Curious about what is really going on with your health?

Fall of 2024 I enrolled in the Functional Health Beta program as I was curious why my energy levels were low along with a weakened immune system. What I found out was shocking at best and made me realize it was time to take control of my lifestyle choices (i.e. diet, supplements, exercise). I'm due to go back in for the second round of tests and I'm curious to see what improvements I may see in the tests.

Interested? https://my.functionhealth.com/signup?code=PSTONE11&_saasquatch=PAMELASTONE

I found the following article in Time Magazine written by Angela Haupt, December 4, 2024. Dr. Mark Hyman, 65, has spent his entire career trying to find a way to “break through the noise and really address chronic disease, which is now a national emergency,” he told me during a video conversation in September. He specializes in functional medicine, which aims to identify and treat the root cause of illness—not just the symptoms it triggers. In addition to being Function’s chief medical officer, he’s the founder of the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, founder and director of The UltraWellness Center in Lenox, Mass., the author of a pile of books, and the host of a popular podcast. He regularly dispenses health tips to his 3 million Instagram followers: which inflammatory oils he avoids; how to think about brain-health supplements; what to know about the six states of insulin resistance.

He calls Function Health his most fulfilling venture. Hyman sees the startup as a natural extension of his desire to make medicine more proactive, pointing to a philosophy called P4 medicine, which stands for predictive, preventive, personalized, and participatory. The idea is to help people take control of their health by identifying what areas they need to work on before they land in a full-blown medical crisis. “The only way to do that is to have your own data, and not be limited by what you get at your doctor’s,” he says. “How do we break down the sort of patriarchal, paternalistic medical system that puts you apart from your own body? You have to go to the doctor and the insurance companies and ask for what you want, and they’re trained in a certain way which is essentially reactive, not proactive.”

Function Health’s tests go beyond what many primary care doctors include in “outdated” annual panels, he adds. While doctors traditionally check LDL, HDL, and total cholesterol, for example, they don’t always include measures like lipoprotein(a), apolipoprotein B, and LDL pattern, all of which can predict future heart health. And while it’s common to find out your calcium and vitamin D levels, I’d never before had a doctor check my ferritin or iron binding capacity.

The thinking is that the earlier you realize something isn't quite right, the sooner you can address it. Plus, Function’s platform is easy to navigate and visually pleasing—a welcome change from the poorly designed patient portals I was used to. That enables clients to track trends over time and compare their results from one round of testing to the next. Is their hemoglobin A1C gradually creeping up? Is their LDL cholesterol better or worse than it was six months or two years ago? Is that random kidney number still out of range, or was it a one-off blip?

“We’re very good at naming and blaming diseases,” Hyman says. “We're not very good at identifying proactively, what is the transition from wellness to illness? Most people are just walking around with low, smoldering risk factors that they don’t know about.” He paused, meeting my eyes through the screen: “Like you, actually.”

Interested? https://my.functionhealth.com/signup?code=PSTONE11&_saasquatch=PAMELASTONE