Mark Hyman And Arianna Huffington Discuss Epidemic Of Chronic Disease. At the global forum in Davos, Arianna spoke with Mark Hyman, MD, about the U.S. epidemic of chronic disease and what inspired him to develop “functional medicine.” Mark Hyman, who is a medical editor at The Huffington Post, explained his thinking around how to define illness changed when he developed chronic fatigue syndrome. “I began to realize our paradigm of medicine is wrong,” he said. “There is a fundamental flaw in how we think about disease.”