Product Description

A hidden epidemic races around the globe -- we can't see it or touch it, which makes it so dangerous.

The invisible epidemic has led to the suffering of millions who spend billions on drugs, only to find they don't work.

This is an epidemic of broken brains.

"Broken brains" go by many names -- depression, anxiety, memory loss, brain fog, attention deficit disorder, autism, and dementia, to name a few -- and show up in radically different ways from person to person, making each seem like a separate problem.

But the truth is that these "diagnoses" are all the result of a few basic problems with our biology. Pinpoint these biological problems, fix them, and let your body's natural healing intelligence take over to repair your brain. Now you can experience an UltraMind -- one that is highly focused and able to pay attention at will, with a strong, reliable memory and a mood that is calm, confident, in control, and in good spirits.

We have all heard of the mind-body connection or how our thoughts affect the health of our body. But the reverse is far more powerful: what you do to your body, your basic biology, has a profound effect on your brain.

Have you ever experienced instant clarity after exercise? Alertness after drinking coffee? A mental crash after popping candy? Does your brain inexplicably slow down during stress, while multitasking, or when meeting a deadline? Each is an example of how what we do to our bodies -- whether through nutrition, sleep, exercise, or stress -- has a dramatic effect on our brains.

Conventional treatments don't help, or provide only slight benefit, because they just manage symptoms rather than deal with -- and heal -- the underlying problem. And just as brain problems all stem from the same root causes, they all have the same solution -- The UltraMind Solution.

Our ancient genes interact with our environment to create systemic imbalances that affect our brains. Correct those imbalances -- most caused by nutritional deficiencies, allergens, infections, toxins, and stress -- and you can achieve optimum mental health without drugs or psychotherapy.

The UltraMind Solution is the future of medicine, the culmination of the last twenty years of research on what makes the brain happy, focused, and calm; research that has uncovered a few simple factors that explain why things go wrong and how to fix them.

Don't wait for this revolution in medicine to trickle into your doctor's office: it usually takes research twenty years to move from the lab to the patient. The answers are here, right now, in The UltraMind Solution.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #8247 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 447 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416549710
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

Review
"Dr. Hyman's brilliant new book shows us that the emotional resilience and mental clarity we all seek is within our grasp. You too can unleash the body's hidden ability to dramatically improve mood, memory, and thinking speed."-- Mehmet C. Oz, M.D., author of YOU: The Owner's Manual

"The UltraMind Solution is an amazing book that will help you today. It is packed with practical information to help you heal your body and enhance your brain."-- Daniel G. Amen, M.D., author of Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

"For the past thirty years, I've studied how comprehensive lifestyle change can prevent and reverse many chronic illnesses. Now, Dr. Hyman shows how to prevent and often reverse mood and brain disorders by addressing their underlying causes. Highly recommended." -- Dean Ornish, M.D., clinical professor of medicine, University of California, San Francisco, and author of Dr. Dean Ornish's Program for Reversing Heart Disease and The Spectrum

"If you suffer from anxiety, depression, memory loss, or attention problems, the help you need is right here -- in UltraMind. Mark Hyman's approach is right on the mark."-- Christiane Northrup, M.D., author of The Wisdom of Menopause

About the Author
Mark Hyman, M.D., is the editor in chief of Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, the most prestigious journal in the field of integrative medicine. After ten years as co-medical director at Canyon Ranch in the Berkshires, he is now in private practice in Lenox, Massachusetts. He is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller Ultraprevention. His websites are www.drhyman.com and www.ultrametabolism.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1

BROKEN BRAINS

A Twenty-first Century Epidemic

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought.

-- ALBERT VON SZENT-GYÖRGYI NAGYRAPOLT, 1937 Nobel Laureate in Physiology and Medicine, the scientist who isolated vitamin C

Your brain is broken. You know it. You feel it. You hide it. You fear it. You have been touched by an epidemic. It deprives children of their future, the elderly of their past, and adults of their present.

No one is talking about this invisible epidemic. Yet it's the leading cause of disability, affects 1.1 billion people worldwide -- one in six children, one in two elderly -- and will cripple one in four people during their lifetime.

I am talking about the epidemic of broken brains.

We refer to our "broken brains" by many names -- depression, anxiety, memory loss, brain fog, attention deficit disorder or ADD, autism, and dementia to name a few.

This epidemic of brain breakdown shows up in radically different ways from person to person so that they all seem like separate problems. But the truth is that they are all manifestations of a few common underlying root causes.

These seemingly different disorders are all really the same problem -- imbalances in the seven keys to UltraWellness.

Conventional treatments don't help, make things worse, or provide only slight benefit.

That's because conventional treatments use the wrong model to heal these disorders.

There is another way to fix your broken brain, and it is not what you have heard or might think.

Just as brain problems all stem from the same root causes, they all have the same solution -- The UltraMind Solution.

I know this as both doctor and patient. My own brain broke one beautiful late August day in 1996. I became disoriented and terrified and descended into a spiral of helplessness and hopelessness.

Let me tell you my story.

My Broken Brain

Learning, thinking, and speaking were always easy for me. My brain never failed me. In college, I learned thousands of Chinese characters. In medical school, the intricate patterns and names of our anatomy -- the bones, muscles, organs, vessels, and nerves -- mapped effortlessly into my mind, and the complex pathways of physiology and biochemistry were clear after one lecture and reading my notes.

I ran four miles every day to medical school. I took detailed notes in my classes, able to simultaneously listen to, remember, and write down nearly every word my professors spoke.

At the end of the day I ran back again to my apartment, did yoga for an hour, ate a freshly prepared whole-foods meal, and studied without distraction or loss of focus for three hours every night. Then I crawled into bed, fell peacefully asleep within five minutes, and slept deeply for seven hours.

The next day I got up and did it all over again.

That rhythmic life broke down, as it does for all physicians in training, when I entered the hospital and started pushing my body and mind beyond their limits with regular thirty-six-hour shifts on top of an occasional sixty-hour shift (Friday morning to Monday evening!).

When I went to practice as a small-town family doctor in Idaho, I worked a shortened schedule of only eighty hours a week, seeing thirty patients a day, delivering babies, and working in the emergency room.

From Idaho, I went to work in China for a year, breathing in the coal-soaked, mercury-laden air, before I landed back in Massachusetts, working a crazy schedule of shifts in an inner-city emergency room.

Then suddenly (or so it appeared at the time), my brain broke -- along the with rest of my body.

Sitting with patients, I often couldn't remember what they had just said, or where I was in eliciting their story. I tried to take careful notes and keep track, but I couldn't focus on conversations, couldn't remember anyone's name. I started taking pictures and writing down personal details about my patients to serve as my peripheral memory so I wouldn't embarrass myself the next time I spoke to them.

During lectures I had to give as part of my job, I would get lost in the middle of a sentence and had to ask the audience what I had just said. When I read a book, I had to go over passages again and again just to glean any meaning. At night, I read my children bedtime stories but had to robotically mouth the words, because I couldn't simultaneously read aloud and understand what I read.

Sleep eluded me. Exhausted and bone weary, I would lie down in bed at night and remain sleepless for hours. After finally drifting off, I would wake the next morning feeling as if I had never slept.

Depression and anxiety, which I had never known before, became constant companions.

At times I felt I couldn't go on any longer. My capacity for pleasure and laughter faded into a distant memory.

The worse my body felt, the worse my brain functioned. If my stomach was bloated and swollen and I had diarrhea, I couldn't think or sleep. If my tongue was inflamed or my eyes swollen and red, I became depressed. If my muscles ached and twitched, I couldn't focus. If I felt bone-weary fatigue, I would forget what I was saying or why I had just walked into a room.

Some doctors said I was depressed and recommended antidepressants. Psychiatrists suggested antianxiety drugs. My family doctor prescribed sleeping medication. A neurologist told me I had ADD and I needed stimulants. Others said I had chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. All I knew was that my brain was broken, my focus gone, my mood depressed, my memory fleeting, and my body wasn't working.

All at once, I couldn't pay attention, remember, or experience joy and happiness. It was as if I had suddenly "contracted" three terrible diseases -- attention deficit disorder, depression, and dementia. How could my brain have failed me? The part of me that was strongest suddenly became my weakest link. What had happened?

What I experienced was extreme and I hid it from the rest of the world, except for a very few close friends. I faked it and pulled myself through each day.

But after that summer day in August when my brain broke, weary and fighting brain fog, I began searching for answers.

Piece by piece, cell by cell, body system by body system, I discovered the source of my broken brain. By combing through the literature, consulting with dozens of scientists and doctors, and experimenting with my body and mind, I slowly put myself back together.

It wasn't one thing that broke my brain. It was everything piled higher and higher until my brain and body couldn't take anymore. It seemed sudden but was the end of a long series of exposures to toxins, stress, and a strange infection.

The trail led back to mercury poisoning from living in Beijing, China, breathing in raw coal used to heat homes for 10 million people, eating endless childhood tuna-fish sandwiches, and having a mouthful of "silver" or mercury fillings. I was also missing a key gene needed to detoxify all this mercury, which compounded the problem. I found out about this later through careful testing.

Years of sleepless nights delivering babies and working in the emergency room

destroyed my body's rhythms, which I tried to bolster with quadruple espressos, giant-size chocolate chip cookies, and mountains of Chunky Monkey ice cream (I reasoned that was healthy because of the bananas and walnuts!).

Then one late summer day in 1996 I ate or drank something up in a wilderness camp in Maine that infected my gut. That was the straw that broke the camel's back.

This book is the story of my healing. It is also the story of the discoveries I made that hold the answer to our current epidemic of broken brains. It offers a solution to your suffering just as it did to mine.

How many of you feel what I felt, at least to some degree?

• Maybe you fear losing your job because you're tired, unfocused, inattentive, and your memory is failing so you can't properly perform your tasks at work.

• Do you feel depressed, hopeless, disconnected, and disengaged from your life?

• Do you see your relationships breaking down because you are mentally and emotionally absent or numb?

• Perhaps you struggle to focus so you can help your children with their homework and guide them through life, but feel sure you aren't living up to your duties as a parent.

• Do you lie awake at night, tormented by the grief and pain of living half a life, and then worry about how you will find a way to wake up early in the morning just so you can get your kids to school?

• Do you forget to meet friends or go to appointments, and then can't figure out how in the world you forgot?

If so, you aren't alone. You have been affected by the broken brain epidemic, a terrifying and life-threatening chronic illness that has been largely unaddressed by the medical community, leaving millions of people to suffer alone, trapped in their deteriorating minds.

Our Looming Silent Epidemic of Broken Brains

Obesity is obvious. You can't hide it. But mental illness and memory loss are suffered silently, hidden from view. Yet they touch nearly everyone either directly or indirectly; personally or through family members and friends.

Our broken brains cause many problems -- anxiety, depression, bipolar disease, personality disorders, eating disorders, addictions, obsessive-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, autism, Asperger's, learning difficulties, and dyslexia.

Broken brains take many shapes, including psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia and mania, as well as all the neurodegenerative diseases of aging, especially Alzheimer's, dementia, and Parkinson's disease.

In addition, there are brain dysfunctions that fall on the lighter side of

the broken brain continuum. While many psychiatrists and neurologists wouldn't qualify these problems as treatable diseases, they still cause unnecessary suffering for many. These include chronic stress, lack of focus, poor concentration, brain fog, anger...

Customer Reviews

Restore your energy naturally
I was privileged to be one of the participants who was chosen to undergo the Ultramind solution for six weeks prior to publication. Although it has only been 18 days since I started, the change in my energy level and my ability to concentrate is remarkable.
I have been suffering from intense fatigue and trouble concentrating for the last two years, and my physicians have been unable to find a medical diagnosis for my symptoms. Being a 46-year-old graduate student, wife, mother and employee, I have to be able to concentrate for long periods of time, especially in the evenings after work. Before the Ultramind solution, I could not concentrate or stay focused past the early morning. Without knowing exactly when it occurred, I now find that my energy has been restored enough so that I can work twelve hour shifts at the hospital without fatigue and still go home and study, while retaining what I read. As a side effect, I have lost close to ten pounds without ever going hungry.
Although it may sound totally impossible to remove all processed foods, sugar, dairy, trans fat, wheat and flour products as Dr. Hyman required from my diet, I have discovered that all of my prior sugar cravings have disappeared completely, even now during the hoiday season when cookies and candy abound. I snack on nuts and fruit and make sure I eat good proteins and plenty of fresh vegetables and I drink plenty of water.
In the beginning I thought I would never be able to make it six weeks, but three weeks have breezed by. I am definitely going to make the Ultramind Solution a way of life from now on. Dr. Hyman's principles are simple yet effective.

What Most Doctors (including ME) Were Never Taught
One of my guiding principles has always been: Never read a book that has the word "ultra" in the title.

However, interesting perspectives on diet & health intrigue me, & when I saw endorsements from such respected doctors as Dean Ornish, Christiane Northrup & Mehmet Oz, I decided to break my rule and plunge into The UltraMind Solution.

I'm glad I did, for this book is an engaging read that's full of cutting edge science & practical advice. Dr. Mark Hyman has been on a mission to do medicine & health differently since conventional medical thinking failed him in his own debilitating illness twelve years ago. He convincingly argues that maintaining the body's health is essential for the brain's well-being, and that many mental & psychological disorders can be rooted in physical, biochemical derangements in the body's health & metabolism.

In part one of the book he details the background: his personal story which led to his changed philosophy & practice of medicine. He is an advocate of what is termed functional medicine, a relatively new discipline which focuses on not the established "label the disease, give it a drug" approach but "find what's functionally wrong behind the patient's symptoms, then correct the body's metabolism back to optimum function."

The second part of the book contain the outline of his "Seven Keys to UltraWellness" (argh! there's that word again!). He covers optimizing nutrition, balancing hormones, reducing inflammation throughout the body, fixing digestive tract problems, enhancing the body's detoxification, boosting energy metabolism, & calming the mind itself. The third part of the book covers a six week plan to initiate many of these changes, while the fourth part goes into specifics for each of his seven key areas.

Ok, so what's the bottom line? There's a lot of intriguing information and sound advice in the 400+ pages, & I saw nothing that I absolutely disagreed with. Like any diet or health book, he has his own viewpoint & focus, & some of his strategies & recommendations will work better for some than others. This book was a major swing factor in my own decision to try a vegan gluten free caffeine free water only lifestyle, which was difficult but very beneficial for me in multiple areas. I can see this book being useful for two groups of people: First, people who are suffering from problems such as anxiety, depression, "brain fog", adhd, migraines or other brain related problems might find something helpful or even life-changing in his plan. Other people, like myself, who are interested in new approaches & optimum health will certainly find new concepts & tools that they can implement in their own healthy lifestyle. Either way, an excellent book to read.

Highly Recommended
I highly suggest this book as your next reading. I assure that for many of you it will be eye-opening. For example the information about sugar. -- You will learn that it is nothing else but a sweet tasting poison. Not only it can be responsible for diabetes but also for many other ailments, including dementia and/or Alzheimer's disease. Similarly problematic is cow's milk...

The most common effects of stressful life and diet containing sugars and highly processed foods are autism, Parkinson's disease, attention-deficit disorders, and chronic fatigue -- just to name a few. Conventional treatments of these and other diseases are usually dealing with the symptoms rather then underlying problem and as a result they don't help, or just provide slight benefits. Mark Hyman suggests natural solutions to these diseases of a "broken brains". The solution is to correct imbalances in the brain. These are the imbalances created by toxins, infections, excessive stress, and most importantly by nutritional deficiencies. By changing your lifestyle you can correct these imbalances and bring back your health without drugs or psychotherapy. So get this book and read about the steps to improving your health and bringing your broken brain back to normal. For more reading on the subject of `Body Cleansing' and `Health without Medication' I highly recommend Your Body Maintenance Handbook.