If you want to avoid stress, you’ve been born in the wrong era. Chronic stress has become an epidemic in our society where faster is better, and we attempt to pack more obligations into our ever-expanding schedules.

Luckily, there are experts out there who have come up with ways that we can achieve calm in the middle of chaos. One of those experts is Pedram Shojai, A.K.A. The Urban Monk.

Pedram Shojai has studied Kung Fu, Tai Chi, Qi Gong, Yoga, Meditation, and medicine diligently for the past 20 years. He is a doctor of Oriental Medicine, the author of two books – including The Urban Monk, and he is the founder and president of Well.Org.

I don’t know about you, but I would like to be an urban monk, too! So, I sat down with Pedram during The Fat Summit 2 to talk about managing stress in our modern world. In this interview, Pedram shares his top tips for a happier and healthier life.

We had a great time talking about Pedram’s way of being, and I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did.

Wishing you health and happiness,
Mark Hyman, MD

How to Be an Urban Monk

Welcome to Dr. Hyman's weekly house call. Your chance to ask him your questions.

Health & Fitness

If you like House Call with Dr. Hyman, you're going to love my new podcast, The Doctor's Farmacy. 

This podcast is a place for deeper conversations about central issues of our time that affect us all. 

Researching my last book, Food: What the Heck Should I Eat?, it became clear to me that we need to unpack the shifts and intersections of medicine, nutrition, food systems, health and food policy, and much more. The food system is at the root of our chronic disease epidemic, climate change, poverty, social injustice, environmental degradation, economic crises, and even challenges in education and national security.

The old foundations of medicine are breaking down and a new model, a systems view or Functional Medicine, is emerging at the paradigm that has the potential to reverse the chronic disease epidemic. Food and the way we produce and consume it is the nexus of most of our world’s health, environmental, climate, economic, and even political crises.

 We can’t stay silent about these issues any longer. That’s why I created my new podcast, The Doctor’s Farmacy. 

Find it anywhere you listen to podcasts (or visit drhyman.com/podcast). Thanks for tuning in!

My New Podcast: The Doctor's Farmacy

Eating healthy is more confusing than ever. I’ve been studying nutrition for 35 years and found that even experts are confused by the science. If the people we look to for nutritional guidance keep changing their views, no wonder the rest of us are so overwhelmed!

You know what I’m talking about. One day eggs are unhealthy, then the next day they are a miracle food. One year the government tells us to eat bread, pasta, and other carbohydrates as the foundation of our diet, and the next it tells us to cut carbs. The US Dietary Guidelines told us 35 years ago that all our health problems were derived from eating fat and recommended we eat fat “only sparingly.” Over three decades later, they suddenly learned fat wasn’t so bad for us.

Then you’ve got the dogmatists who believe you must adhere 100 percent  to a particular plan to be lean and healthy, whether that plan be vegan, Paleo, vegetarian, Mediterranean, raw food, ketogenic, high-fat, low-fat, or omnivore.

Lots of factors contribute to this nutrition confusion and contention, including misinformation, personal biases, and conflicting science. Chief among the reasons why so many people are so confused is our $1 trillion food industry that provides us with all sorts of “healthy” options— low-fat, high-fiber, whole-grain, gluten-free—that are mostly not healthy.

All this confusion is enough to make you give up and just eat whatever you want, whenever you want, and in whatever quantities you want.

That’s why I wrote my new book Food. What the Heck Should I Eat?. I want to help you undo all the beliefs about food that are making you fat and sick and replace them with a new understanding that will lead to health and longevity.

I can’t wait to share all the information I’ve learned, so you can cut through the confusion and design a plan that helps you cultivate vibrant, abundant health. Food. comes out on February 27, 2018. You can learn more about the book, and pre-order it at foodthebook.com

Why I Wrote My New Book: Food. What the Heck Should I Eat? (+ 7 Take-Home Principles)

Arthritis has become a 21st century epidemic, affecting 1 out of every 4 people. Even more shocking is that 30% of adults age 45-64 have doctor diagnosed arthritis.

Something has changed in our environment, making all types of arthritis more and more prevalent.

Inflammation is the most basic problem in all arthritis, whether it is what we traditionally call “inflammatory arthritis,” like autoimmune rheumatoid arthritis, or the arthritis most associated with wear and tear on joints over time, osteoarthritis.

The traditional medical approach to these two kinds of joint inflammation is to use medications to block the inflammation process. Although these can be successful in decreasing symptoms and can in some cases prevent further joint destruction, the medications don’t get at the root cause of why you developed the inflammation in the first place.

Functional medicine takes a deeper look at the causes of inflammation and gives you options for reversing the process where it starts: in the gut, in the mouth, from your food, and from the stress response.

Traditionally, doctors almost never evaluate these areas when addressing joint pain, but fortunately functional medicine has the tools to do just that.

In this interview, Dr. Susan Blum presents a new way to treat arthritis. In her new book, Healing Arthritis, you will learn the best food plan for arthritis, the precise supplements and dosage we recommend to reduce pain and inflammation, how to build resiliency so that life’s stressors won’t affect your health, and what your gut has to do with your arthritis symptoms. In essence, Dr. Blum gives you all the tools you need to fix your gut and heal your arthritis. I am so excited to share this interview with you. I hope you enjoy it.

Wishing you health and happiness,
Mark Hyman, MD

Conquering Arthritis Naturally

Modern industrial medicine treats disease with medication or surgery. That’s what it is designed to do, and when it comes to emergency interventions it is still the best medicine in the world. When someone comes into the emergency room with a severed leg, conventional medicine treats the problem with incredible efficacy.

But when it comes to chronic illness, this approach simply doesn’t work.

Here’s why conventional medicine tends to break down in the face of chronic illnesses like diabesity …

Most medicine today is based on clear-cut, on-or-off, yes-or-no diagnoses that often miss the underlying causes and more subtle manifestations of illness. Most conventional doctors are taught that you have a disease or you don’t; you have diabetes or you don’t. There are no gray areas.

Instead, I suggest taking a radically new and unconventional approach to treating chronic illness. Some might call this approach Functional Medicine.

Functional Medicine is the future of conventional medicine–but available now. It seeks to identify and address the root causes of disease, and views the body as one integrated system, not a collection of independent organs divided up by medical specialties. It treats the whole system, not just the symptoms.

In his new book, Unconventional Medicine, my friend Chris Kresser, M.S., L.Ac, discusses the challenges with conventional medicine, and why the future of medicine is unconventional. In this interview, Chris and I talk about what it takes to get to the root cause of dis-ease.

I hope you enjoy it.

Wishing you health and happiness,
Mark Hyman, MD

What Does It Mean To Be Unconventional?

Last year I experienced some serious health challenges. Recently I sat down with Mind Body Green to talk about this difficult time in my life.

How to Be an Urban Monk

Download our free app to listen on your phone