Download the accompanying reference guide.

161 Pages·2009·3.19 MB·English

Mark Hyman, M.D.
The
5
5
Forces
of
Wellness
The Ultraprevention System for Living an Active,
Age-Defying, Disease-Free Life
An Instruction Manual for Your Body
The
2 5 Forces of Wellness
IMPORTANT:
To begin — please save this workbook
to your desktop or in another location.
The
5 Forces of Wellness 3
Table of Contents
Welcome .......................................................................5
Session 1: From Illness to Wellness .................................................7
Session 2: Medical Myths ........................................................22
Session 3: Healthy Aging .........................................................36
Session 4: Malnutrition ..........................................................49
Ultraprevention Questionnaire, Part 1: Malnutrition ..................................50
Lab Tests for Malnutrition ........................................................57
Session 5: Inflammation .........................................................63
Ultraprevention Questionnaire, Part 2: Inflammation..................................63
Lab Tests for Inflammation .......................................................75
Session 6: Impaired Metabolism ...................................................82
Ultraprevention Questionnaire, Part 3: Impaired Metabolism ...........................82
Lab Tests for Impaired Metabolism ...............................................102
Session 7: Impaired Detoxification ................................................105
Ultraprevention Questionnaire, Part 4: Impaired Detoxification ........................105
Lab Tests for Impaired Detoxification .............................................122
Session 8: Oxidative Stress ......................................................124
Ultraprevention Questionnaire, Part 5: Oxidative Stress ...............................124
Lab Tests for Oxidative Stress ....................................................129
Ultraprevention Questionnaire Scoring ............................................131
Conclusion by Mark Hyman, M.D. ................................................132
The
4 5 Forces of Wellness
The
5 Forces of Wellness 5
WELCOME
Congratulations! The 5 Forces of Wellness is about to take you on a journey of self-discovery and,
ultimately, better health. In this program you’ll learn that it’s not enough to wait until you’re
sick to get healthy or until you have a symptom to go to the doctor. This program will teach you
how your body works.
Were you born with a little instruction book that told you how much you should eat? Or listed
what kinds of food, vitamins, and exercise would suit your body best? No. Few of us know how
to optimize this beautiful creation — our bodies.
That’s what this program is about. It’s about helping people thrive. It’s about creating an envi-
ronment in which you can feel fully healthy, fully engaged, fully alive, and not have to deal with
chronic symptoms that so many think are inevitable parts of aging. This whole program is
about learning how to take care of yourself and how to make your body function at its highest
level.
For each session, do the following:
• Preview the section of the workbook that goes with the audio session.
• Listen to the audio session at least once.
• Complete the exercises and the ultraprevention questionnaire in this workbook.
By taking the time to preview the session before you listen, you are priming yourself to absorb
the material. You’ll be able to absorb the information faster — and you will see results faster.
In every session there are easy exercises to help you expand your thinking about health. In this
workbook there are also five ultraprevention questionnaires that you can use as a self-diagnostic
tool. At the end of the workbook you can compile the questionnaire answers to determine how
you are managing the five forces of wellness. The powerful information in this workbook will
get you started toward an active, age-defying, disease-free life.
In addition to the material in this program, Dr. Mark Hyman has created a web site,
www.drhyman.com, that contains even more in-depth health information.
Let’s begin.
The
6 5 Forces of Wellness
The
5 Forces of Wellness 7
SESSION 1: From Illness to Wellness
We are living in very exciting time in medicine. It is a time of transformation. We are finally
beginning to understand how the body works and how to use that information not only to treat
illness, but to help people improve their health.
We do this by understanding the five basic forces of illness: malnutrition, inflammation,
impaired metabolism, impaired detoxification, and oxidative stress. If you look at any condition
— chronic conditions in particular — these forces are the root of the problem.
These five powerful forces can work for you or against you. They can create illness or they can
create health. For the purposes of this progam I will mostly refer to the illnesses caused by
imbalances in these five forces. But remember, any force of illness can be turned into a force of
wellness.
Modern Medicine
In the past, human societies were plagued with infectious disease. These diseases were a major
cause of human suffering and death. Then, in the late 1800s, Louis Pasteur discovered the
microbe. Microbes, microorganisms that include bacteria or “germs,” are the microscopic
invaders that were found to be the cause of many terrible diseases. For example, the tuberculo-
sis microbe causes tuberculosis, and the pneumococcal bacteria causes pneumonia. After the
discovery of the microbe, medicine focused heavily on the germ theory of disease.
When penicillin was discovered in the 1920s, doctors had a weapon to wield against microbes.
Once a doctor diagnosed the disease, the cause was known and the disease could be eliminated
with a single agent, a drug like an antibiotic. This “magic bullet” technique worked well for
acute infections. But what if the illness is not caused by a germ? Many chronic illness fall into
this category, and without a magic bullet, they are difficult for doctors to treat.
The
8 5 Forces of Wellness
Exercise One: What Do You Have?
How many of the following symptoms do you suffer from? Check all that apply:
(cid:2) Fatigue (cid:2) Muscle aches (cid:2) Joint pain
(cid:2) Sinus congestion (cid:2) Postnasal drip (cid:2) Excessive congestion
(cid:2) Headaches (cid:2) Bloating (cid:2) Gas
(cid:2) Constipation (cid:2) Diarrhea (cid:2) Heartburn
(cid:2) Sleep problems (cid:2) Problems concentrating (cid:2) Brain fog
(cid:2) Food cravings (cid:2) Fluid retention (cid:2) Losing weight
(cid:2) Excess weight (cid:2) Acne (cid:2) Pimples
(cid:2) Eczema (cid:2) Psoriasis (cid:2) Arthritis
(cid:2) Canker sores (cid:2) Puffy eyes (cid:2) Dark circles under your eyes
(cid:2) Bad breath (cid:2) PMS
These are the kinds of chronic complaints for which magic bullet therapy has little to offer. The
promise of ultraprevention is to treat these chronic problems in an entirely new way. Ultra-
prevention does not suppress symptoms, but helps the body to heal itself. It’s about activating
the body’s own healing system to tackle the problem, rather than relying on a medication to
mask the symptoms. When you have high blood pressure and you take a blood-pressure pill,
your blood pressure goes down. But when you stop taking the pill, your blood pressure goes
right back up. The pill didn’t cure anything; it simply suppressed the high blood pressure. What
ultraprevention seeks to do is to get rid of the causes of the high blood pressure and to help the
body restore a normal balance so that the high blood pressure simply disappears. That’s the key.
There Is No Cure for Cancer
We’re always looking for the cure for cancer, heart disease, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. But there
is no cure. There is only prevention. These chronic, complex, multigenetic diseases have no sin-
gle cause and no single cure. They are not like strep throat: a condition called by a microbe that
is easily treated with penicillin.
Yet, too often medicine is still treating all illness using the single-drug-for-the-single-disease-for-
the-single-outcome model. For chronic lifestyle illnesses, the magic bullet is the wrong philo-
sophical road. It doesn’t deal with the underlying causes of the illness.
The
5 Forces of Wellness 9
Exercise Two: What’s Your Paradigm?
What was your reaction when you read/heard that there is no cure for cancer or heart disease? Do
you know anyone who has had those chronic illnesses? How would that person react if you told him
or her that there is no cure?
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________________
Your answer highlights your current attitudes about medicine and disease. If you found yourself
not believing the statement “there is no cure,” then it means you are probably still enmeshed in
the traditional lines of thinking. You are in good company, as millions of people are still looking
for a magic bullet to cure chronic lifestyle diseases. There are more than 125 million Americans
with chronic illness. As you continue with this program, your thinking will probably change.
You’ll start to see that you have both the opportunity and the responsibility to make the changes
in your lifestyle that can prevent many chronic illnesses.
But aren’t we healthier than ever before?
It’s certainly true that in Europe and America our average life expectancy is longer than ever
before. One hundred years ago an average man used to live to be 40 or 50. Now an average man
lives into his 70s — an increase of almost 30 years. But the reason for this higher life expectan-
cy is not curative medicine, acute-care medicine, or medications. The reason is improved public
health, like greater access to clean drinking water and flush toilets, better hygiene, and better
public-health education. Only 5 percent of our increased life expectancy has been the result of
improved curative medicine.
Yet, illogically, 95 percent of our healthcare resources are focused on curative medicine — on
giving the patient the right drug — rather than on disease prevention. It’s a complete flip-flop
from what we should be doing. And this isn’t just a problem in America; it’s global.
We’re finding now that the rates of Western diseases — heart disease, cancer, diabetes, osteo-
porosis, Alzheimer’s, etc. — are skyrocketing in all developing countries that have adopted the
Western lifestyle. Worldwide, over 29 million deaths every year are caused by these chronic
lifestyle diseases.