Dr. Aaron Hartman (MD) discusses 'medical gaslighting'—the recurring problem where patients (often women aged ~30–50) with diffuse symptoms are dismissed, misdiagnosed, or labeled with functional disorders after visiting multiple specialists. He gives clinical examples (gut dysbiosis, dysautonomia/POTS, chronic Lyme, Long Covid), historical context showing slow acceptance of medical ideas, and practical advice: trust your body, pursue further testing, and use modern tools (including AI) to build differentials. The episode closes with a promotion for his book, Uncurable, and a link to resources.
Chapters
A lot of patients that come to me have been to five, six, seven different specialists. Typically they're women between 30 and 50, plus or minus aches and pains, they hurt, their joints hurt, a little bit of brain fog and they see the specialist for the joint aches, they see the rheumatologist and they sometimes get a diagnosis of non specific connective tissue disease disorder, sometimes arthritis or sometimes fibromyalgia, and are sent home with some medications. They might see a GI doctor for their gut symptoms and be told they have IBS or if one of the things is a functional bowel disorder, which means the specialist not quite sure what's going on.
I routinely get individuals coming to my office asking me questions about what other physicians have said. They went to another doctor, another specialist, and they had their symptoms, they were anxious, they had palpitations, they felt off and they left with a prescription and feeling overlooked, not feeling listened to. This happens all the time, and it's unfortunate. The new term I'm using for it is medical gaslighting. And that's what I want to talk about briefly today is this thing that's been going on for as long as people have been interacting with healthcare professionals, their concerns being overlooked, neglected, minimized, because what they're experiencing doesn't fit within the realm of accepted dictum, accepted knowledge base, accepted diagnoses. And so, you know, it goes down to one of three things. Either it's all in their head, they're a little anxious, crazy, there's really nothing going on and they can't be helped. And so I want to talk about that briefly under the rubric or the guise or the title, whatever you want to call it, of medical gaslighting. And I see this all the time. A lot of patients that come to me have been to five, six, seven different specialists. Typically they're women between 30 and 50, plus or minus aches and pains, they hurt their joints hurt, a little bit of brain fog, and they see the specialist for the joint aches, they see the rheumatologist, they see and they sometimes get a diagnosis of non specific connective tissue disease disorder, sometimes arthritis or sometimes fibromyalgia, and are sent home with some medications. They might see a GI doctor for their gut symptoms and be told they have IBS or functional. One of the things is a functional bowel disorder, which means the specialist not quite sure what's going on, and they come see me and we kind of start asking them questions, digging beneath the hood, so to speak, and we find out that the Their gut issues are related to yeast or strep overgrowth in their GI tract or biofilms. We find out that their anxiety might be dysautonomia pots or past trauma, or, interestingly enough, because of the gut health, the gut could be driving anxiety. What I want to talk about this under, the concept of these individuals having issues with being medical gaslit is that these people had real diagnoses, left the other providers feeling listened to, feeling hopeless. Many times because they'd been to multiple specialists. And they come to our practice, and within an hour, an hour and a half, we're like, well, these are. Are the five or six things it could be. Let's do some testing. This happens a lot. And, you know, people ask me, why has it happened in today's culture and society? And the reality is things are not that much different now than they were 100 years ago. I remind people it took roughly 30 years for hand washing to catch on. And the guy who invented it, Ignaz Semmelweis, actually lost his career over it, Was eventually jailed for being crazy. Because who in the earth would believe that US Austere German physicians could possibly have, you know, little creatures on our skin, right? And ultimately died from the infection you're trying to prevent. We also forget the frontal lobotomies, which is kind of a crazy thing to think. The last one was done in France in 1990, 91. We were doing those in the United States, late 70s, early 80s. You're cutting out parts of your brain to treat mental health issues. That was a thing for quite some time. You know, even smoking took 50 years and 7,000 research articles before the surgeon general said, hey, it causes cancer. My point being is that this happens all the time. You know, when Long Covid first started coming out, I started seeing people with that back in May of 2020, before it was even recognized as a thing. These people had been to multiple specialists and were told, we can't quite help you. Probably related to Covid. We don't know what's going on. This happens all the time with people with chronic Lyme, people with post Lyme syndrome, mold, a whole host of things. And so it's unusually uncommon. But what can you do about it? You know, first thing I think you need to know is that you are the expert of your body. If you're feeling something, you're having anxiety, you're having chest pain, palpitations, you know, whatever, you. I had one patient recently was having some liver issues, feeling like, liver pain and end up having liver flukes. Having some worms in the, literally in the liver and need specialized treatment to help clear that up. Something probably is going on. And you should always trust your intuition, trust your body. If you feel a certain way, you need to know why you're feeling that way. The other thing is that right now, with technology, with AI, now literally, you can create your own differential diagnosis to find out what potentially could be going on and actually assist your practitioner in this new age. There's been such a big change in the last year, and it's going to be even bigger in the next one to two years. Practitioners really need to be open to their patients showing up with a pretty good knowledge base of what's going on, actually having some good ideas of what might be going on.
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.
You know, one of the things I learned in medicine, there's this thing called the Bates Textbook of Physical Exam findings. We did read that my first year of medical school. The point was 80% of the diagnosis could be made by the patient's history and physical exam. You really didn't need fancy lab testing, genetic markers. You just need a really good history where you grew up, what you did, a really good physical exam and you could actually figure out what's going on 80% of the of the time. Well, that still holds true. It's just now we have a lot more nuances and the person, your story, your history, your feelings still need to be 80% of what we're doing. We still need to spend the majority of our time not ordering fancy testing, but actually listening to the patient, listening to the person and actually recording their symptoms. And so with that, you can actually take AI and these other tools and actually get a pretty good idea of what potentially can be going on. And then go to your practitioner, help us, you know, it's a teamwork and figure out what additional testing could be helpful and not helpful. You know, why do a $3,000 expensive MRI of your whole body looking for stuff when literally some basic blood tests could help you figure out if you have an early inflammatory bowel disease, for example, which actually has to do with yeast, you're developing an aversion, an immune response to yeast in your GI tract. So point is, I want to talk about this a little more, do a couple other of these videos for our podcast as well as our social. But this is something that's real. And when you realize that the third most common cause of death in our country is actually medical error, misdiagnosis, medication, side effects, you know, just sometimes the therapies themselves, if you're hospitalized in the hospital for seven to 10 days, you have about a 10% chance of getting a life threatening infection while you're there. So even the right diagnosis, the right time, everything being done appropriately still has risks. And when you add those all up, it's usually about 250 to 300,000 people a year dying from that. And that's with us not even looking at that deeply. So this could actually be a bigger number than it appears to be. So I want to keep on talking about this concep over the next couple of videos podcasts. I'll take a couple of basic examples of this medical gaslighting. One of my colleagues, he actually refers to us that he's becoming a medical feminist. What that means is paying super close attention to women's complaints and not minimizing, which unfortunately our healthcare system has. People don't realize, back in the 80s we assumed women had heart attacks just like men. And we didn't realize actually women are more likely to present with abdominal pain and symptoms. And then the chest, the crushing chest pain elephant on your chest that typically present with. It took decades for us to really kind of accept that as our new reality. And so the idea that we need to listen to individuals and women tend to be very astute at their bodies, their physiology. They start from a young age getting paps and female exams and cycling. You get super, super intuitive in your body when every month you can tell when you ovulate, you can tell when your estrogen hormones are changing. Men are run like diesel trucks. Nothing changes. For decades. Women become super attuned to it. And so we need to listen to their complaints, concerns because many times they are experiencing real stuff because they've developed this intuition about their bodies. Their bodies are way more complicated with hormones and cycling and they've been sometimes from the age of 12, 13, 14, paying attention to that. While men don't really pay attention to their bodies until you know, they have erectile dysfunction or urinary issues, which could be in the 40s and 50s. So medical gas lying. What is it? I want a couple of talk about topics and the question is, have you dealt with this? You know, I'd like to hear from you, share your experiences because as we talk about this, this is going to help us become more attune or alert to, but also help physicians and practitioners take care of patients better and ultimately help you become a better advocate for your help. With the technology and things changing so quickly, you are, you know, this is your store, your practitioner is just your guide, is your consultant. But you are the captain of your ship and becoming more aware of that and taking charge of that will have a massive impact on your ability to be your own advocate. Take care. Talk to you soon. And I'm excited about this series on medical gas line.
