In this podcast episode Dr. Aaron Hartman, MD, interweaves personal narrative, historical analysis, and medical advocacy to expose three major "blind spots" in contemporary healthcare. He begins with the harrowing story of his daughter Anna, who was told she would never walk, talk, or crawl, yet at 19 she thrives after his family rejected invasive surgeries and pursued an alternative, evidence‑based regimen—a story he expands upon in his book Uncurable. Hartman then traces the evolution of dietary fat misconceptions, from early 20th‑century infection‑driven heart disease to the 1950s rise of industrialized vegetable oils (e.g., Crisco) and the ensuing demonization of fat by the USDA food pyramid and Ancel Keys’ Seven Countries Study. He argues that essential fats and cholesterol are biologically vital, and that the modern push to “remove” fat is a mis‑informed paradigm shift now slowly reversing. Next, he recounts his own encounter with chronic Lyme disease in Virginia, detailing institutional denial, restrictive board policies, and the recent governmental acknowledgment that Lyme cases now outnumber breast cancer. He highlights the gap between outdated treatment guidelines (short‑course antibiotics) and emerging consensus (longer courses to prevent chronic infection). Hartman proceeds to discuss Long COVID, noting his first case in 2020, the initial professional ostracism, and the current recognition of its prevalence, neuro‑degenerative risk, and vascular impact via the endothelial glycocalyx. Throughout, he emphasizes the necessity for patients to become educated advocates, questioning the Hippocratic “do no harm” legacy that has eroded under modern medical bureaucracy. The episode concludes with a promotion of his book Uncurable, offering a “blueprint” and free resources for patients navigating complex, often dismissed diagnoses.
Chapters
Patients who've known me for years thought they knew my story. They had no idea. My daughter was never supposed to walk, talk, or crawl. And not only is she thriving at 19, I found the exact blueprint that made it possible. In Uncurable, I share that blueprint plus thousands of dollars in free tools and resources because I got into this work to help people just like you, not just the people sitting in my office. The link is in the show notes below. Get your copy today.
Because Lyme disease, as of last year, the government made a statement that there are more cases of Lyme disease in our country every year than breast cancer. The government's finally recognized it's there. The government actually this past January had an Open Table Forum. They had experts from around the country to talk about Lyme disease, talk about how it's affected patients, how they've worked about it. But it's now starting to come out in the open. What are the things that our healthcare system has got just plain wrong? Not even close to being right, and yet held them to be the truth, the dictum for years, sometimes decades. These are blind spots. These are things that our healthcare system, we get plain wrong, things that we think that are right that are wrong and vice versa. I wanna talk about the fat one just a little bit more because this is pretty recent and talk about two other ones. Um, one you probably know about and one you might not think as much about that are things we got plain wrong that are in recent memory that these should make sense and resonate with you. We will go back and talk ones more in antiquity, ancient, more ancient, but more distant history. But the point is there's all something we're getting wrong right now. And one of the things I ask myself when I see patients, you know, is what I'm going to do now, what is, is there a blind spot? Is this a thing right now that 5 or 10 years from now we think, wow, I can't believe I used to do XYZ. And in which case, whatever procedure, maneuver, medication, supplement, intervention I'm doing, they need to be safe. Especially when according to the med— current medical literature, half of all research findings from published— from published clinical research findings are later found to be false. That's a crazy number to think about. So I want to get back to the fat thing. Now the fat thing is interesting because the main thing was heart disease, right? A lot of people don't realize that in 1900, the most common cause of heart disease in our country was actually infection. You might get typhoid, get aneurysm, die from that. You might get strep, get rheumatic heart disease. Acute infectious processes were actually the most common cause for heart disease. Fast forward to 1950, all of a sudden, you know, heart disease is going up in our country, but with antibiotics, it's not being caused by infections. Well, what happened about 1908 to 1910, this thing called crystallized cottonseed oil, Crisco, became— got introduced into our food system. It's actually interesting, the history. Napoleon actually was looking for a butter alternative for his troops. And they actually were able to create this thing, butter alternative, white thing. Eventually Crisco got in there and eventually got margin, you know, decades later. But the idea of looking for a fake fat is actually not new. It was an old thing. We just didn't know how bad they were gonna be for us. So 1950s, heart disease is going up. You know, Ancel Keys came in with the Seven Countries Study. 1977, USDA says, look, we're gonna make a food pyramid. Fat's bad at the top. You know, the thing about it is, did everybody get it wrong? This is a concept I also want you to think about with these blind spots. And with medical gaslighting is, and even the idea of being a medical feminist, is that there are a group of people who are getting it right. There are people who knew that fat, that knew cholesterol was good. I mean, basic biochemistry, cholesterol is the most important fat molecule in your cell membranes. It actually keeps the shape and structure of your cells. Omega essential, these are called essential fatty acids. Cholesterol, why are they called essential? Because they are essential, right? Omega-3s and omega-6s. Essential fatty acids. These are things we've known we need for health, but yet there's some kind of cognitive, cognitive dissonance. We know we need these, but we'll make these synthetic things that are partially crystallized, partially plasticized, and we'll talk about that in a second, and they'll be just as good or healthier for us. And that's kind of where the thinking gets a little off. And, you know, in hindsight, you're like, how did we think that? Why did we think taking plastic and putting into ourselves— I mean, we know what microplastics are, right? Microplastics are small nanoparticles of our plastic world that we inhale, we breathe, that actually get in our cells and cause issues. Strangely enough, actually, men with low testosterone many times will actually have microplastics in their testicles. Kind of think about that. Totally different topic here though. This is us taking liquid, you know, whether it's vegetable oil and making semi-solid into margarine, taking, you know, cottonseed oil and crystallizing it into Crisco. And the effect of these things actually are that messes up the cell walls and membranes. So for basic biochemistry standpoint, it doesn't make sense why we would demonize these. But yet that happened. And there were people saying fat is good, there were people saying we should not remove it, yet those people were demonized, were ostracized, looked at as being crazy. Even as recent as, you know, 5 years ago, to say you need healthy fats, mainstream medicine was not a thing. It's only since the FDA flipped the pyramid upside down that you can be a credible physician, academic. I am assistant clinical professor at the Medical College of Virginia, and talk about this and not get shot down or canceled or whatnot. Half a century. It was actually roughly 7— it was actually about 7 years. I mean, from the food pyramid thing, over half a century. And yet we got it plain wrong. Now, what happens? Okay, we're in this transition right now because this is pretty fresh. This is pretty new. Well, the transition usually takes 10 to 20 years for it to take on. It's not going to be a quick thing. So what's going to happen is the information comes out slowly. Yes, good fat, yada yada. This doesn't mean everybody goes carnivore and starts eating sticks of butter. It means you eat fat, you eat whole fat milk. You don't separate it out, you don't homogenize it, you don't superheat it, ultra-pasteurize it. You don't do all these things to change the chemical structure and then call that healthy. That is unhealthy.
Have you been told there's nothing wrong with you, or worse, there's nothing we can do for you? We were told our daughter Anna would never walk, talk, crawl, or even see. We were also told to start surgeries when she was just 18 months old, and we said no to all of it. Today at 19, she's thriving. And here's what really shakes me to the core. Her story isn't rare. I've seen this happen in hundreds to thousands of patients in my clinic. In Curable, I show you exactly how you can do the same type of thing because you deserve the same fighting chance as my daughter had.
The link is below.
Get your copy today.
You don't strip out the fats from things. You eat them as they occur in nature, minimally processed, minimally processed. And so just think about that for a second. We got this wrong for such a long, long time, and now fat is back and it's gonna be a while before we can have conversations without being upset about it, without name calling. But that is how medicine works. There's a saying that medicine progresses one funeral at a time. Okay? And we're experiencing this between hormones being flipped around as of last fall and now the fat thing. We're experiencing this in real time. What is something else we're experiencing in real time, a blind spot that we've gotten wrong, that a small group of physicians getting bigger and bigger, providers getting bigger and bigger, have known about? Lyme disease, chronic Lyme disease. So when I moved back to Richmond after getting out of the military in 2007, had my first case of Lyme disease. A patient came in, you know, rashes, et cetera, et cetera. Testing had a lot of these— the Western blot testing was positive, and I'd never treated Lyme disease before. I mean, in the military we didn't have it and you don't have it in hospitals, right? It's rare. It's not— it's a rare disease that doesn't exist, right? So called my local infectious disease doctor, and their response was, we don't take care of Lyme disease, we do not take consults for it, and it doesn't exist. It does not exist in Central Virginia. Got off the phone and I thought, with this infectious disease doctor, and thought to myself, how can you say it doesn't exist if you literally refuse to see it? So I called the Medical College of Virginia, the local medical school, um, try to get infectious disease department. No one returned my calls, no one returned my information for a consult. So I was forced to figure it out on my own, used UpToDate, started researching, and took care of this patient. So fast forward, you know, at this point in time, the Infectious Disease Society of America was saying you should only use Anabox for 2 weeks. If you have a tick bite, you only need doxycycline for a day, no more. If you use it more than that, you risk your license. So in the Lyme literate world, physicians actually have— and I actually have my patients sign pretty pretty thick, you know, disclosures. Yes, they realize this is not standard of care. Yes, it's not FDA approved, yada, yada, yada, before I can actually treat them with the most up-to-date data. But even now, you know, why am I bringing this up? Because Lyme disease, as of last year, the government made a statement that there are more cases of Lyme disease in our country every year than breast cancer. The government's finally recognized it's there. Uh, the federal, the government actually this past January had an open table forum. They had experts from around the country to talk about Lyme disease, talk about how it's affected patients, how they've worked out. But it's now starting to come out in the open, but yet we still have medical boards for states saying if you use too many antibiotics, you might lose your license. We're seeing a transition with this. And most of my patients, most people I talk to know that, you know, I'm in Virginia. Everybody knows there's Lyme disease here now. It's, you don't, even though some of the experts still disagree, the average person knows, yeah, it's a tick. I got the red thing. I get my antibiotics. They may not know, however, that they might need the antibiotics for 4 to 6 weeks, not just 1 to 2 weeks. To prevent from getting chronic Lyme disease. But this is another example of a blind spot that we're transitioning through right now. And this is one— everybody's going to know about this one— Long COVID. I saw my first Long COVID case May of 2000. Now, at that point in time, this was unrecognized. If you talked about it, you, you might have lost your license. You know, California was doing some really interesting things. If you mentioned it, you were considered crazy, outlandish. Fast forward now, it's recognized Long COVID is a thing. Now we're recognizing that there's a significant number of people 10% of all people who got COVID will probably have long COVID. Now we're realizing that there's a significant number of people that will probably develop some kind of neurodegenerative issues from this, similar to Hong Kong flu, similar to Spanish flu, similar to swine flu, similar to the Russian flu. This is a thing when you see a lot of people getting a similar infection, you tend 8 or 10 years later to see neurological conditions. Now we're also learning with long COVID, you can actually— they can actually set you up for cardiovascular disease. Because the impact of the spike protein on your endothelium, which is the lining, it's actually called the glycocalyx for all the nerds out there, but the endothelial glycocalyx. But the point is like, now this is accepted. It's being researched, you know, 6 years ago, actually 5. Yeah. Yeah. 6 years ago it didn't exist. If you mentioned it, you were in big trouble with your medical board, with stuff you'd get canceled online. You're considered anti-scientist and anti— you're against people. You were actually could get in a lot of trouble and lose your job and things over it. So the idea of this blind spots, these things that we think that are just plain wrong, it's not a new idea. It's as old as medicine itself. Next episode, I want to talk about something that is pretty crazy to think that we used to believe this and now we know to not be true. But, and we'll keep on talking about this. The reason I wanna talk about these in the next couple of weeks is just so people get an idea in their head that you have to be an advocate for yourself. You have to be educated. Read, learn your body, know yourself, be engaged with your health. Trusting the experts to do everything for you in today's day and age, and any day and age, you know, it's— why is that? Why is the Hippocratic Oath— here's a good question for you, actually two anecdotes, and I'll be done with this one. Why is it that the Hippocratic Oath, part of it is you will do no harm, you will enter a house only for good, not for evil? Because back in the day, you know, what was that, like 500 BC, whatever, over 2,000 years ago, it was common for doctors to actually hurt and kill people. This was actually a thing. And another anecdote, when I was at a mission hospital in Ecuador, middle of nowhere, we did some really cool work there, helped a lot of people. In that culture, if you went to the hospital and got admitted, it meant you were dying. So we had a mom bring her kid in, maybe 6 years old. And, um, they walked like 3 days from the jungle, came in, he was unconscious, just totally out of it. He had meningitis. So we told mom, we have to admit him to the hospital. And she just, you could hear the wail. This guttural, emotional, like just most bare emotion of a mom grieving, like someone telling her your child is going to die. And it was just, it was horrible. Just, I still hear it like now, just kind of makes me emotional. Just those horrible sound. Horrible. Because for her, that's what that meant. A week later, the son left with the mom. Okay. That's good part of the story. But in that culture, getting admitted to the hospital is, it means you're going to die. Right? So the point is, is that the idea of doing no harm first, first and foremost, do no harm is something that's historically been part of medicine in the world is now. We've lost that in the United States because we've become so clean and so sterile and so exacting. We've forgotten that there are dangers. And the part of this is just educating people about those past dangers and some things to think about. Maybe we'll talk later about what are some— what do I think are some blind spots right now. That's where you get controversial. Anyway, hope you all enjoy this series. If so, please, um, like, share, subscribe. Um, let us know how you're— if wherever you're looking at this, YouTube or on a podcast, let us know what you think about it. We'll keep on you a few more of these. Um, and depending on the feedback, we might do a bunch of these, but I feel like I wanna do this for enough of the time so everybody gets the feeling that this is not just Dr. Hartman saying things, this is legit, this is real, and it's part of you becoming invested individual in your healthcare. Take care, we'll talk to you soon.
My daughter was never supposed to walk, talk, or crawl, and today at 19, she's thriving. And guess what? We ignored every single thing the specialist told us to do. Hi, I'm Dr. Aaron Hartman, and I wrote Uncurable: From Hopeless Diagnosis To Defying All Odds, so you don't have to navigate this alone. In it, we share the secrets that she and thousands of my patients have used.
Grab the book or Audible wherever books are sold, or you can find it in the link below.
