Between a Rock & a Hard Case: Dr. Hartman's Experience with Groundbreaking Therapies

Welcome back.

I am Dr. Christian Jensky and I am one of the clinicians at Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine. 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 of the things 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 meaning value, stress reduction, being in the mean, 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, that's how bad she was. You know, she had her swallow reflex. So she could. You 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. And it 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 to. So she started doing that at a super young age. They Put her in a cage with hold with like the 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.

Still now. Still now she's doing three to five hours therapy a day.

It's not something that you just do and then stop and then eat whatever you want, or it's exercise and then 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 sixes, phosphor, lipid bore. I call it brain juice. So we did start a food. We do some cool things. We did the suit stuff. One of the next things we did was mention Dr. Amy Yasko's work, checking her gene SNPs. What stuff?

SNP.

So snip 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 environmental factors, the typos become misspellings. You know, all of a sudden you have issues. And so was doing gene testing and then saying 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 to her. Her genes, which 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.

And that's awesome.

Yeah. And that led to some recurrent ruler. 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. Right. And so all of a sudden I'm like doing that testing on her. And what happens when you do these organic acid tests? You realize, wait a second, the gut's messed up. Got 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've got heavy metals. And you realize that actually one of the ways your body 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 might Well, I think one of the reasons my daughter's CP is so severe is probably because of hypermobility. Just made her susceptible to crystal meth and pregnancy for. It's bad for brain development, if you're wondering. Yeah. So yeah. Just in case you're wondering. It's bad for brain. Just in case you're wondering. Anybody out there wondering? Yeah. No bueno. No bueno. So but then it would go back to food. And so I was having this parallel track of getting the 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 your more heavy metal stuff, more nutritional evaluation stuff led down to some infection panels. Looking forward, does she have a viral infection reactivation? And she actually did. She had elevation and her chicken pox tighter as well as CMV tighter and her mono tighters. So maybe she has a low grade infection from her nutritional things. But as we kind of went down that pathway, we'd always come back, food's even more important. This pathway. Oh my gosh, did you realize food's important, Even more important. 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 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 the clots with cyanomia.

Yeah.

Pain 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, 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 just happening. It's.

It's your subconscious often imbalanced. Right. So the term dysautonomia is what's often used, POTS being an extreme form.

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

Heart rate elevations.

Yeah. All that kind of stuff. And Anna 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 pathway of lipid Medicine with Dr. Smith.

What about Patricia Kane's work?

Patricia Kim. Sorry, wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

Come back. Yeah. Deliberate therapy. And so then I went to train with her and realized you can use phospholipid for repairing membrane. 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 in a factory when I was in college. Yeah. So I need to flush my DNA off as well as hers. Did some IV phosphylcholine on her, came back and realized wasting. How can I do this with diet? 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 flax seed, but it's not bad seed.

It's flax and safflower that have been cold expressed, not heat expressed, not rancid. So they're making mayonnaise out of that. All of a sudden, my kids are getting three tablespoons of this on their sandwich. You know, so it came back to foods and medicine again. Right. Then came to the peptide world.

And this is stuff that you're doing at home. This is stuff that 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.

Well, I looking at. Right.

Which basically makes it a fancy aioli. And you go to a restaurant and 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 ended 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 are 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 know, cows are a great example. They take grass. Where's calcium come from the 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 do they get that from? The dirt puts it in the grass. They eat grass and then what? How do you get that out of cows were a lot of connective tissue extracts. 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 I'll simply that into our food as medicine. Start giving us some collagen supplements as well. Then let down another pathway. I told you about the functional neurology and that's always led into things like one of the things we that really made a big difference with her tone issues was actually a foot neuro neuromuscular stimulation device called a revive that basically she puts her feet on and it activates her calf muscles. And she started getting calf muscles. Kids with CP don't get calf muscles. She started getting calf muscles and what happened is her tone went away. So she went from not being able to. She's always crunched over and couldn't put her feet flat. Doing flat footed and standing up. So then I goes like, well this is kind of cool. Can I 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 thighs, putting her back and all of a sudden she's getting little legs on her, you know. And that led to us getting a suit. You've heard of the Clotho gene before? Yeah, yeah.

That's the new, newest, most favorite longevity gene.

The way you activate it by Interval training by fasting certain peptides can activate it.

I think quercetin can do. Can act.

Yes.

Through some of the flat bioflavonoids. Maybe strawberries.

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

Yeah, blueberries and strawberries.

Cyan 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 grow.

They're all kind of. Yeah. So, so got her the suit that actually does neuromuscular stimulation. Came across this therapist and California who does a special therapy called tasis therapy, which is task specific neuromuscular stimulation. And what that is, is that looks at the KBCP 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 to walk. And it basically activates those muscles. So it does external neural stimulation of the weak pathways. Wow. Now you do this at home. As you're doing that, you're like, wait, since she needs more protein for muscles, we come back how much protein she gets? She's hypermobile. Wow. She needs more protein than she's getting. So food becomes a bigger issue as well.

Always goes back to food.

With the lipid medicine, 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 minerals. Lipidol, lipids, phospholipids and minerals is actually B vitamins. 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 put an egg like one of our pastured eggs and all of a sudden they're getting eggs and yolk, they're going to be spices and they. And they eat it all up. It's yummy. And they're like, they have no idea that 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 it's medicine. Yeah.

So they know it's healthy, but they don't know to credible extent that it's healthy.

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 in Atlanta that learned about oral stimulation. It's really interesting how one of the things that happens with a brain injury is you get dysregulated neural pathways. It's kind of like trauma. People get trauma, limbic activation, they get dysautonomia, they get a vagal dysfunction. Your pathways get shaken up, and when 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, 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 or 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 dysregulated 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 PIN s. 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, because you 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 footpad, right? I'm like, well, this is weird, right? You've heard about these vibrating foot pads. 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 bought 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. So we got one. And so part of my daughter's therapy and what happens is it goes this altering vibration. And we just 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. What that means is you can have a person with a spinal cord injury that's contracted up, but if you hit that vibration on their 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 dysregulation from your pathways, that frequency can actually bypass that, allow the person to engage their muscles and then try to stand. I know the connection is not there. We're activating this connection. And over time, you can rewire the path, you can relay the tracks. So 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 one of the things with Dr. Kane, with all that gut, you realize how important butyrate for your brain health. Yeah. Then we kind of start fermenting all of our stuff at home. So we have fermented kefir. We do kombucha at home now. And. And so again, sauerkraut. Yeah, you've seen me bring the sauerkraut and.

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 now.

Actually, there's a sourdough bread in one of the blue zones in Sardinia, I think.

Yeah.

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, they pass down for generations and how their fermenting process goes. That bread is. Should be full of gluten and is not. That's pretty amazing.

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

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 for that? How do we ferment apple cider? How 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 acetic 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 tritus turricum, which is like monocult, you know about that super, super highly hybrid wheat is, was it actually started, was the ancient Cape Canaveral that became a model at the moon with bread when we no longer used a natural culture and went to a monoculture of just one yeast and left everything else out. So all of a sudden we make, we make homemade sourdough bread at home as well. We fermented 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 going to eat bread when I'm there. Or I'm going to eat and I'm like, look, 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 if they're eating.

I've heard that so many times.

Too many times to be a coincidence. Yeah, yeah.

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

Yeah.

Are you inappropriate sleep, making sure our environment's clean, removing chemicals and toxins from our house, 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 with my daughter, we've done more things. So I want to keep on going because I'll tick the whole time. Yeah.

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've learned this. I don't know if I talked 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 the outside, actually, your blood gets a little thinner, you get better circulation. Yeah. Really interesting. I was. I was doing some training on photo 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. So how cool. Maybe that's the reason why people feel better.

Yeah.

One of the many reasons why I feel better in the sun. So we've really taken the foundations to heart. 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, 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 devices and then how hard Anna has worked to implement the devices. You know, 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. 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 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?

Yeah. As you know, it's hardest to the people that you're closest to.

Oh, 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 the kind of person, she's gonna do it. She's gonna figure out her own and do it. She's a. 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 was so hard. She was so stressed. She was like feeling so psychologically discombobulated. She actually went to a 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's just. You were fine, no big deals. You know, I didn't gaslight her. 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, an anatomy lab at vcu, the Medical College of Virginia, and the light bulb goes off. I've been in that anatomy lab. 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. The whole odd dolls walk up to the floor on 10th floor and singer 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 giggle like, hey, look at them. You go in there, you start eating or whatever. And. And I was like, she had a massive amount. And also 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 be like, this is annoying. I'm just going to 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, how her skin's on fire. And I'm like, yeah, you just. Again, I'm not gaslighting my. My wife. I'm just, I guess, a duller. And then Becky one day is like, you think I have toxic shock? I'm like, oh, my gosh. Yeah. And basically stopping using tampons and going to that little cup thing went away. Like, you had toxic shock every month for like a year. And your loving, caring husband absolutely just missed it. Totally diminishing it. Diminish it.

Yeah, you'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 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.

It was five years where literally she had like from a course of steroids. It was like we had Cleo, we lost him. This massive stressor, stress. And then the Mr. Nest neck up flare of pain, went to well main 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 I'm 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 PEMAF device and that made it go away. And I was like whoa. This pemaf it re regulated her neurological system. Another event happened with Cleo'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. They're still young. They're still young.

We'll see.

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 in of itself and functional mess fixing. His 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. Nor 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. It's really bad. And that just messed her up. Messed her up bad. And so every time he disappear, she would spiral. He. He popped back up because that's what boys do every 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 to go? And he pops back up. He's like hey mom. And she's like what? I told her, 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 Satrapato, if you heard Sachi Patel, he does this holotropic breath work, like resetting your neurological system with breath work. So she did that and it basically, she had a emotional release. And since then she has not had one of those spirals. Wow. And so it's been a journey. It's not just been one kid. I don't think I've actually mentioned Khalil elevator incident yet on any of these recordings.

I remember that 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. 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.

But it was like the whole tropic 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 thing.

Does she have to do the breath work every time?

She's only done it once. Just one. And she's one and done. Yeah.

So is it 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. Yeah. 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 wiring 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 it's just this really, really relaxed stage. It's really interesting watching some holotropic 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 will actually have like these insights like flashlights kind of thing. And 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. If 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 our, portion of our patients are hardwired into a sympathetic response. You know, fight, flight, freeze. And these memories that you're referring to, for those of you listening, these aren't memories that this person can just recall whenever they feel like it. 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 dysautonomia that goes along with it. It's incredibly powerful and, and 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. So we've done a lot of these things and so it's like just my daughter Anna. It's not just Khalil, it's not just everybody else, not just my wife. It's all of us.

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

You've had. Oh, you know what? I've. I was 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 others.

I think my thing, I was a kid in middle school, in elementary school that no one liked. So I was just kind of like, there's always one kid in elementary school no one likes now it just was. That was me. So they call me names and there's this group called the Devastators. They'd make me do push ups in the bathroom. And I remember lunchtime I was going to fake them out. I'm not going to go to the bathroom, I'm going to go to the classroom. They came in the classroom, made me do push ups, you know, but like just the way I was. But it's kind of weird because like my response to that as a kid in fourth grade, a kid in fifth grade taking second grade, I mean that was, this is elementary school. God's on my side. He's not on your side. I'm going to 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 be kind of future thinking. The thing that's interesting about that, it almost 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, what's my one year, three year?

You got your three month, six month.

Yeah. One year, 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 know.

But just having enough like planning for that stuff. Right. So that when that happens, that cool. We've got this here so, you know, it gets paid for. I don't 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 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. No, 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 to 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 now.

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 with 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?

Well, yeah. These realizations. And so one of the realizations was actually when I was working on a seminary degree, like all this. 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 know this idea that knowledge is not just your brain, it's not just in your heart, it's not just emotional like this holistic head, hard hands. So a true knowledge, a true understanding is not just. I read some textbooks and read some articles which there 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 a vulnerable stage now. You're two, you're three or four and. And 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 thing. 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 don't do things I've never done anything for and not ever expected anything in return. You love your wife. Your wife's great, she's attractive but she expects something back. You know, friends you expect. You mean your boss. You'd be your colleague. You expect me to respect. You expect something this expectations. She's the only person in my life that I've given without reservation with abandoned. 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 don't get a little missed, you know, try to get in there.

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

I was 10 man. Yeah.

Or Grinch.

Right.

It grew three sides.

I wasn't Grinch. I wasn't a nasty guy. I was more a tin man. Tin man was a nice guy beforehand. He was a good character until he got a tin man. My wife jokes that I was almost robot from the future. Yeah, very like no, no, we will do this. We'll stop 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 to 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 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, acute 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 et cetera. 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 patient care? Like, how does 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 a nice thought about. And it Was 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, when I came in, like, hey, I want you 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 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 lives transformed. I want to see. And I'm not going to 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 brain.

Yeah.

Robot from the future where they like deleted that code.

You know, the stuff sniff for quitting has been. Been mutated. Yeah. But I think that's where it affects my clinical. I got this intellectual curiosity that's just been augmented. So now I don't like, stop learning. Yeah. It's 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 underlined people. You get the books and they highlight stuff. I remember 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 a 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. I said, you can't judge them as dumb. It was because you were working with the Information you had at hand. And hindsight's 20 20. 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. 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 but as long as you learn.

But the point is that was the me then. And like what's happened is now I have an unquenchable desire to learn. Yeah. When I, you know, in medical school, I had like a different color for everyone and like I had like my five color things. And 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 so a ton of textbooks that.

You never were going to buy. I read textbooks too. It's like for fun. I just finished reading a textbook on environmental and clinical medicine or 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 and cook. It's been in the context of my family, the struggle of being a dad, a doctor, a father, a husband in the context of the world we live in. And that's kind of what I think.

The school 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 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 pull in it and I want to see really cool things happen.

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

Patients will send me. You get this too. You get messages about. I got this article, I got this thing. You've ever heard about this? Yeah. 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 that you asked me a question of the answer to. So then I take it and I'm like, because it's a message and I like research. Well, no, no, no, no, no. They're like, oh, Dr. Harvey, when they ask you in person, you're like, can't.

What do you do right if you don't know it? And they ask you in person, 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 gonna 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, you know, 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 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.

Because I wanted to learn. And you were always so, 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 RIFM? Give me the quick synopsis of the 3-655-year-plan. What's going on in the future?

The plan is to finish going on our 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, EBOO 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 on Facebook. It was this crazy thing of someone we know, and it was like totally total deep fake. It's deep fake silhouette. 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 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 as well as creating a. What I call. It's my proprietary system. It's a triangle of health. Where are the three things that people get stuck on in the health journey through gut, which is all this stuff. It's stress, which is all this stuff. 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 solves 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? Can enrichment and great functional medicine. Can we have an impact through what we're doing to talk about topics on the conversation at a 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, the working title is the Toughest Case. It's about, you know who. If you don't know when the book comes out, you 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 didn't 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.

It's all pretty magical though, you know, like if you sit down and force yourself, because I know it's not 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 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 kind of wake up every day and say thank you because we're out of the er, because I get to do this. It's my two year anniversary out of the ER as of this month, which has been kind of glorious. And that's because of you, that's because of our I fm. 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. 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 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, 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. I appreciate your personal stories and the tear jerking. Thank you all for listening and watching and we'll see you soon.