The UltraWellness Center > About The UltraWellness Center > About Dr. Hyman > Dr. Hyman's Personal Health Story
My Personal Health Story
My mother and father were free spirits, and we traveled and lived all over the world. When my parents divorced, I moved in with my grandparents until my mother remarried and we settled in Toronto. I returned to the United States to attend Cornell University, where I majored in Asian Studies.
Although I’d been interested in Chinese medicine as a career, and became a yoga teacher while an undergraduate, I eventually decided to enter traditional medical school and enrolled at the University of Ottawa, where I also did my internship. However, I never lost my interest in alternative medicine.
After a residency in Santa Rosa, California, where I learned how to be a family doctor in a community practice serving indigents, immigrants, and the disenfranchised, I settled in Orofino, Idaho, in order to start a rural family practice. I longed to become the old-fashioned doctor, caring for my patients from birth to death. Orofino, a rustic logging community, gave me that opportunity. The Clearwater Valley Hospital was on the edge of the largest wilderness area in the lower 48 states, and there we took care of everything from delivering babies to dealing with trauma from logging accidents to performing minor surgery.
My patients were unusual. For instance, there was Little Jim, a 30-year-old, 400-pound Nez Perce Indian whose drooping breasts, thin black ponytail, and flushed hairless cheeks made him indistinguishable from a woman. A drifter, he had left the valley of his ancestors for a Western lifestyle that had rewarded him with obesity, alcoholism, diabetes, and a drug addiction; he was now in my care after swallowing a few bottles’ worth of pills and 48 cans of beer to cope with a rocky romance. While pumping out his stomach with a tube nearly the size of a garden hose, and hardened to such unappetizing sights from years of medical practice, I turned to the nurse and said, “I'm hungry.” Talking around the tube in his mouth, Pee Wee mumbled, “I'm hungry too.”
Other experiences, though, weren’t as humorous, and one forced me to leave the area. The daughter of the town banker, whose life I saved when she suffered a sudden heart attack during a pregnancy, had a miscarriage. To save her life again, we had to remove the fetus. It turned out the baby had had a heartbeat, and soon the rumor spread around town that I was performing abortions in my garage.
Various segments of the community, including two of the other doctors’ wives, announced a boycott of my practice and formed a committee to run me out of town. My patients supported me, but I’d had enough and I felt compelled to move, this time to Mainland China to develop a clinic whose goal was to integrate Eastern and Western medicine.
Ironically, I turned out to be one of its most successful patients. While in Idaho I’d ruptured a disc in my spine and had suffered paralysis, nerve damage, and chronic pain. No one had been able to help. But in a Sino-Japanese hospital in Beijing, a Chinese doctor 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.
This had been my first significant personal experience with an alternative treatment, and although my American neurologist, neurosurgeon, and rehabilitation surgeons had told me that I would never fully regain my strength or nerve function again, my pain disappeared, my muscles enlarged, and my limp disappeared. Many years later, I am still pain-free and able to run, ski, and play ice hockey.
In the meantime, now married, I had returned to the mountains of western Massachusetts to raise my two children, and in order to support my family I ended up working in an emergency room in nearby Springfield.
This inner-city job took a serious toll on my psyche, my health and my family; I was overwhelmed by the demands of the job and, 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, and drinking quadruple espressos at eleven at night to make it through 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), renewed 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. I hadn’t applied for the job, but serendipity landed me in the right place at the right time.
In the meantime, though, I developed another health problem. Nine years ago I drove my kids to summer camp in Maine, and while there became violently ill with some kind of digestive problem. Nothing seemed to help. And, although I tried everything, the symptoms only grew worse.
Meanwhile, my marriage was falling apart; I was fighting for custody of my kids while also trying to expand the Canyon Ranch medical department. My life had become so stressful, and my physical pain so enormous, that I often thought I would have to go on disability. My system was in chaos: my eyes surrounded by rashes, my tongue burning, my muscles aching, and my digestion completely malfunctioning. I was exhausted and miserable.
Eventually I realized I was suffering from a disease for which most conventional doctors showed little patience: chronic fatigue syndrome. I was now one of those frustrating patients who complain endlessly about seemingly unrelated symptoms, who fail to test positive for any diagnosable disease, and who don’t fall into the Western medical rubric.
All of this continued for more than two years, until my travels led me to a Hawaiian naturopath, whose diagnosis revealed that my body had been poisoned by mercury. (A level of 0-3 mcg in a 24-hour urine specimen is considered normal. Poisoning begins at 50 mcg/24 hours. My level had reached 185 mcg/24 hours.)
It was never clear how I had ingested the mercury; it may have been from eating too much mercury-saturated fish, or from my dental fillings, or from pollution generated by the heavy coal burning in Beijing. Regardless, I undertook a self-administered program to remove the mercury from my system, using various nutritional supplements including garlic, vitamin C, and algae, as well as a great deal of hyperthermic therapy, such as sauna treatments.
I also 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.
Too often, patients are given diagnoses that are quick and/or superficial assessments of their condition. But because I learned first-hand what it’s like to suffer from what are called “nondiagnosable” conditions, I have become more empathetic and thorough with my own patients.
Today, I wouldn’t dream of telling patients who come to me with a litany of complaints that nothing is wrong, as I was told about my own condition. No longer do I look upon these people as merely depressed, nor do I dismiss their complaints as psychosomatic just because they have no immediately recognizable diagnosis.
As I look back on my entire experience from beginning to end, I realize that my poor health was an opportunity to learn how to cure others and myself as well.