02: The Power of Nutrition and Gut Health – Transform Your Well-Being with Functional Medicine’s Top Secrets with Dr. Aaron Hartman

One of the things that happens with brain injury is you get dysregulated neural pathways. It's kind of like trauma. People get trauma, they get limbic activation, they get inside anomia, they get a vagal dysfunction. Your pathways get shaken up and they try to fix it, get dysregulated. So what happens with a brain injury is the exact same thing happens. And so one of the things that they figured out is if you do oral stimulation, you activate cranial nerve 7, cranial nerve 9. The nuclei for those are actually in your brain stem where a lot of your regulatory pathways for pain, the rubber spinal tract where they sit. So what if someone has a brain injury, trauma, concussion, multiple sclerosis, if you have them walk when they can't walk and you're activating their tongue, you're basically trying to regulate the dysregulate relay systems in their brain stem that regulate down the spinal cord. And so all of a sudden now they actually walk a little bit.

Welcome back. I am Dr. Christian Jensky and I am one of the clinicians at Richmond Integrative and Functional Medic. And I am here with Dr. Aaron Hartman, who is the founder and co CEO of Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine. And last time that we spoke, we talked a bit about your journey, your healthcare journey, from being a family practitioner all the way to how you came into being a functional medicine provider, opening the practice, what we've evolved to become. And we talked a bit about your family as this kind of inflection point and the impetus for change and the point in which you start to kind of see that healthcare could be better, could be different, and it could be something that is really transformative for patients if you were able to keep an open mind and learn new things. And you spoke a bit about Anna, who is your first adopted daughter, and her struggles. But let's get more specific. Let's take a little bit of a deeper dive into what specifically you all have done, your wife Becky and yourself, with regards to some of the medical management treatments and things that we're seeing maybe as outside of the box, to kind of help her to go from someone who should never speak, read, write, walk, do anything, to being as totally productive and efficient as she is now, beyond what was expected for someone with her condition.

So one thing that I want to focus on, the foundations for my daughter, the foundations for our most complex patients are still the foundations. Yeah, you know, real food, exercise, appropriate sleep, having leaning bows, stress reduction, being in a. Having meaning, value in a family. Those Are like the foundational things. Pillars. Pillars. And that's actually where we started with. And it was just, how do we get real food into this kid who is not interacting with the world enough that she can actually feed herself?

Yeah.

And that's how bad she was. You know, she had her swallow reflex, so she could bet she could. You had to work on that. So it was first just trying to get food in her body. The therapy we did with her a lot. One of the first things we did with her was this thing called suit therapy, which actually was developed by, I believe, like Polish astronauts, I think. So it was basically like these lower bands on a suit and it gives you like tension. So you can get tension in space.

Right.

That was used with people with brain injuries and trauma. And you put these suit on and every time you move to give you tension. So you're getting all this proprioception, all this input into your body. So she started doing that at a super young age. They put her in a cage with whole reflective rubber bands, make her walk like how the average kid spends six hours a day practicing walking when you're two or three. She wasn't doing that. So how do you replicate that? So real food, lots of physical activity. And that's been the foundation for her brain neuro rehabilitation. Still now she's doing three or five hours of therapy a day.

It's not something that you just do and then stop and then eat whatever you want or sit for two years.

Well, the real food thing was really. We actually have a real food diaries on our website that talks about what real food is. But it went from just eating like real food to realizing like lipid therapy, which is something we do with our mold patients, giving the right kind of fat. Your brain's mostly made of fat. Using omega 3s, omega 6s on phospholipid for, I call it brain juice. So we did start a food, do some cool things. We did the suit stuff. One of the next things we did was mention Dr. Annie Yasker's work checking her gene SNPs.

What substrates snip.

So SNP is a small nucleotide polymorphism. It's a small genetic deviation.

Right, Like a typo.

A typo, yes. And usually there's enough redundancy in our genes that the typo doesn't matter. But if you get enough typos or you have the environmental factors, the typos become misspellings. You know, all of a sudden you have issues. And so it was doing gene testing and then seeing what nutrients could fix or address the gene testing. And that was when we started with lots of supplements.

Yeah. But incredibly personalized. Right. This is specific Teresa. Her genes.

Yes.

When activated. Right. So genes are dormant, they get woken up, they transcribe, that gets translated and then there's a metabolic process. You're going all the way up there to intervene, to say, where are there some snips that we can do something about to help her?

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. And that led to some of Kurt Wool or he's a pediatrician who deals with a lot of kids with autism. And he focuses on organic acid testing, gut testing and hair metal analysis. And so all of a sudden I'm like doing bat testing on her. And what happens when you do these organic acid tests? You realize, wait a second, the gut's messed up. Gotta work on the gut. Which goes back to food. You've got these nutrient deficiencies and low fatty acids, which goes back to food. You've got minerals, you got heavy metals. And you realize that actually one of the ways you're buying naturally chelates heavy metals is with minerals. And where do you get magnesium, potassium, Food, you know, so you know, bone broth. Like if you want to get a lot of trace minerals that people with hypermobile. My. Well, I think one of the reasons my daughter's CP is so severe is probably because of her hypermobility. This made her susceptible to crystal meth and pregnancy for. It's bad for brain development, if you're wondering. So yeah, just in case you're wondering. It's bad for brains. Engaged. Just in case you. Anybody out there wondering. Yeah. No bueno. No bueno. So but then it go back to food. And so I was having this parallel track of getting into deeper science. So from that led it to the ifm, which was like the usual thing we do. You do like your methylation evaluation looking for how her genes are turning on and off. You do more heavy metal stuff, more nutritional evaluation stuff led down to some infection panels. Looking forward, did she have viral infection reactivation? And she actually did. She had Melvation and her ticket pox titer as well as a C CMV titer and her mono titers. So maybe she has a low grade infection from her nutritional things. But as we kind of went down that pathway, we always come back, food's even more important. This pathway. Oh my gosh, did you realize food's important even more? And so there's this parallel evolution of crazy therapies and the foundations getting stronger. Yeah. So one of the next things we started doing, I kind of started reading about electromagnetic field therapy, which they've been doing in. I mentioned that before in Europe for a while and got a PEMF device which you've used.

I mean, you have it at home. It's huge and it's heavy, and you're.

Kind enough to lug that thing around. Well, that was with our experimentation. So when I got that device, we were seeing our patients with dysautonomia and pots. I started wondering in chronic fatigue, could this actually help their energy? And one of the things I realized was you could actually re regulate someone's autonomic nervous system with this device. Right. With thoughts with Sain syndromes.

And so what's the autonomic nervous system?

Okay. The autonomic nervous system is your sympathetic comparison, like nervous system. So you've got your rest and digest and your fight or flight. Kind of. Some of the systems that kind of come together and the whole is called the autonomic nervous system. Okay. So autonomic, autonomous.

It does its own thing happening.

It's. It's your sub.

Often imbalanced. Right. The term dysautonomia is what's often used, pos being an extreme form.

Exactly. Yeah. And my daughter does kids with cp. Actually, dysautonomia is common. They overheat easily, they can't maintain their blood pressure. Yeah.

Heart rate, elevation.

Yeah. All that kind of stuff. And it does have some sensitivities. If it gets too hot, she'll overheat really easily. She won't sweat. And then she'll, like, sweat voluminously.

Yeah.

And then came back to food once again. And then went down this path. We have lipid Medicine with Dr. Smith.

What about Patricia Keynes?

Patricia Kerne. Sorry, wrong. Yeah. Come back to lipid therapy. And so then when the training occurred, realized you can use phosphate lipid for repairing membranes. So then ordered a fancy genetic test from Germany on my daughter and realized she had these chemicals attached to her DNA from birth. Did it on me and realized mine looked worse than hers. Prior from working at factory when I was in college.

Yeah.

So I need to flush my DNA up as well as hers. Did some IV phosphylcholine on her, came back and realized, wait, how can I do this with dot? Because part of what Dr. Kane does is like doing nuts and seeds. And realized, wait a second, I can take mayonnaise. Brain mayo.

Yes.

Yes. And so I'll use the Body Balance oil, which is a balanced omega 3, omega 6. It's not a seed oil like people think about.

It's a flaxseed, but it's not fat seed.

It's flax and safflower that have been cold expressed, not heat express. A lot rancid. So they're making mayonnaise out of it. All of a sudden, my kids are getting three tablespoons of this.

Yeah.

On their sandwich. You know, so it came back to foods and acid again. Right. Then came to the peptide world.

And this is stuff that you're doing at home, and this is stuff they're eating, and stuff that they're eating that you made delicious. Like, it's not stuff that you're force feeding them. I mean, this is like an aioli. I mean, your brain mayo is like a fancy a. Oh, well, I put.

A garlic in it.

Right.

How much?

Basically makes it a fancy aioli. And we go to a restaurant, pay.

A lot of money for aioli.

You're making this at home.

Yeah.

And you're using these supplements that we would give patients to make a food product that your children eat. And unbeknownst to them, their brain's healing. Right. Like, how amazing is that?

One of the things we did end up doing when you realize a lot about, like, how important your connective tissue and your fascia is. And she has fascia issues and tone issues. Well, one of the important things you need trace minerals. So, yeah, I got my. My trace mineral stuff. But I realized where in nature do humans get most of their trace minerals? Like, where do we get them from? Well, we eat animals that you have. Cows are a great example. They take grass. Where does calcium come from in cow's bones? Where. Where are the 98 trace minerals the cows need to be healthy that they don't get from eating grains? That's the reason a lot of cows are sick. Where. Where they get that from the dirt. Puts it in the grass. They eat grass. And then how do you get that out of cows? Where a lot of connective tissue extracts. So that's your bone broth, that's your gelatin. So all of a sudden start. We always have at least half a gallon in our fridge to be used for whatever for years. And so implement that into our food as medicine. Start getting some collagen supplements as well. Then led down another pathway up. I told you about the functional neurology. And that's all led into things. Like one of the things we. That really made a big difference with her tone issues was actually a foot neuromuscular stimulation device called Revive that. Basically she puts her feet on it, activates her calf muscles, and she started getting calf muscles. Kids with CP don't get calf muscles. She started getting calf muscles. Wow. And what happened is her tone went away. So she went from not being able to. She's all crunched over and couldn't put her feet flat. Doing flat footed standing up. So then I was like, well, this is kind of cool. Cannot reproduce this. So I got this thing called a power dot, which is another neuromuscular stimulation device used by elite athletes or athletes make their muscles big and strong. Start putting out her, her thighs, putting her back, and all of a sudden she's little legs on her, you know. And that led to us doing a suit. You've heard of the Clotho gene before? Yeah. Yeah.

So that's the new, newest, most favorite longevity gene.

And the way you activate it by interval training, by fasting, certain peptides can activate it. I think quercetin can do connect. Yes.

Here's some of the flat bioflavonoids, some of the bioflav diacitin, maybe strawberries.

Yeah, Some of the bioflavonoids, the plants that actually also treat cancer stem cells. Okay. Also get the Clotho thing going on. So all of a sudden you can prevent cancer and do longer, longer with blueberries, you know?

Yeah, blueberries and strawberries.

Those cyans. Right.

Though side note, EWG just put out the dirty dozen list today and strawberries are at the top of it. So get your strawberries organic or they're all kind of.

Yeah, they are. So. So got her. That actually does neuromuscular stimulation. Came across this therapist in California who does a special therapy called tasis therapy, which is task specific neuromological stimulation. And what that is, is that looks at the KP as a therapist and says, this muscle's weak, that muscle's weak. Then takes a NMS device and puts pads there. Let's have you walk. You try a walk. And it basically activates those muscles. So it does external neural stimulation of the weak pathways. Wow. Now you're doing this at home as you're doing that, you're like wan. She needs more protein for her muscles. We come back how much protein she gets. She's hypermobile. Wow. She eats more protein than she's getting. So food becomes a bigger issue as well. Always goes back to food with the lipid mess. And we realized as well, she needed more organ meat. People Forget that before 1950, 30% of all the meat consumption in America was organ meat. And now it's like no one eats it anymore. And that's the richest source of mineral lipids, phospholipids and minerals is actually in the environments. All that stuff is actually organ meat. So start figuring out how we can implement that. And I make a sausage with hamburger and liver meat and make the spice. And kids with one of our pastured eggs, and all of a sudden they're getting eggs and yolk, they're gonna be spices, and they. And they eat it all up. It's yummy. And they're like, they have no idea that. Right. This is healthy. You know, they know it's healthy, but.

At this stage, they don't know that it's medicine, basically.

They don't know Ms. And.

Yes, so I know it's healthy, but they don't know the incredible extent that it.

Yeah, yeah. So other thing, we've done so many things. So during this process as well, the functional neurology we already mentioned going down to the clinic and layer, I learned about oral stimulation. It's really interesting how one of the things that happens with brain injury is you get dysregulated neural pathways. It's kind of like trauma. People get trauma, get limbic activation, they get inside anomia, they get a vagal dysfunction. Your pathways get shaken up and they try to fix it, get dysregulated. So what happens with a brain injury is the exact same thing happens. And so one of the things that they figured out is if you do oral stimulation, you activate cranial nerve 7, cranial nerve 9. The nuclei for those are actually in your brain stem, where a lot of your regulatory pathways for pain, the rubber spinal tract, where they sit. So what if someone has a brain injury, Trauma, concussion, multiple sclerosis, if you have them walk when they can't walk and you're activating their tongue, you're basically trying to regulate the dysregulate relay systems in their brain stem that regulate down the spinal cord. And so all of a sudden, now they actually walk a little better, and you start retraining the brain through external neural stimulation. And this is. This device is called Pons pnes. It's been studied for years. Using it in Russia for kids with cp. They're using it for brain trauma in Canada. As of now, I think it's only FDA approved in the United States for balance issues from multiple sclerosis. Another brain dysregulatory issue. Lose insulation. Right. So we're using it with my daughter. And then again, research and found this lady in California who actually had her own spinal cord injury. And one of the things she did was using this thing called Galileo, which is an alternating foot pad. Right. I'm like, well, this is weird, right? You've heard about these vibrating footpads. That's a bunch of Huey, right? So dive into it. There's actually a hospital in Koln, Germany. It's called the Princess Sophia Hospital. And Princess Sophia of Jordan fought enough of these Galileo devices for the hospital that all the kids with a brain injury can take one home with them. They use it, and they see amazing results with their kids with cast. So we got one. And so part of my daughter's therapy and what happens is it goes this altering vibration. And we usually said it. This is. So it's cool. So what happens with the spinal cord injury? If you move it about 24 hertz, what happens is you activate the spinal reflex arc. You don't do that. Sixteen hertz. You don't do it. Eighteen hertz. That means is you can have a person with a spinal cord injury that's contracted up, but if you hit that vibration of the feet at 24 hertz, it disconnects. The neural pathway from the central nervous system, activates the spinal arc. The muscles engage. So if you've got disregulation from your pathways, that frequency can actually bypass out, allow the person to engage their muscles, and then try to stand. I know, I know. The connection is not there. We're activating this connection, and over time, you. You relay the tracks. So we. And she's been doing that now for seven or eight years. And then you're like, okay. Then you go back to. Her gut's still a mess. She's still got yeast overgrowth. Like, what's going on? Then you adjust her supplements. Then we start adding in fermented foods. Because of the things with Dr. Kane, with all that gut, you realize how important butyrate for your brain health. Yeah. Then we kind of started fermenting all of our stuff at home. So we have fermented kefir. We do kombucha at home now. And so again, sauerkraut. Sauerkraut, yeah. We give that. You see me bring the sauerkraut in? Yeah.

You make your own yogurt?

Yeah, I stopped the yogurt because it's a little difficult. I stopped that.

I'm just making sourdough bread.

I mean, you kind of still do sourdough bread. Yeah. All the gluten people out there. I know we'll get a little excited about the sourdough bread thing?

No, actually there's a sourdough bread in one of the blue zones in Sardinia, I think.

Yep.

They make a sourdough bread that when it was tested, had less gluten in it than gluten free bread in the United States. And it was made with traditional wheat. And it was because of the starter culture that they use that they pass down for generations and how their fermenting process goes. That bread should be full of gluten. It is not. That's pretty amazing.

So if the real food is medicine. Pathway. You're sucking me down again, Dr. Jinsky.

Yeah.

So one of the things that happened in the 1880s was we started using brewer's yeast, Sarcomyces cervicia. Okay. How did we ferment wine 4,000 years ago? How we ferment beer? How we ferment apple cider? How do we ferment bread? Unfermented bread, they call it. No, yeast unleavened bread. Yeah. What's the leavening? It's bacteria and yeast from the air that you capture on the skin of a grape, on the skin of an apple that then gets mixed with it and you can create a culture. So this is a polyculture of multiple hundreds of strains of bacteria, hundreds of strains of yeast that then culture it. And they make a vast variety of different short chain fatty acids of micronutrients. They leave their own DNA and mRNA, which we now know the MRNA from the environment actually trains our immune system and that is in that fermented thing. And then they create acidic acid. Propionic acid. Acidic acid. What does acid do? It breaks down protein.

Right.

So all of a sudden the bread is self digesting.

Right.

And so my question is, is part of our issue with bread in our culture, not just the glyphosate and roundup, not just the tricum, which is that monocol, you know about that for super highly hybrid and wheat. Whereas it actually started was the NGK carnival that became a mile at the moon with bread when we no longer used a natural culture and went to a monoculture of just one yeast. Yeah. And left everything else out. So all of a sudden we make, we make homemade sourdough bread at home as well. And you reform it for 24 hours.

I mean, do you not have patients that like don't have celiac, but are avoiding gluten or dairy for whatever reason suggested by you? And then they say, hey, I'm going to go to Italy, I'm going to go to France, I have this honeymoon this trip. And I'm sorry, Dr. Jinsky, I'm gonna eat bread when I'm there or I'm gonna eat and I'm like, look that you're fine. You know what the risk is? I'm fine. This is your backup plan.

Report back.

You'll have access to the Internet and you can send a portal message if necessary. And they do. Great. And it's like, wait a minute. That's an aha moment.

Yeah, I've heard that so many times.

Too many times to be a coincidence.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so like our path Florida. Every time we like go down, you know, flip it, whatever, then it's all. We kind of keep re refining food as medicine.

Yeah.

Are you getting appropriate sleep? Making sure our environment's clean? Removing chemicals and toxins from our house. Yeah. You know, hepa filtration. All these super basic things that people don't think about. That has been the magic sauce. And that one of my realizations in this world is like all these cool things we've done, my daughter, we've done more things. So I want to keep on going because I'll take it the whole time. Yeah.

But we're going to talk about some of the rest of your family in a second.

Yeah. Is that those are all on top of. Are we eating food as medicine? Are we eating seasonally? Are we getting nutrient dense food? Is she getting the building blocks so that when we do all these cool things, her body will heal? Peak maximum. You know, we did hyperbaric with her. We have a hyperbaric chamber at home. We have a sauna at home. One of the things I, I've learned this. I don't have to talk to you about this. Recently I learned a week or two ago that water actually absorbs infrared light. And actually the viscosity of water decreases when exposed to infrared light. So maybe one of the mechanisms of action of infrared saunas or even being outside, actually your blood gets a little thinner, you get better circulation. Yeah. Really interesting. Yeah. I was doing some training on better biomodulation. Yeah. And water itself absorbs light at a certain spectrum. It's not just your cells, not just your mitochondria, not just your skin. Literally. Water absorbs a certain wavelength of light that lowers its viscosity for the universal solvent. Right. Yeah. Maybe that's the reason why people feel better. Yeah. One of the many reasons why I feel better in sun. So we've really taken the foundations to heart for anybody listening to this. It's like all the fancy cool stuff is built on top of real food.

Right.

Food is medicine. All the foundational stuff that people don't want to do. That's the hard work you do. So then we do the cool stuff. It's like magic.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And unless you're fasting, you have to eat, right? And if that's built in and what you're choosing to eat and deciding to eat is medicinal and informative to your biology, then every day you're taking medicine without realizing it, and there's variations, so it's not boring and there's consistency there. And you're now not only avoiding disease or preventing it, but optimizing and maintaining health, which is pretty beautiful. That's awesome. I love that story. And it makes something that sounded so intangible for people that don't have CP or access and resources like you do. And it wasn't like these things fell in your lap. I mean, like, let's not downplay how hard you and Becky have worked to research and find where you might be able to get these devices and then how hard Anna has worked to implement the solar devices. But it also kind of coinciding with that story for everyone else, is that it all goes back to food. It all goes back to get some sunlight. It all goes back to manage your stress and sleep and all these other things.

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So let's segue into beyond Anna and your other children that you had talked about a little bit in the last episode. Let's talk about Becky. We've alluded to Becky a little bit as someone who's been your partner in crime and who's the co CEO and who kind of is the Ying to your yang and and how. And obviously is the behind the scenes powerhouse that helps make all this magic happen. But she hasn't always been healthy and you've had your own journey with her and you've had to kind of help her along the way. Would you be willing to speak to that?

As you know, it's hardest to the people that you're closest to 100%. And the journey with Becky a lot has not been me doing a fancy test on her and saying do this because she's a kind of person. She's going to do it. She's going to figure out her own and donations. Yeah. And so part of it's been like, for example, I talk about this all the time. I think we've been married for 15 years at this point in time. And she's talking about when she went to grad school. She got really anxious. She almost dropped out of grad school because it's so hard. She was so stressed. She was like feeling psychologically discombobulated. She actually went to psychiatrist, got given, I think Prozac, made her feel horrible. Eventually started getting better, got used to grad school and graduated. And she's a great therapist, blah, blah, blah. When I heard that story, I was always like, you know what? That was just, you're fine, no big deals. Yeah, I think gaslighter. I just kind of ignored her. Her lived experience, let's say. And I heard the story over and over again. Fifteen years later, she's talking her story in a 90 lab at VCU, the micro college in Virginia. And the light bulb goes off. I've been amilab. You have as well. Yeah. You have your own stories. You know, it's oh my gosh, that is a massive amount of formaldehyde. I remember coming up, the whole adults walk up to the floor on 10th floor and Sanger and come out the door smelling it. You can smell it. Yeah. And I remember walking out one day and seeing like some high school students that were kind of checking out the lab, crying in the elevators because the stench was so horrible. And you just kind of walk by, you kind of go like, hey, look at them go in there. And you start eating whatever. And I was like, she had a massive amount. And then all of a sudden all these dots like, this is the reason why your parents had new carpet put in. You went and spent the night that your chronic fatigue flared for a week afterwards. This is the reason why when we go to newer hotels that you feel horrible, you have this multiple chemical sensitivity was from this. And so a lot of our.

Which is that formaldehyde is basically a volatile chemical and classified as a biotoxin.

Yeah.

So these are biotoxin hits that she was getting unbeknownst to her. And you.

Yeah.

And you finally learn about this stuff and you start to draw these connections.

One of the funny stories is that there was a period in time every month she'd feel really bad, really sick. And you know, me being the caring, loving husband I am, I kind of would be like this is annoying. I'm just gonna avoid this. Da da, da. They went on for like almost a year. She tells me a story about her, how she feels and how her brain feels and how her body feels and how she hurts and aches. Our skin's on fire. And I'm like, yeah, you just like, you know again, I'm not gaslighting my wife. My wife. I'm just I guess a dullard. And then Becky one day is like, you think of toxic shock. I'm like oh my gosh. Yeah. And basically stopping using tampons and going to that little cup thing. Run away. Like you had toxic shock every month for like a year. And your loving, caring husband absolutely just missed it down. Totally diminishing it. Diminish it. Yeah, we're fine. Put some dirt on it. She figured out and that's happened over and over again. When he got her son, we got Cleo, we ended up losing him. And that was like a major like emotional kind of stressor and flared some of her, her pain stuff. And this is all mixed together. So she started really bad neck pain, pinched nerve. And so she went and got some steroids which totally jacked her up and put her into a massive fatigue spiral. It took almost five years for her to get out. Oh my gosh. There's five years where literally she had like from a course of steroids. It was like we had Cleo, we lost him, his massive stress.

Stress and then the steroids.

Mr. Nest, neck up, flavor pain. Went to a well meaning physician, got steroids and then just had this massive crash. So it was like five years of like I can't get out of bed today, but I got to cause I'm a mom and at the end of the day she's like done for the day and having the non restorative sleep and just the horrible fatiguing illness that just my brain doesn't work and will this ever go away? And all that stuff going on. We got the pemap device and that made it go away. And I was like, whoa, this P. Meth, it re regulated her neurological system. Another event happened with clio's. Our kid. Our. Our kid who likes to push us to the limits. Yeah. Hopefully your kids don't ever do that to you, man. They're still young. It's still young. They're still young. I have my thoughts, but he, when he was, I think about eight, he got crushed in the elevator, almost died. And so that's a crazy story of itself. And functional medicine is fixing basically a 90 facial nerve palsy that shouldn't be in. Fixed it in six weeks with some cool LED light therapy and stem therapy and some things. But she was actually at a homeschooling conference in Kentucky, I believe, and drove like 12 hours back. And she was just like, my one normal kid is not normal now. Right. It's just coming back. Whatever. Normal as we know, there is no normal. But, you know, because he has a beautiful smile. He's just got, you know, you see him, he's got beautiful smile. Yeah. See him in the hospital and his face is just shaped bad. That's what I am. And back just messed her up. Messed her up bad. And so every time he disappear, she would spiral, she pop back up. Because that's what boys do in trauma. Yeah. One time he actually went to sleep in a cubby hole and fell asleep for three hours. And she's just like, where is he? Is he dead in the pond somewhere? Because we have ponds on our property. Did he know where'd he go? And he pops back up. He's like, hey, Mom. And she's like, what? Right. Yeah, but just hours spiraling. Right. So. And we tried flotation. It helped a little bit. One of our conference, one of our colleagues, one of the groups were in Satra Patel, viewer, Satcha Patel. He does this holotropic breath work, like resetting your neurological system with breath work. So she did that and it basically she had emotional release. And since then she has not had one of those spirals. Wow. And so it's. It's been a journey. Yeah. It's not just been one kid. I don't think I've actually mentioned Khalil elevator incident yet on any of these recordings. But then I remember that.

I remember we were at the practice together, and I remember how much that affected you. I mean, I just saw you get emotional and it's going to make me emotional. You keep your cards close to your chest. And you don't ever really let that side of you show. And I remember how it affected you, and I. I saw it on her as well, but I was used to kind of seeing her be that person in your relationship. She was the one who kind of, kind of carried the emotional cards, but. But I wasn't aware of how every little episode of I don't know what's going on with my son provoked this traumatic. And that's like.

That's really like the ultra weak breath work. Like using your breath as a therapy session.

Yeah.

Through breath holding, hyperventilation, and then at the end going through a guided imagery thing. How about literally, you know, when he disappears, does she get anxious? Yes. Does he still stress her out? Yes. But she does not have that uncontrollable spiral where when he pops back up, two hours of kind of. Yeah.

Does she have to do the breath.

Work every time or she's only done once?

Just one injection?

One and done. Yeah.

So is a typical for this type.

Of breath work or. I use it a lot with my patients. It's on our trauma thing. We have. We have a trauma course coming out sometime soon and it varies. I've had. I've only had one person. Well, myself and one other person do it and not have some profound thing with it. One of my patients who is actually a therapist and has a lot of personal trauma, she actually, every time she does it, she like some memory in the past she didn't realize she had comes to. So the cool thing about it, it's using. You start that. You start it with unequal body movements. And so the idea is you want to do left, right stuff that's not coordinated to basically kind of disengage some of the automatic watering in your brain. It's almost like acting like an animal that's almost been killed and shakes, shivering. Yeah. You're trying to replicate that as a human, and then you hyperventilate. So you blow off CO2, become hypocapnic, and you retain CO2. So what you're doing is you're doing massive vagal nerve activation with hyperventilation. So what you're doing is kind of like massaging your. Your sympathetic parasympathetic nervous system to get you in a stage where this really, really relaxed stage. It's really interesting watching some whole tropic breathwork sessions that are like three hours long. The individuals will actually have almost like these psychedelic kind of experiences where they have spontaneous hand cramping, spontaneous emotional responses. You'll actually have like these insights, like flashlights kind of thing. It's all induced by your breath. And so that's more. You need someone to work with that. But this is something, God, you can do on your own, and I use it. And my one patient I was telling you about, she, like, every time she has, like, new memory pops up. So it's interesting some of the science behind this. You've heard of Wim Hof, he's got his own version of this. Yeah, but it's not a version like, meant for trauma work or self stuff. It's more for like, you know, peak maximal performance kind of thing. But in our world, it's like we need some for trauma stuff.

So, I mean, a large portion of. Portion of our patients are. Are hardwired into a sympathetic response. You know, fight, flight, freeze. And. And these memories that you're referring to, for those of you listening, these are memories that this person can just recall whenever they feel like. These are repressed memories, and these are memories that are being reactivated and coming to the surface. And it's like, you know, for some people, that's this cathartic moment of this is what's been pushed so deep down can kind of help to explain why I feel the way I feel. And as it comes to the surface and you get resolution with it, you can heal and you can kind of get that autonomic stability back instead of the dish autonomy that goes along with it. It's incredibly powerful. It almost made it sound like what you're describing sounds a little bit like some of the psilocybin research and some of the Ketamine IV Ketamine that's being used to kind of activate the default mode network and how it kind of rewires and helps heal the brain and. And resurfaces some of these memories. I mean, it's. It's all really fascinating.

Yeah, so she. She did that as well. So my wife, we've done a lot of these things. And so it's like it's just my daughter, aunt. It's not just Khalil. It's not just Abigail. It's not just my wife. It's all of us.

What about you? You get your own stuff, right?

Oh, you know what? I've always bullied as a kid. Yeah. And so I think my wife said, I have my own trial. It's hard to pay attention to your.

Own problems when you're so busy helping so many of them.

I think my thing, I was a kid in middle school, in elementary school, that no One liked. So I was just kind of. There's always one kid in elementary school no one likes. And that was just. Was. That was me. So they called me names and there's this group called the Devastators. They'd make me do push ups in the bathroom. And I remember much time I was gonna fake them out. I'm not gonna go to the bathroom. I'm gonna go to the classroom. They came in the classroom, made me do push ups and oh my gosh. So like just the way I was. But it's kind of weird cause like my response to that as a kid in fourth grade, kid in fifth, second grade. I mean I was. This is elementary school and God's on my side. He's not on your side. I'm gonna be a doctor when I grow up. We'll see where you're at in 10 years. We'll see where I'm at in 10 years. And I just kind of like my default because of my upbringing was the kind of future thinking. The thing that's interesting about that, it almost like, like rewired my thinking. And then you see how this plays out in the business and how I do things. I'm always now forward thinking. Yeah. What's my one year? Three year?

If you got your three month, six month.

Yeah, I was buying one year and five year.

I mean, you got all your plans.

All my plans. If this falls out, this happens and if this comes out and if we move our practice and all of a sudden insurance doesn't, you know. Well, you don't know. There's a big hack in the insurance world. Like this past month and billing stopped for a month. Things we don't talk about all the time. Yeah. Things you don't need to know about. Right?

I don't need to.

Yeah. But just having enough like planning for that stuff. Right. So that when that happens, like, cool, we've got this here. So, yeah, you know, he gets paid for. I don't got to worry about that. All that kind of stuff. I feel like that set me up to have this mind wired like that, which I like it, it works for me. But it makes it hard for me to be in the moment, so I don't relax very well. It's hard for me to make connections with people. It's hard for me. I don't have a lot of friends. I'd love to have friends. I'd love to have lots of friends. But it's hard for me to in the moment. Like, let's just chill and hang out because my mind is moving. I got the 10 year plan and so is that trauma. Is it just me being me? I don't know. I feel like that's a connection I've kind of made through my journey.

Yeah, but do you see it as pathologic to the point where you want to do something about it, or do you see it as, you know what this is kind of maybe a secret superpower that helps me to be successful in these realms that I exist in. And although it might interfere with some of my interpersonal relationships, I'm okay with straight off.

That's where I'm at.

And as we get older, I mean, having a lot of friends is overrated, by the way. As we get older, I'll tell you, I used to be a social dynamo. I don't know how else to say it. I am a hermit now.

I'm a total introvert.

Your social emotional needs change as you get older. And for me, it's my wife and my kids. It's being at home, it's having no plans is really my favorite plan.

Well, I know what your thing is. Like, if anything interrupts with my family time.

Yeah, it's a problem.

Yeah.

So how has all this Anna and Abby and Khalil and Becky and your own personal journey, how's that shaped you as a clinician? And keeping in mind like kind of the heart hand connection, like how is that kind of translated?

We have these realizations. And so one of the realizations was actually when I was working on a seminary degree, like all this. I also did a seminary degree when I was in the military and finished that in 2010, 2011. One of the things I realized, like this idea of, you know, being fully you holistically, you, you know, this idea that knowledge is not just in your brain, it's not just in your heart, it's not just emotional like this holistic head, hard hands. So the true knowledge, a true understanding is not just. I read some textbooks and read some articles, which are lots of people out there, they're super smart. It's not just the practical knowledge of like, I can do cool things with my hands. I'm a surgeon, I can fix anything around the house. I've been working on cars since I was a kid. But it's at the heart aspect, like with my daughter, like having that young kid who I know you're verbal stage now you're two, you're three or four and, and you're, you have this propensity to heal. I've got, I Don't have that much time. I need to get up at 4 o' clock in the morning and be looking at articles and research and stuff. I need to be reading two to three hours a day. I need to uncovering everything. Like the idea of that with my daughter, with engaging my holistic being. It's like my wife says, it kind of gave me a heart. I learned to love one of the things my daughter gave me. She's the only person in my life that I've ever done anything for and not ever expect anything in return. You love your wife. Your wife's great, she's attractive. But you expect something back. You know, friends you expect. I mean your boss. You do, your colleague. You expect me to respect you. You expect certain things, this expectations. She's the only person in my life that I've given without reservation, with abandon. And I actually expect nothing return.

It's called unconditional love.

It's unconditional love and like that has given me a heart.

Yeah.

It's giving me emotions. Sometimes I go missing, you know, I kind of track it in there.

But you had a heart. It just made it bigger. I made it work better.

I was 10 man. Yeah.

Or Grinch. Right.

So I wasn't Grinch. I wasn't a nasty guy. I was more tin man. 10 was a nice guy beforehand.

He was a good character.

Really got a 10 man. My wife jokes that I was almost robot from the future. Yeah, very like we will do this. We're shop these kids, you know. But it's like you have to be a certain. For you example, you're an empath and it made you in the ER really good at stuff, but at a cost. Yeah. Right. You come back from three days in the ER and you would take four days recover because you're like using your spidey sense. You talk about. Yeah. Figuring things out that other ER doctors or hospitals have missed. And you're like, how do you do this? Right. You know, I'm the opposite. Where I've got. I don't have that spice since. But I've trained my brain to realize things and I'm very compartmentalized. So I can go from thing to thing to thing and not have that emotional kind of thing hang with me.

It would force me to put up walls that I didn't want. It would force me to become less empathetic and less feeling. I mean there's. You talk about burnout in the er. There's something called empathy fatigue, which I think is another way of saying burnout but for me that's worse. Burnout could be you're just tired. Burnout could be you're mentally exhausted, physically exhausted, but empathy fatigue, when you stop feeling, when you stop giving a bleep about patients, that's not okay. And when it gets to the point that in order to do your job well, cute, life threatening injury or illness, you can't have emotionality if you become that person that affects and infects every aspect of your life and then you, you start to have problems with your relationships and etc. So I went from having no real issues with my relationship and being this kind of freewheeling ER doc to this emotional coldness which made me a better clinician but made me a worse friend, partner, son, brother, etc And I had to relearn that and find that happy medium and kind of tap back in. And much like your story with Anna, like my children, I say this all the time, quite literally, my children saved my life. So did my wife. Marrying Jody and having Eden and Gabriel literally saved my life, transformed my health, transformed who I am as a person and got me back to who I am at my core, which I knew I always was, but went back from the head and the hands to the heart. Like you said, that's powerful and I think it's really powerful when you tell your story. How has that translated into, to patient care? Like how did that affect your patients?

Well, I think the biggest thing, I was actually talking with someone and she was like as an interview and they're talking about, you know, what's your secret thing? That, and that's I stallbound and it's like, you know what my thing is? Like I just don't give up. Like I'm not going, I'm not going to give up on a patient, you know, as long as they keep on coming to see me. Right. And even though I might have no idea what I'm doing, like, we'll figure something out. My first metastatic cancer patient, I came in like, hey, I want to do something different. I'm like, oh, let's figure this out together. My first mold patient that I'm like, I don't even know if this is a thing. You know, you just kind of have to run these pathways. And so I think the thing that for patients that's gotten to me is like I have this emotional thing. Like I, I, I want people to get better. I want to see, I don't use this word, light. I want to see miracles. I want to see people come in that have no hope. And have been in different places. I want to see crazy things happen with their physiology. I want to see their labs transformed. I want to see. And I'm not gonna give up. And it's really.

It's not in your DNA.

It's.

There's no quit. It's. For as long as I've known you, I don't think that word is something that computes in. Computes in your computer.

Yeah.

Do not robot from the future where they like deleted that code.

You know, the sniper quitting has been mutated.

Yeah.

But I think that's where it affects my clinical. I got this intellectual curiosity that's just augmented. So now I don't like stop learning. Yep. It was really funny. I remember in college I used to make fun of people who bought. I didn't buy any textbooks in college. And I know a lot people get the books and they highlight stuff. They're making fun of those people. Like I would just show up to class and take notes and just get my. It was about 80 pages of notes is how much I. Because I calculated out like that per class was about what it was in undergrad. And I remember just like whoever buy a textbook. Right. I remember saying I'll never start a research company. I hate research. Never really did research. I remember saying to a friend of mine in college, I was never going to adopt kid. I said that. Huh? I said that in my past. I've said a lot of dumb things.

Yeah, you said things that you believed at the time. You can't judge them as dumb. They said you were working with the information you had at hand. And HIAC 2020. You can look back now and say of course that was dumb. But the reality is you maybe believed it then. And although you may see it as dumb, maybe it was more naivete. And the reality is you're looking back and laughing at it now and getting teary eyed and understanding that this has been the evolution of you.

Yeah.

Which is pretty amazing. That will continue on as long as you learn.

But the point is that was the me then. And like what's happened is now I. I have an unquenchable desire to learn. Yeah. When I, you know, in this funny medical school I had like a different color for everyone. And like I had like my five color things. Yeah. I literally memorized every page in our notes we got from. Because you were there. But you took a year or two later me like I took those notes and memorized them and visualized them and started a research company and adopted all my kids.

And stood heavily ton of textbooks that you never were going to buy.

I read textbooks too. It's like super fun. I just finished doing a textbook on environmental and clinical medicine. Let's presoeiner and crinian. Yeah. So I just want to say it's been a transition, personally being the fullest realist version of me I can possibly be. And it's not been in a cook. It's been in the context of my family, the struggle of being the dad, a doctor, a father or husband in the context of the world we live in. And that's kind of where I think.

The school of life. Things you cannot learn in a textbook.

Yeah.

It's just been experienced and that.

And I bring that to the table when I see patients because it's like, okay, how I. I want to find out what's going on. I want to find their trigger, their mediator, the things that keeping them stuck. I want to find what they're lacking and I want them to end and I want to see really cool things happen.

Do you learn from patients? Not about them. Obviously we learn about them.

How do you help them?

You learn from them too.

Well, the patients will send me. You get this too. You get messages about. Got this article. I got this thing. You ever heard about this? I almost just hate it when someone asks me a question I don't know the answer to. I'm like, I should know the answer. I hate it. Then you ask me a question don't the answer to. So then I take it and I'm like, and because it's a message and I like research well, like, oh, Dr.

Harson, you're like, can't.

What do you do?

Right. If you don't know it?

And they ask Dr. Yeah, it's called up to date. Yeah.

Or you say things like, and I learned this in medical school and this was your way of not getting in trouble. But I adopted it. This makes sense. And this is how I'm going to live the rest of my life. I don't know, but I'll look it up. If you didn't know an answer to a question, instead of pretending that you knew the answer to the question and clearly getting called out and then you're really in trouble, you would say, honestly, I don't know. I really don't know. Maybe I should. But I don't. And I'll look it up. And then you report back with that answer in a timely fashion. But you've now learned something and you've taught that person something about you through the process of humility and desire to grow and learn. If you become that, how do you not succeed? How do you not learn for the rest of your life? How do you not learn from patients, et cetera. I tell patients similarly that I'm not going to be the one that quits. I'm not going to be the one that ever says I don't know without eventually trying to figure it out for you. And I know that you're the same way a lot. I. I learned a lot of that from you because people have seen the other video that we did. But you treated me as a patient before I became a colleague. And so I had lots of questions too. I did have a lot of questions.

Like, oh my gosh, I was questions.

Cause I wanted to learn. And you were always so open and amenable to answering them and going down these rabbit holes. And I never felt shame. I never felt I'm gonna get choked up now. I never feel stupid. Like, you never made me feel like I was doing something wrong for wanting to know how to get better. And that was huge. And I know that's how you treat your other patients, so I'm really appreciative of that. So what's next for you? What's next for your family? What's next for Rafm? Give me the quick synopsis of the 3 6. Oh, I'm five year plan. What's going on in the future?

The plan is to finish going out of practice here, to build out our functional primary care, to build out our procedure room, to add new cool procedures on top of IVs, on top of pulse electromagnetic field therapy, maybe do some ozone therapy, EBRU therapy, maybe add in a bunch of lipid therapy, IV nad, all these things. The question is, with the rest of our space here, do we do that with the procedures or do we add a fourth practitioner on board? But one of the big things is scaling what we're doing and like, help as many people as possible. That's part of what we're doing here is educating people, giving people a reliable right now, especially with AI, like, where's the truth? Where do you get good information that someone's vetted for you? You know, from someone you know can trust, from an educated person. Like, where do you get that now? I mean, literally, my wife was. There was a thing, she got her Facebook. It was this crazy thing of someone we know. It was like totally total deep fake. Is deep fake silver? Yeah. Okay, so it was not real. You know, it's like it was just in a Facebook feed. And it's like, why is this even here? To be that resource so people can learn. And you create this ecosystem where for the self starters can go to our website. There's over 70 books on there. I've read of different topics and functional medicine, other areas to help people self discover. We've done over 200 blogs on mold and hormones and stuff that people can learn. We're starting. Hopefully this will be launching soon and then having an online educational platform where people can actually start their own healing journey. Because the reality is there's. There's two of us in Richmond, the city of 1.2 million people, you know, have our combined training. There's less than 200 in the country. There were two unicorns who just happened to. To be in the same space, which is really, really cool. Yeah, but how can you like getting the 80%? If I believe that the foundations of functional medicine are the foundations, how can you make that available? How can you scale that? And so that's one thing to work on is where I was creating a rock called. It's my proprietary system. It's a triangle of health. Where are the three things that people get stuck on? A new health journey through gut, which is all this stuff. It's stress, which is all this stuff. And it's the time you heal, sleep. And so that's what I found. That's where people get stuck the most. And so giving people a way to access that do their own healing journey and the confines of a community with coaches, 80% of people could get better. And we did this a little bit before during the pandemic. And the people who went through it and again came, saw us in person. It was like there was jet fuel. They came in ready to go. It was just amazing. So the goal is to like take that and scale that to make that available and to have an impact. Can we have an impact, Congressman Engraving functional medicine. Can we have an impact through what we're doing to talk about topics on the conversation at national level? Not because we need to be busier. We don't need to be busier, but can we have a bigger impact? Yeah. And that's kind of where I see us in one to two years. There's a book that they're working, you know, title is the Toughest Case. It's about, you know, who. If you don't know what comes out. I need to read it. Yeah, I got lots of. Lots of ideas. And so those. That's kind of like the immediate future for. I'm thinking about, but my life has been. I'm not where I thought I'd ever be. You know, I thought I'd be two years ago. I think I'd be here two years ago. Yeah. So who knows where I'll be in two years. But that's kind of where I'm thinking right now.

All pretty magical though, you know, like if you sit down and force yourself, because I know it's a lot easy for you to actually be present. You're very present in these interviews, by the way, to force yourself to be very present and think about that continuum from where you started to where you came. It's, it's almost daunting and, and overwhelming. And so why can't all that happen? I mean, quite literally, the sky's the limit at this point in time. Where you've come and where we're going in such a short period of time has been pretty profound and probably exceeded even your expectations. I don't know that I had any. I just, just kind of wake up every day and say thank you because.

I swear out of the er, us.

I get to do this. It's my two year anniversary out of the ER as of this month, which is kind of glorious. And that's because of you. That's because of our ifm. It's. It's the ability to. And not that I hate emergency medicine. I mean, don't get me wrong, it served a purpose and it was pretty great for a period of time until it wasn't. And I still will always be an ER doc at heart and I applaud those that do it. But the reality is this is what I'm supposed to be doing. This is what you're supposed to be doing. That's why we're here. So it's impactful and the more change that we can affect, the more people that we can touch, the more of the paradigm that we can shift and hopefully go from our little microcosm to a macrocosm to making the system move in a direction. If we have any part in that, then that's a life well lived and we've done a good job. And I think that's really important. And I know as someone who's very spiritual and religious minded and has. I think you want to go back to school to get your theology PhD or something or.

I was thinking of THM for a while, but I'm not. I've got so many things. That was my goal when I was 50 and now I'm like, well, it's not my new goals now. All right, so it's change. Yeah.

Well, either way, I think there's a spirituality to all of it, and I think it's pretty awesome. So thank you for your time, appreciate your personal stories and the tear jerking. Thank you all for listening and watching, and we'll see you soon.