Mark Hyman

Mark Hyman, M.D., is an American family physician and leading proponent of functional medicine , an approach that seeks to identify and treat root causes of chronic disease through personalized assessments of genetics, environment, and lifestyle factors including nutrition and detoxification. He earned his medical degree from the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine and completed training in family practice, later founding the UltraWellness Center in Lenox, Massachusetts , where he serves as director, and establishing the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine in 2014, for which he now acts as senior advisor. Hyman has authored fifteen New York Times bestsellers on health and wellness topics, hosts the podcast The Dr. Hyman Show with over 250 million downloads, and co-founded Function Health, a direct-to-consumer testing company. While his advocacy has popularized concepts like food as medicine and systemic approaches to conditions such as diabetes and autoimmune disorders, functional medicine , as practiced by Hyman, has faced criticism for emphasizing unproven interventions like extensive supplement regimens and advanced biomarker testing without sufficient randomized controlled trial evidence to validate efficacy beyond conventional care.

Mark Hyman was born in New York. His parents divorced when he was five years old, after which he was raised primarily by his mother, who remarried a man in a union she later described as unhappy and enduring for four decades. He has an older sister, ten years his senior.

Hyman's mother grew up during the Great Depression as the hearing child of deaf parents; born in 1908, she was raised partly in the countryside and boarded at the Lexington School for the Deaf. She worked as a teacher and author, instilling in Hyman values shaped by her resilient upbringing amid economic hardship and familial communication challenges.

Hyman earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Asian Studies from Cornell University, completing his studies from 1978 to 1982. During this period, he cultivated an interest in nutrition, which later influenced his approach to medicine.

He then attended the University of Ottawa Faculty of Medicine (formerly Ottawa University School of Medicine), where he received his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1987, graduating magna cum laude . Following medical school, Hyman completed a residency in family medicine through the University of California, San Francisco's program at the Santa Rosa Community Hospital. This training established his foundation as a family physician before he pursued interests in integrative and functional medicine.

After completing medical school at the University of Ottawa in 1987, Hyman relocated to rural Idaho to establish a family medicine practice in a small clinic , where he managed a high volume of patients with chronic illnesses that conventional treatments failed to resolve effectively. This experience exposed him to the limitations of symptom-focused care, as he observed patients who "shouldn't have been sick" yet suffered persistent conditions linked to diet, environment, and lifestyle factors rather than isolated pathogens or genetics alone. His workload during this period routinely exceeded 80 to 100 hours per week, underscoring the demands of underserved rural healthcare.

Subsequently, Hyman transitioned to emergency medicine in an inner-city setting, further highlighting gaps in acute care models that overlooked underlying contributors to disease recurrence. These early clinical encounters fueled his shift toward integrative approaches, influenced by his pre-medical background studying nutrition and anthropology at Cornell University , where he also practiced yoga and explored holistic wellness principles.