Mark Hyman, My Personal Story
My own experience as a patient has helped me to become a better doctor. After completing my residency in Family Practice I moved to Idaho to start my own practice. While in Idaho I ruptured a disc in my spine and had suffered paralysis, nerve damage, and pain. I saw specialists here in the states, but no one seemed to able to help. During a subsequent trip to China, however, I met a Chinese doctor in Bejing who thought he could help me. He used various techniques including Gua Sha, which removes negative energy by rubbing a tincture over the skin with an object that felt like an ice scraper.
Although my American neurologist, neurosurgeon, and rehabilitation surgeons had told me that I would never fully regain my strength or nerve function, my pain disappeared, my muscles enlarged in size, and my limp disappeared. Now many years later, I am still pain-free and able to run, ski, and even play ice hockey.
That was my first significant personal experience with alternative treatment. In the meantime, now married, I had moved back to the mountains of Western Massachusetts to raise my two children, and to support myself I ended up doing emergency room work in Springfield.
This inner-city job took a serious toll on my psyche and my family; I felt completely overwhelmed. Like many doctors, I believed I wasn’t subject to the same sleep requirements as the rest of the human race. I often went for days taking just short naps, working difficult night shifts, eating poorly, drinking quadruple espressos at eleven at night to survive the next shift. I did this for years, neglecting my body’s own signals telling me to slow down.
Then, in March 1996, I attended a nutrition conference featuring doctors Dean Ornish, Benjamin Spock, and Neal Barnard. That, combined with my work in the emergency room, where I so often saw people at the end of a long process of disease and dysfunction (often self inflicted), made it easy for me to renew my interest in nutrition and alternative medicine. I realized I had to change the way I worked. Two weeks later, I was offered the position of medical co-director at Canyon Ranch. Serendipity landed me in the perfect place at the perfect time.
I restored a healthier rhythm to my life, with regular patterns of sleeping, waking, eating, resting, and working. My diet changed as I stopped relying on caffeine and sugar to keep me going, and instead started using nutrients and herbal therapies that could heal my digestive system and repair my damaged immune system. Now, when my body talked, I listened.
This journey to health took me from learning about and addressing my body’s nutritional biochemistry and cellular biology through a process of psychological and spiritual renewal. It allowed me to heal completely, and gave me the basis on which I now heal others.
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Ceonex, Inc.