Aaron Hartman, MD shares stories that didn't fit in his book Incurable, centering on his wife Becky and daughter Anna. He credits Becky with introducing alternative therapies like suit therapy and teaching him that intuition and heart knowledge matter as much as clinical training. Lessons from animal and soil health shaped how he sees disease.
Chapters
I'd like to give you a little different view on the behind the Scenes of Incurable, From Hopeless Diagnosis to Definal Odds, which is my book that came out speaking about my daughter and her health journeys and interaction with the healthcare system and how literally she's defied all odds. But part of my journey through this was actually my family. So what I'd like to do is talk about individual persons who played a massive role in my personal as well as professional development. The first person, actually, is my wife, Becky. I do talk about her throughout the book in different places, and she actually has a little section she talks about, but I want to take a little deeper dive on that, because when you get to be this, you know, the position I'm at now, your three board certifications, you know, start several businesses, all these things people forget, like what got you there. And ultimately, it's not just working hard and not just being smart and not just being dedicated, but there's people that come along your path that actually give you little nuggets, little gems. My wife was one of those individuals. One of the first gems, so to speak, was when she read the book Animal, Vegetable Miracle and started trying to introduce things, new, real food, different things into our family. And I really wasn't having it. I was kind of like, you know, I mean, I'm reasonable, decent guy. I didn't. Wasn't antagonistic, but I was kind of like, okay, if you want to do that, cool, whatever. And it took probably about two years before I started catching on to that and to put things in perspective. It was 2012, and I was still putting emergent stuff on the yard to block weeds from growing, still using Roundup or glyphosate in our yard. So that's not that long ago. Even though we were battling the healthcare system, trying to work on our daughter, she was super patient with me, but she was the initial scout, so to speak, that went out and realized, hey, there's some other stuff out there. The person who did the research on making our home clean, like, for example, our food sourcing guide. That's one of the resources in this book that's also available to you for free for download, but something she actually put together, trying for putting it together for patients, for people who she cares about. And it's interesting, there's little nuggets, but not just that. She's the person who actually, being a pediatric occupational therapist, knew about kids with special needs and kind of was the first person to enter me into the world of rare diagnoses, unusual Diagnoses and how common they really are. Some of the patients on her caseload, when we were down in Florida, living in the Tampa area, there would be like, you know, 50 cases a year, 100 cases of the year of this. And she'd had like three kids on her caseload. And so it's one of those things where I was introduced to the idea of, like, things I'd never heard of before were common to someone else. And the idea of using different, you know, occupational therapists, they're trained literally to think outside the box and treat every kid with special needs as a special use case and find out what works for them. I mean, there is no standard of care for these kids with multiple facial malformations, who've had multiple surgeries, who have rare genetic diseases. Like, there's no standard of care for those uncommon, quote unquote illnesses that when you look at 330 some million people actually are quite common. So that's the first thing kind of introducing me to that. The second thing was her introducing me to Anna actually opened up my heart to, you know, there's three kinds of knowledge, head knowledge, heart knowledge and hand knowledge. And. And you can be an academic, you're smart, study a lot and have head knowledge. You can be really good with your hands and have hand knowledge. And I was both of those. But the heart knowledge was something I actually learned through my daughter Anna, who my wife introduced me to, and my other kids as well. So it's one of those things that, you know, that holistic type of knowledge that when you start integrating your emotions, it's really interesting. I do talk about this in the book a bit about some of the newer neuroscience is showing that our intuition is actually a real thing. Your gut instinct is actually a real thing. Most of what your brain does is subconscious and you do have this whole nervous system in your GI tract. So when you get that, that gut sense, that hunch, there is actually now data on that. Actually something real. Well, in my career, early on we were told that was nothing. It was emotions, it was culture, cultural biases or whatever. And it's actually a legitimate thing. And there are some practitioners, like the physical therapist, occupational therapist, who that is kind of what leads some of their nuanced therapies for rare cases. So I kind of got introduced that by her as well. And then also just some of the nuances of different therapy techniques. The first one we were introduced to was suit therapy, which I'd never heard of suit that before. It was one of the first intensive Type therapies my daughter did where she was basically wear. It's almost like a bungee type suit with all these little bungee cords in it. And it's meant that as you put your arms out, it gives you tension. It was originally developed for cosmonauts when they go in outer space so they wouldn't lose muscle mass, and eventually was adapted for treating traumatic brain injury patients and kids with special needs who couldn't walk. How do you train a kid to walk when they literally can't walk? And so it was one of those interesting things where, wow, this is an interesting, bizarre therapy that has been used in Europe for, at that point in time, 20, maybe 30 years. There's maybe five centers around the country that do it. And outside of Tampa, Florida just happened to be one of those places that did it. And then we moved up here to Richmond, back to Richmond. When I got in the military, there was a place in Richmond that just happened to do it as well. So it's one of those interesting things. And we realized this all of a sudden. That opens up the door to, are there other things like this? Are there other hidden gems, other hidden therapies that are being done elsewhere that I didn't know about? And so that's more like my wife interaction was the kind of gateway where for all these kind of things that then I took and I ran with them. And so all my kids had a different view for that. You know, Anna talked about a lot in the book. I don't talk as much about my son Khalil, who, when we got him, he had horrible eczema, horrible asthma. And we brought him into our house when he was six months old. And they were so bad that my wife was concerned he'd stop breathing and asleep at night, so she actually slept with him on her chest. We had to figure out a formula alternative. So she researched it and found you could actually use raw milk with bruise yeast, different fatty acids, nutrient things, and actually make a. A thing pretty close to nutritional yeast as well. I don't think I said that makes something pretty close to mother's milk that doesn't have high fructose corn syrup and chemicals and preservatives in it. And over the period of a year, his eczema asthma pretty much went away. And now as of, you know, 2025, he will have some flares of his lungs a little bit and a skin that tends to go around when he goes to the church camps and eats bad food and. But otherwise he's pretty normal. And he's only had Anabox once or twice in his life, mainly for Lyme disease, because we are in a Lyme endemic area, but not for any respiratory tract infections, no strep throats, nothing like that. So he's my child who diet alone has been his major thing. And if my daughter, it's been diet, environment, and all these really cool things you read about in the book. So I want to give that little glimpse into our family life, some of the nuances behind that. And I also want to. We'll take some other deep dives into some of the behind the scenes with, you know, the cows and what I learned from cows and chickens and things like that, because that was a eye opener for me to apply things to the human world, which is interesting because integrating medicine includes integrating your environmental medicine. You know, it's really interesting. I've learned a lot from my patients who are vets about different diseases that animals carry. And, you know, we know about smallpox and hepatitis, we know about measles, mumps, we know about tuberculosis. All these illnesses started actually in animals when transmitted. Flu, influenza is a great example. Well, Covid, another great example started in animals transmitted to humans. And so to ignore animal husbandry and animal health, we do it to our own detriment, especially in our current situation where we have a lot of illnesses that we have vaccines against and we worry about every year that literally started in animals and will transition to humans. So we'll talk a little bit about that next. A deep dive into how learning about the soil and animals actually made me a better doctor and see better behind the scenes with people's health. Take care.
