Dr. Aaron Hartman explains how chronic pain shifts from a physical injury to a nervous-system problem, and describes a McGill study linking gut bacteria patterns to phantom limb pain and complex regional pain syndrome. He discusses treatments like low-dose naltrexone and peptides, plus factors that fuel neural inflammation: mold exposure, Lyme disease, and fatty-acid imbalances.
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All chronic pain is centralized pain. It's all in your central nervous system. So if you fracture a leg, fracture an arm, yeah, it's all hurt for several months. But if it's hurting two years later, that actually becomes a centralized pain syndrome. So, yeah, you did have an injury in the past, but, you know, the whole part, the part of forming calluses, right, is that you have less pain, less sensation there. If you actually create a pain cycle where you're feeling it, that is a centralized process. Did you know that your gut bacteria can actually help be a predictor of chronic pain? That's what I want to talk about a little bit today. By now, hopefully most people have heard about the gut bacteria, the gut microbiome, and starting to intrigue people a little bit. But the more and more you take a deep dive into it, we're learning that your gut bacteria, your gut microbiome really do impact pretty much every part of your health. And there's an interesting data research put out by McDill University looking at patients with complex regional pain syndrome. Now, this is something that I deal with in my clinic. And if you've ever heard of people having like phantom limb physical pain or syndrome where you lose an arm and you still have pain there, sometimes you'll actually develop whole body pain from fractures and injuries. That's complex regional pain syndrome. Phantom limb pain is you lose limb and you still feel the pain there. The question becomes the link between the two of these, where is it? It's in your nervous system, and is there a neuroinflammatory, or better said, a gut inflammatory connection between these? And the answer is yes. The patients I've dealt with in my clinic with complex regional pain syndrome, been able to actually get them in resolution, but it's always required dealing with a lot of environmental toxins, chemicals. Most of them had some mold issues, and their gut has always been a part of it. It's really interesting how some research from McGill is actually showing that the gut microbiome can be a predictor of who will get phantom limb pain. So anyway, they looked at the microbiome of about 120 different samples across Israel and Canada, and they saw a persistent signature in people who had had amputation with this phantom limb pain issue. And so, you know, phantom limb, can you lose the limb? You still have pain in that. That's a smaller version of, you know, CRPs. And when it generalizes, that's, you know, complex regional pain syndrome. It's really interesting how the gut bacteria actually sets up that Priming and some of the treatments we use for that, like low dose naltrexone bisphosphonates. One of my patients actually had IV bisphosphonates, which are, some of you may know their medications for osteoporosis, was actually part of her treatment at a University of North Carolina. But ultimately part of what they actually work through your gut track, your gut microbiome. One of the things is that AI artificial intelligence is actually helping us to see these connections through massive data gathering. So the question, next question is, okay, because it's really hard, how do you look at all these weird different markers and if you have, you know, hundreds of different bacterial markers in the gut, how do you actually process that in the clinical world? The answer is you can use artificial intelligence to actually process the data. And in my clinic where we have, I'm starting to use this with patients, where we'll have tons of patients, you know, data coming in and people aren't getting better. I'm starting to use it to figure out other signatures and markers of things that were that may have been missed. To date, actually, it's been more elusive showing that, yeah, we're on the right track, which is always good to know if people are kind of stuck in their healing process. But some of these unknown associations, like complex regional pain syndrome and the gut microbiome, those kind of things, it's kind of hard to find out unless you're using some kind of artificial intelligence or technology to figure that out. But it's interesting because the gut microbiome, we've known that your body, how can you use it as a signature for illness or disease? We've known for years that every individual has a unique microbiome signature. So you can actually look at someone's DNA for their gut microbiome. It's almost like a fingerprint, so to speak, based on the DNA in your gut. And you can actually use it to identify different individuals. And now they're using this kind of imprinting, using AI technology to see the imprint for different illnesses. And the CRPs, complex regional pain Syndrome is one of those. But it'll be interesting to see the next several months actually, because this is going so fast. Do we start using the technology and research and maybe even the clinical world to start using it to look for these signatures? Which is something I'm kind of playing with personally now. And just it's exciting to see how technology might actually help us be better at what we're doing in the functional medicine world.
Have you ever lost trust in your own body or in the doctors who were supposed to help you heal. It happens to millions of people who are stuck in the cycle of prescriptions, tests, and more questions than answers. That's why Dr. Aaron Hartman wrote his new book Uncurable. As a physician and a parent, he's lived through the pain of being told there's nothing more we can do. But instead of accepting that, he built a new path, one that combines traditional and functional medicine to uncover what's really driving illness. Uncurable is more than a book. It's a roadmap to help you find the root causes your doctor might have missed, reactivate your body's natural healing systems, and finally believe in what's possible again. If you've lost hope or trust in the system, this book will help you take back control. Go to UncurableBook.com and grab your copy along with Dr. Hartman's free resources to help you start your healing journey today.
I'm always curious how people in the regular conventional medicine world use these kind of new technologies and stuff, because I just don't know how they have time to do it in a regular clinic practice. But the good thing with, you know, functional medicine, practitioners will have more time to use these kind of new technologies. But also the question is like, how's that playing to actual treatment of these individuals with chronic pain? Well, all chronic pain, this is like just from good old fashioned conventional medicine. Now, all chronic pain is centralized pain. It's all in your central nervous system. So if you fracture a leg, fracture an arm, yeah, it's all hurt for several months. But if it's hurting two years later, that actually becomes a centralized pain syndrome. So, yeah, you did have an injury in the past, but you know, the whole part, the part of forming calluses, right, is that you have less painless sensation there. If you actually create a pain cycle where you're feeling it, that is a centralized process. And so using things that minimize neural inflammation, using peptides for that, using different neuromodulators like letters, naltrexone, working on gut health, and a lot of the individuals as well, looking at imbalances in their fatty acids. And in my clinic, what I've noticed is a lot of individuals, the trigger might be the injury that causes the pain, but they also have underlying chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which is the fancy term for mold related illness. And a lot of people will have mold exposure, toxin exposure, chronic Lyme, et cetera. That is something that keeps their neural inflammation going. So you can't, they can't heal. So that all of a sudden now using all these different concepts to treat pain. I think it's a really good addition to our armamentarium. It's also showing some of the leeway, some of the new frontiers and pain management that are out there. But again, coming back to our gut microbiome and what my question is, you know, when you start doing personalized medicine, precision medicine, doing genomic analysis, doing gut analysis on patients, doing nutritional analysis, a lot of times we'll see these markers for risk. You know, if someone's inflammatory markers are off, if they have imbalance in their gut bacteria, if they have a deficiency in omega 3s, they have an excess of omega 6 fatty acids, their homocysteine levels are elevated. HS, CRP, they have positive auto antibodies. Now we know they have markers predisposition to inflammatory conditions, which could also include neuroinflammatory conditions. So, point being is that your gut is huge with all kinds of things. It's super important. And this kind of goes down the basics, you know, gut stress sleep, getting your gut fixed, which real food's important, part of stress reduction, which plays into a lot of the neurally mediated stuff, and adequate sleep is when everything, everything heals and repairs. You know, these are the basic things. So it's really interesting how some of the deeper science is just getting us back to the basics. So we need to do the basics and perfect the basics. So hopefully this little deep dive was helpful. If you have questions, please put them below here on social media. Wherever you're consuming this information, we always like to hear back from individuals to find out what people would like to learn about, as well as take these little mini deep dives into a topic that interests individuals. So take care, we'll talk to you soon.
