Dr. Mark Hyman

Mark Hyman is an American physician and one of the most prominent public advocates of functional medicine — a framework that focuses on identifying and addressing root causes of chronic disease rather than managing symptoms. His work has centered on the idea that the American chronic-disease burden is driven largely by the food supply, environmental exposures, and the underlying metabolic dysfunction those factors produce.

Hyman has been in clinical practice and public writing for decades. In 2014, he founded the Cleveland Clinic Center for Functional Medicine, which integrated functional-medicine clinical practice inside one of the country’s most prestigious academic medical centers. He has served as the center’s director and has used the Cleveland Clinic platform to produce outcomes research on functional-medicine approaches to chronic disease.

He is the author of more than a dozen books on nutrition and health, many of which have reached the New York Times best-seller list. The 10 Day Detox Diet (2014), Food Fix (2020), and Young Forever (2023) each anchored a different part of his public message. In 2013 he co-authored The Daniel Plan with Pastor Rick Warren and Dr. Daniel Amen; the book went to #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list and was named Christian Book of the Year.

In 2021, Hyman co-founded Function Health, a membership-based direct-to-consumer diagnostic company that offers broad lab-testing panels covering metabolic, hormonal, nutrient, organ-health, and cancer-signal markers. As of 2024 the company had at least 100,000 members; a November 2025 financing round valued the company at roughly $2.5 billion. Hyman serves as Function Health’s chief medical officer.

Inside the MAHA coalition, Hyman occupies the “elder statesman of functional medicine” seat. He has been a consistent public ally of Kennedy’s HHS agenda on food-system reform, and his audience — built over decades of books, a podcast, and a newsletter — is one of the larger organic audiences in the movement.

Critics note that functional medicine does not have broadly accepted clinical-evidence status in the academic medicine establishment, and that some of Hyman’s specific product and supplement recommendations have drawn debate. Those criticisms are part of the public record around him.

Current battles include defending Function Health’s testing model against mainstream-medicine critics, serving as a public interpreter for HHS policy moves on food and chronic disease, and scaling Function Health infrastructure as it grows.

Open questions: whether Function Health moves into any formal partnership with CMS-covered preventive-care programs, whether Hyman takes any advisory role inside HHS beyond his external-voice position, and how the functional-medicine framework absorbs the regulatory scrutiny that will follow from the MAHA era’s alignment with its ideas.