and I don't wanna scare people, but the first symptom of of heart attack and heart disease for fifty percent of the people that have it, you know what it is? Sudden death. You literally drop dead of a heart attack, and you have no idea it's coming.

Literally no idea. That's terrible. So you don't wanna wait. And then it's often subtle even if you have symptoms. So people don't know.

And they can be a little tired, a little short of breath, a little whatever, and and they don't know how bad their heart disease. I had a friend who was like 53 years old, and he had pretty significant heart disease and 90% occlusion, and he was jogging and felt a little tired, short of breath, and, you know, he didn't get any issues. When he got checked, he had full occlusion. He has really bad lipid particles. So really important to get this diagnostics early and manage it.

It can be managed through lifestyle, it can be managed through supplements, sometimes medications are needed, but really important to manage your risk. We also look at thyroid, we talked a little bit about that earlier, I won't go too much into it, but you know, it it's important to do the full panel of thyroid tests, including TSH, free t three, free t four, thyroid antibodies, sometimes reverse t three. And you have to look at what's optimal, not just what the normal range is, but what's optimal. Like, if the range is point five to five for TSH, probably the optimal should be like one to two. And so we look at that and try to get people in the optimal range and not just manage to the lab reference range.

And you can have really subtle symptoms, as I mentioned, fatigue, hair loss, constipation, brain fog, weight gain, depression, you know, low sex drive, cracked nails, hair loss, I mean, loss of the outer third of your eyebrows, and all kinds of stuff that just don't really maybe seem serious, but that are serious. Because if you if you have it untreated, you actually will end up having a higher risk of having heart attacks and other conditions later in life. What about nutrients? Doctors don't check your nutritional status. Now what is the point of nutrients anyway?

I mean, there's 37,000,000,000 chemical reactions in your body every second. Every single one of those chemical reactions, because you got about 40,000,000,000,000 cells, every single one of those chemical reactions needs a helper, an enzyme to convert one molecule to the next. And every enzyme needs a helper, and those helpers are vitamins and minerals. So they literally grease the wheels of your metabolic system in in such a profound way that that one third of our entire DNA codes for enzymes, and those enzymes need these nutrients, and they only need different amounts. So getting the right new nutrient status for you is really important.

And that's why we do a deep dive on nutrients. We look at vitamin d, we look at zinc, magnesium, iron studies, omega threes, folate, b twelve, minerals, lot lots more. We can check all kinds of things, but you really wanna get a good basic picture. We do that on the on the basic function panel, but it's also add ons so you can do much, much more. And you wanna track it over time because it changes and your needs change, but getting your nutrient levels optimized is so important.

We also look at things that can relate to abnormal gut function. You know, things like iron absorption may be low. B 12 may be low because of absorption issues. You might have inflammation related to gut stuff. You have liver functions that might be elevated.

Your your blood sugar even can be as tied, as I mentioned, to your microbiome. So all these things are really related and and are really important to track. So and and you can have all kinds of symptoms that doctors dismiss. Oh, it's IBS. It's in your head.

What's the big deal? You know, just relax, and it's all anxiety. Not true. Irritable bowel is caused by and not an irritable brain, but the irritable bowel causes an irritable brain. It's the other direction.

It's the the body mind effect, not the mind body effect. And you can have a bloating, constipation, diarrhea, reflux, food sensitivities, all these things we can start to manage and check for. So let's talk about how how we read labs differently from the perspective of understanding the body as a system or a network, the root cause medicine. Some people call it functional medicine. I don't really care what you call it.

But this is really where science is going. So when I look at a lab, I can look at the same result as another doctor and see a totally different story. And I see a very different picture because I'm looking for subtle patterns. I'm looking for relationships between things. I'm looking for root causes.

So instead of like looking for, oh, do we have a diagnosable disease that shows up in the lab test? Do you have megaloblastic like anemia that comes from severe b twelve deficiency? Maybe not. But maybe you have a subtle change in the size of your red blood cells that's creeping up that indicates that you might have a b twelve deficiency that's an early on one that's not so severe. And so you can look at these things like insulin.

You might see insulin should be you know, the reference range is 18 on on the lab, but it should be less than five. So if it starts to go from five to 10, you're like, oh, you're getting in trouble over 10, more serious over 20, you're in big trouble. So really how to look at subtle things. A thyroid, subtle shifts in thyroid, subtle shifts in inflammation, subtle shifts in in your insulin related lipids, which are particle size, particle number. All these things really help you identify what's going on.

And they're beautiful because we can actually not just measure one point in time, we can actually track things over time in a systematic way, and that tells you some really important data. So like for example, like, might see your blood sugar is 95 and the doctor goes, oh, that's fine. But your insulin's a little high. Your triglycerides are going up, which is a sign of prediabetes. Inflammation's going up a little bit.

And these are clues that things are really going off the rails long before you actually become diabetic. So really important to start tracking these things, subtle changes over time, and tracking against you because everybody's different. So your own your your own reference range is enhanced. Your your what's your optimal? What's your baseline?

It may be different than somebody else. So how do you then approach your own labs? What should you do? Well, think about labs as a window into how your body's actually functioning, and how you begin to interpret them through a functional lens, how your body's working. How do you think about this?

First of all, always get a copy of your labs. I I function provides you with a copy. You can you can download the the full version. You can see it on the dashboard. But you really wanna to go and see your doctor, you wanna look at your labs.

You also wanna compare your results to optimal range, not just normal. So in all the content for function, each biomarker, we we reach we show you what is the normal range with the reference range, and then what's the optimum range. And it's important to track things at least once or twice a year based on what the issues are or the patterns are. Is your insulin going up? Is your inflammation rising or CRP going up?

Is your vitamin D a little low? Is it worse in the winter? So then you can kind of be more proactive with your doctor. And this is the key, you know. Am I heading in the right direction?

What's borderline but still important? What lifestyle changes can move this? They may or may not know. But with Function Health, we have now medical intelligence, and we have a medical function chat, which you can kinda interact with your own data. And based on your own data and and your self awareness, you can be proactive, you can be preventive, We can do a personalized approach to optimizing your health and not be in this reactive state that medicine is in.

So just remember, labs aren't just for diagnosing disease. They're basically helping you identify a road map to optimizing your health and your future health. It really is what function is all about. It's about empowering people with their own data. It's about helping people have agency, about being the CEO of your own health, about being able to measure, track, and empower yourself with long term data and and insights from the world's tops doctors and scientists in the world scientific literature, but using your own data as the core anchor that all that information is helping you understand.

And so Function does all these things in one panel, which is which is really super easy to understand, and it's really elegant. And I encourage you to check it out. You go to functionhealth.com/mark and check it out. Now if this episode sparks something for you, I want to invite you to take the next step. Don't just hear this information.

I want you to apply it. Get curious about your own data. Look at your labs through a new lens. Dig deeper, and start connecting the dots in your own health story. And if you know someone who's struggling, or someone who doesn't feel well, keeps being told their labs are, quote, normal, I want you to share this episode with them.

It might be the perspective shift they've been waiting for. We all deserve access to real answers, and this is where it begins. Thanks for joining me for office hours. I love diving into these topics with you. Remember, you are the CEO of your own health, and every choice you make can move you closer to healing and vitality.

I wanna keep these episodes as relevant and useful as possible. So tell me, what do you want to explore next? What questions are you wrestling with? What breakthroughs are you chasing? Share your ideas in the comments on social media or through the link in the show notes.

I'm listening. Until next time, keep taking charge, keep asking questions, and keep showing up for your health.

Dr. Mark Hyman
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 Doctor Mark Hyman. Please reach out. I'd love to hear your comments and questions. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe to the Doctor Hyman show wherever you get your podcasts.

And don't forget to check out my YouTube channel at Doctor 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 Doctor 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. 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 health care practitioner and can help you make changes, especially when it comes to your health. 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.