CBS Just Hired Dr. Mark Hyman: My Take on the Controversy

CBS News recently hired Dr. Mark Hyman as a contributor, and the response from parts of the medical community has been swift and critical. 

One physician told The Guardian: "By hiring Mark Hyman, CBS News will be misinforming its large audience on the subject of health. Hyman is the face of functional medicine, a pipeline that moves disenchanted healthcare providers away from evidence-based care and into the arms of a very lucrative wellness industry."

That's a strong statement, and I want to share my perspective as someone who practices integrative medicine in the Maryland area and who has been watching the functional medicine movement evolve over the past several years.

Here's my honest take: the criticism isn't entirely wrong, but it's also pretty overblown (imagine, the media blowing something out of proportion!)

The Problem with Absolutes in Health

I've written before about how speaking in absolutes is one of the biggest red flags when evaluating health information. If someone is telling you they have the answer, the cure, or the solution to your complex health problems, be skeptical. The human body is extraordinarily intricate, and good medicine requires humility about what we know and what we don't.

This is actually one reason I've been leaning away from Dr. Hyman's content over the past few years. While he's been a pioneer in advancing the importance of nutrition and lifestyle medicine, there's sometimes a tendency toward absolutist thinking and talking that doesn't match the nuance of the actual science. Many of his statements make for compelling headlines, but they often oversimplify what we actually know from research.

At the same time, the critics who paint functional medicine as divorced from evidence-based care are probably cherry-picking specific claims like the ones I’m describing. The core insight of functional medicine—that specific attention to nutrition, sleep, movement, and mental health is foundational to treating chronic disease—isn't quackery. It's now widely recognized as essential to good medical care, with a large and growing body of scientific studies backing it up.

What Gets Lost in the Public Fight

What frustrates me about this debate is that both sides are talking past each other, and patients are caught in the middle.

The critics are right that some practitioners in the functional medicine world make unsupported claims, order excessive testing, and sell expensive supplements with questionable benefit. The business model can be problematic—and I’ve written about this as well, especially the potential conflicts of interest around the supplements industry.

But the critics also often dismiss legitimate concerns about the conventional medical system, like not reporting negative outcome studies in pharmaceutical trials, the marginal benefit of some drugs (especially compared to exercise and other lifestyle interventions), profit-driven care systems, etc., that drive people toward integrative or functional medicine in the first place. 

When I spent 25 years in emergency medicine, I had a front-row seat to how our system handles chronic disease. A patient comes in with chronic back pain, headaches, chest pain, shortness of breath, metabolic syndrome, pre-diabetes, chronic inflammation, or persistent fatigue. The conventional approach is often: here's your prescription, see you in three months. If you're lucky, you get 15 minutes with a primary care physician who's pressed for time and working within a system that doesn't reimburse for the kind of detailed lifestyle counseling that might actually help.

Is it any wonder that patients feel "disenchanted," as the quote puts it?

A Better Framework: Medicine 3.0

This is why I've increasingly aligned with Peter Attia's concept of Medicine 3.0, which I find to be a useful framework.

Attia describes Medicine 1.0 as the era of anecdotal medicine—doing what seemed to work based on observation. Medicine 2.0 is our current system—evidence-based, focused on treating disease once it appears, but often reactive rather than preventive. Medicine 3.0 is about aggressive, proactive, personalized approaches to healthspan and longevity. It's about asking: what can we do today to ensure you're in your best health 20 or 30 years from now?

Attia's approach maintains scientific rigor while acknowledging the limitations of our current healthcare model. He's willing to say "the evidence isn't there yet" on topics where it isn't, but he's also willing to engage seriously with emerging science on the microbiome, metabolic health, and personalized medicine. He's changed his mind publicly when new evidence comes in—that's what good scientists do.

The Medicine 3.0 framework gives us a way to be both evidence-based and proactive. It doesn't require abandoning scientific thinking, but it does require moving beyond a purely reactive model of care. The sad reality is our system is not set up to prevent disease, and those who can are typically able to afford the extra cost. That said, focusing on the foundational elements of health makes a profound difference for anyone.

For most people, including personally for Dr. Attia, the best ‘medicine’ is an aggressive lifestyle focus layered with targeted supplements and pharmaceuticals. Sounds a lot like integrating conventional and lifestyle approaches. 

The Bottom Line

Is Mark Hyman going to misinform CBS's audience? Probably sometimes, yes—especially if he speaks in the absolutist terms that have characterized some of his past claims. Will he also share genuinely useful information about nutrition, lifestyle, and chronic disease? Almost certainly yes.

The real question is whether viewers will have the context to distinguish between the two.

What I hope comes from this controversy is not a retreat to purely conventional medicine or an embrace of functional medicine without scrutiny. What we need is a healthcare system that focuses on nutrition, sleep, and movement as seriously as it takes developing and prescribing pharmaceuticals. That grounds interventions in evidence while acknowledging that evidence takes time to develop. That gives providers the time and incentive to truly partner with patients on long-term health.

The answers to our healthcare challenges won't come from dismissing integrative approaches entirely or from abandoning scientific rigor. They'll come from the hard work of integrating the best of both worlds.