In this 10‑minute monologue Dr. Aaron Hartman explains that many patients with chronic inflammatory response syndrome, mold‑related illness, Lyme disease, POTS, dysautonomia, and related neurotoxic conditions remain symptomatic despite conventional remediation because trauma—both classic “big T” trauma (physical, sexual, emotional abuse) and subtler “little t” trauma (repeated health‑related stressors, toxin exposures, chronic illness interactions with the health‑care system)—can lock the nervous system and cellular metabolism into a maladaptive state. He expands the modern definition of trauma, cites emerging diagnostic tools (genomic expression panels, NeuroQuant MRI showing enlarged amygdala/small hippocampus, brain auto‑antibody panels) that reveal PTSD‑like patterns in these patients, and describes the physiological cascade: autonomic dysregulation (sympathetic overdrive, parasympathetic withdrawal), gut‑brain axis disruption, and the cell‑danger response that stalls mitochondrial healing. Clinical anecdotes (a pediatric occupational therapist’s parents, a breast‑lump patient, an airline stewardess with aerotoxic syndrome, concussion from everyday activities) illustrate how health events become traumatic. Hartman argues that when standard interventions (removing mold, treating infections, diet, supplements, fascial work) plateau, clinicians must assess and address trauma. He recommends evidence‑based nervous‑system‑regulation tools—breathwork, HeartMath, Amofit, vagal‑stimulating technologies—and points listeners to a forthcoming Connected Health platform with a trauma‑recovery course. The overall message is that recognizing and treating both big T and little t trauma can unlock further healing for chronically ill patients.
Chapters
If you've seen multiple doctors, multiple specialists, multiple practitioners, and you're told there's nothing wrong with you, it's all in your head, or they don't know what's wrong, that you can't be helped, maybe, just maybe, you're dealing with chronic inflammatory response syndrome or mold-related illness or sick building syndrome or multiple different terms we're talking about here. I wanna take a little bit of a deep dive into the trauma aspect of mold-related illness. One of the things that's changing in our understanding of trauma is that it's not just about physical, sexual, emotional abuse. It's not just about— it used to be thought actually that PTSD was only related related to people in war. Um, it used to be thought it was only related to soldiers. We're finding out is that there's many, many different perturbations, many different degrees or levels of trauma. And I like to remind people that the water torture, taking a drop of water and just dropping on someone's head, drop by drop by drop, over 4 to 6 hours, can literally drive someone insane, can actually be a form of torture. The point of that is that it's not just the acute illness, the acute seeing someone die, you know, having something bad happen to you, but it can be actually your illness itself. And one of the things that actually cued me to this was My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist and we'd have conversations about parents with their kids, special needs children going through healthcare. And when you have a child with rare illnesses that almost dies, you know, once or twice a year, who you have to fight the system to help, literally your child's illness interacting with the system becomes a type of trauma. And what really solidified this for me was talking with one of my friends and colleagues, Dr. Rosanna Campana Hodge, who's a, um, Dr. Rofi Short, who is a pediatric psychologist who specializes in PANDAS and PANS. We've had great conversations on family vacations cuz that's What we do is we, my wife and I meet really cool people and have crazy conversations about stuff like this. But, and it's interesting in the pediatric world, when you talk with other experts in the field, like the idea that can your child's illness be a trauma and the parent? And the answer is yes. And I've even had patients who, for example, getting a breast lump, they interact with healthcare system, it might be breast cancer. 3 months later, they're told it's fine. 3 months later, they're told to go home and follow up on the routine mammogram. And every time they drive by the office, the heart races, they get panicky. So the point is that there's many different ways to define trauma, but in my world, in the patients with chronic health issues, mold-related illness, which is interesting cuz we actually have fancy testing, research-based, currently not really ready for prime time. Genie testing actually looks at genetic expression in your brain of different, called genomic testing. You can actually pick up signals in patients with chronic inflammatory response syndrome that show in the brain to be actually a PTSD response. And even in NeuroQuant testing, which is a special MRI where you actually are able to do an MRI on someone's brain and then you basically blow up into balloon and then chop into pieces. And you can actually figure out volume of different parts of the brain, you actually will see things like a bigger amygdala, smaller hippocampus. You'll see these patterns of PTSD in the brains of individuals with mold-related illness. So I wanna talk about this a little bit because when, and when I deal with patients with lots of health issues, whether it's mold-related or mold or SIBO or POTS, dysautonomia, whatever, as these events can be traumatizing to a person's neurological system. So much so that they get dysregulation in the rest and digest parasympathetic nervous system. They get dysregulation in their fight, flight, or flee, which is their sympathetic overdrive system. They get dysregulation in their sympathoadrenergic, which is how their adrenal glands, or the sympathocholinergic, which has to do with vagal nerve activation. So there's different parts of your nervous system, or even your, your gastroenteric nervous system, they'll get dysregulated there. And all of a sudden they have weird symptoms, gut problems, anxiety, panic, lightheadedness, dizziness, overwhelming fatigue. Inability to focus. And all of a sudden now, the decreased blood to the brain related to the dysautonomia, or the adrenal surges related to the norepinephrine increasing blood flow to the muscles, etc., the blood pressure drops, you get flushed, all these weird things because you're having almost an anaphylactic, anaphylaxis-like response because of your nervous system being dysregulated or abnormally regulated. So literally your health condition itself, your chronic illness or your child's Or you're in chronic low-grade environmental stressors. Mold is one of those. Or chronic Lyme, low-grade concussions. I'm playing football, you know, getting hit in the head, soccer, or someone who's like doing fine, had little, you know, events in their past, but gets in a car accident. You know, those are very, very common. I actually had a patient early in my career who rode a roller coaster and then her, it induced a concussion and she wasn't able to work for 6 months. I had one patient who actually was actually at Home Depot looking at cabinets, leaned over, stood up, hit the back of her head, got concussion. It took her 3 months. To get through that whole process. And part of that, she developed— both these individuals developed like PTSD trauma-like responses. It's important to recognize this as a thing because as you walk through people with chronic health issues and you get stuck in the healing process— remove the mold, remove the Lyme, you fix the gut, you change your diet, you improve your sleep, fix your nutrients, all that stuff— but they're still not healing. They're stuck at 50%, they're stuck at 60 or 70%. All of a sudden you have to start thinking, is your body not healing because of this trauma event. And we actually have a newer concept called the cell danger response. Some of you out there have heard of this before, which is literally your mitochondria and how they're designed, stopping your cells' natural process of healing because of external factors, which can include toxins, chemicals, infections, as well as trauma. And sometimes the nervous system has to speak or talk through cell signaling molecules to the mitochondria to tell the cells the environment is now safe. And so in the world of chronic health issues, actually Neil Nathan is brought this to light in his book, Toxic, as well as one of his newer books for the chronically ill patient. This whole concept of the cell danger response. Dr. Robert Naviaux is actually the big researcher with that, who's done the most groundbreaking research in it. But the point is that all of a sudden we realize the idea of trauma, it's almost like we, I've talked before about chronic inflammatory response syndrome, how complicated mold-related illness is. Trauma itself can be really complicated because the causes of that on your nervous system can be a whole host of different seemingly unrelated things that actually are interrelated. That's one of the things we do, we like to do, I love about functional integrative medicine is trying to connect all these supposedly unrelated things. So what's the point of this Friday 10-minute podcast or wherever you're experiencing this? If you're stuck in your healing process and you're having a lot of weird symptoms and you've done everything, you've treated your Lyme and your mold and all that stuff, you removed the, the building, you, you realize you're hypermobile and you're doing your fascial body work, changing nutrients because of that, you're getting more your vitamin C and collagen, rare earth minerals, you're doing all this stuff. That you know you need to do and your healing is still stuck, you still almost feel like you're always an inch away from the precipice of having a regression, then maybe you need to start thinking about trauma. Whether it's, you know, big T trauma, which is physical, sexual, emotional abuse, like all these big kind of things, or it's the little t trauma, which can be chronic health issues, it can be toxin exposure. One of the things that really first brought me to light is my very— is my very first aerotoxic syndrome patient, which this is actually recognized in Europe, it's not recognized here in the United States. She was an airline stewardess who got on a gas event, that's the term that they use in her industry, where they got a lot of basically burnt diesel in the, the cockpit, in the, in the, um, plane cabin. And they had to take her out on, on a gurney because she couldn't walk afterwards. She developed a lot of symptoms that looked like PTSD, and she ended up going to Texas to get a brain MRI. And her brain MRI looked like a brain that had been in a really bad car accident. And they did antibody testing on her, and she had tons of brain-related autoantibodies. And this was from a chemical exposure. So all of a sudden, even like this trauma brain thing going on can be related to neurotoxic syndrome, which is being exposed to combustive petroleum products. Gulf War syndrome— a little tangent here— is those SARS Asia syndrome phenomena, probably actually a version of air toxic syndrome where people were inhaling burning petroleum. Or if you're in Afghanistan, a lot of military people will be exposed to burning tires or burning trash for 6 months, a year at a time. Inhaling these can actually activate your innate immune system and ultimately cause these effects on your nervous system that are microtraumas that build up over time. Pointy thing is that if you're stuck in your healing process, you think about trauma, big T trauma and little t trauma. Um, we have a bunch of resources on our Connected Health platform, which probably will be be out sometime soon. And one of those is actually a trauma course we've walked through using things from breathwork, which if you've watched my videos, you've seen me talking with Sachin Patel about that, to technologies— Amofit, HeartMath, a whole bunch of different technologies to help regulate your nervous system, your vagus nervous system. A lot of cool resources out there. So anyway, I want to stop today's little 10-minute thing coming up at 10 minutes. But the point is that if you're stuck in your healing process and you don't feel like you're getting better with your mold-related illness or whatnot, you have to think, is some kind of trauma, big T or little t trauma, related? If so, how can you work through this? We have tons of resources if you're looking for them on website as well, and all, as all of our other things. But you just really need to find someone who's an expert with this that can help walk you through it, because it can get quite complicated and confusing at times. So hopefully this information was helpful. Take care, and we'll talk to you soon.
