I've Had 6 Back Surgeries And Almost Died: Here's What 40 Years of Medicine Actually Taught Me

Dr. Mark Hyman (0:00)

That last surgery, the Almeria surgery was, I was pretty sick. I couldn't move, I couldn't step in bed, I had lost 25 pounds, I was just a skeleton. And the surgeon was like, look, we don't really know if we can help you, but otherwise you're gonna die. And they were like, well, you have a five to 10% chance of making it through the surgery.

Emma (0:16)

Now that you've kind of had a second life, has it changed your view on longevity, what that means to you?

Dr. Mark Hyman (0:22)

The things that really matter come to the forefront, like family, friends, community, your health. These are things that are just the most important things in life. Hey, everybody, today we're going to do something different. I'm joined by my producer, Emma, and we're going to do a little Q&A for Dr. Mark.

Emma (0:38)

Mark, you spent your career helping other people figure out what's wrong with their health, but you've also had a pretty extraordinary health journey yourself. You've dealt with mercury poisoning, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, mold exposure, multiple injuries, and now you've had six back surgeries. So you've experimented with everything from functional medicine and supplements to some pretty cutting edge longevity therapies. Today, instead of you answering questions about our health, I wanted to turn the table and ask you questions about yours. So what you've learned from being the patient, what you've changed your mind about, what you've tried that worked and what didn't, and what 30 plus years in medicine has taught you about what actually matters for health. Forty, actually.

Forty, is it 40?

Dr. Mark Hyman (1:21)

Well, next year, I'll be 40 years being a doctor.

Emma (1:24)

Wow. After spending decades obsessed with health and longevity, what actually matters to you now? So I want to start out by you taking us back to when your health journey first really fell apart. I believe you're 32, you're living in Idaho. Take us back to that moment and tell us what was happening then.

Dr. Mark Hyman (1:42)

Well, I was a family doctor. I was working in a small town. I lived at the end of this dirt road up on the top of a mountain, and there were five family doctors in this small town where we had a cache of about 10,000 people.

And I was the one who did the c-sections, and I ran the ER one day a week. It was just like a lot. So I delivered lots of babies, ran the ER, worked full time, had two little kids.

My wife at the time was not mentally very well, and I took the burden of it all, literally on my back. And I was chopping wood and getting wood ready for the wood stove for the winter.

And I was tired, exhausted, working really hard. I hadn't been exercising as much because I was just working too much. And I was carrying a lot of heavy logs, pieces of wood into the house. And I just carried them in a way that was really biomechanically bad. And I herniated, really ruptured a disc. And the next day, that was like a Sunday, the next day, I had a baby that I was working to deliver. There was a mother who was quite sick with preeclampsia. And I noticed that I was limping. And I had no motor function in my foot. I didn't have any pain at the time. And then within two or three days, I ended up being rushed to the hospital, had a pretty emergency surgery to relieve the compression of the nerve. And that was my first back surgery. So it was pretty rough. And I was left with a permanent residual weakness in my calf.

And so I managed OK with it. But it was the beginning of a long journey of back issues.

Emma (3:19)

And you're only 32 at that time that that happened.

Dr. Mark Hyman (3:21)

Yeah.

Emma (3:22)

Yeah. Wow.

So at that time, you were a physician. Did you assume being a doctor meant you'd be able to figure out what was wrong with you? Did it take you some time to seek external help?

Dr. Mark Hyman (3:32)

Yeah, well, at that moment, I had motor weakness. It took it very seriously.

I went to see the neurologist in the local town, which is about 50 miles away in Lewiston, and they immediately saw that I had a herniated disc on MRI and had the surgery. But the thing was I re-herniated the disc like 10 days later, and I went back and they weren't listening to me. I said, listen, something's wrong. They weren't listening. That's why I ended up with a permanent disability because I didn't go back in and operate. So it was my first experience of doctors missing the ball and actually causing a permanent lifelong problem that I've had. They could have easily relieved if the doctor had been attentive, had listened to what I said, and paid attention. It's kind of unfortunate because doctors sometimes can be very stuck in their ways, and it left me with a problem. So I learned very quickly that I can't rely just on the experts to have all the answers.