Aaron Hartman, MDFunctional Medicine Specialist | Clinical Researcher

I had the opportunity to join The High Performance Life podcast with Scott Danner #FunctionalHealth

21 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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1:01

Conventional medicine excels at acute emergencies like heart attacks but struggles with chronic, unexplained illnesses like fibromyalgia and IBS. A doctor recounts how the system failed his daughter, whose peers underwent multiple surgeries while she needed none, pushing him to explore how to bridge the gap between conventional and alternative approaches.

Chapters

The system itself is really good at what it's really good at. If you have a heart attack, we can literally have you in the er. Have you stinted, have you anticoagulated, save your life in two to three hours. If you have a chronic issue, like chronic fatigue, fibro gut issues, ibs, post concussive syndrome, mystery illness, stuff that some people say is psychiatric, some people say is anxiety, this is a terrible place to be because our system is super academic, super, super specialized and super focused on evidence based medicine, which puts these blinders on. A lot of times the experts don't know and they don't know what they don't know, and they promulgate what they do know as if it's the gospel if it's the only thing. And there's so many gaps in it. With my daughter, the system 100% failed her. The average kid with her diagnosis at 20 has had 13 surgical procedures. She's had zero. Okay. And so our decision to jump off the beaten path has led down to different outcomes for her. For her. So big picture is we're really good at what we're good at and really bad at what we're really, really bad. How do we get, how do we fix that, how we bridge that gap?