In this episode Dr. Aaron Hartman discusses three inter‑related ways the healthcare system fails patients: medical blind spots, medical gaslighting, and what he calls "medical feminism"—systemic gender bias that leads to misdiagnosis and undertreatment of women. He opens with a personal story about his daughter Anna, who was told she would never walk, talk, or see, yet at 19 she is thriving after his family rejected invasive surgeries and pursued alternative approaches detailed in his book Incurable (also referenced as Uncurable). Hartman uses historical examples, such as Ignaz Semmelweis’s hand‑washing discovery, to illustrate how entrenched beliefs become blind spots that persist for decades. He then describes how conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia were long dismissed as psychiatric illnesses—a classic case of medical gaslighting—while recent research reclassifies them as inflammatory brain disorders with emerging treatments. The discussion moves to gender‑specific blind spots, highlighting that women often present heart attacks with gastrointestinal or shortness‑of‑breath symptoms rather than the classic crushing chest pain, leading to higher mortality. Hartman frames these three concepts as facets of the same problem: a hierarchical, expert‑driven system that resists new evidence. He announces a multi‑episode deep‑dive series and short social‑media clips that will explore 30+ examples of these errors, urging listeners to become informed patients and share the information. Throughout, he promotes his book as a practical blueprint containing tools, resources, and strategies that have helped thousands of his patients achieve better outcomes.
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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.
Women are different than men. Their physiology is different. They can actually bear life in the womb. The way they react to things is different. And it even goes down to something as basic as a heart attack, which is the most common cause of death in women and men. But women present differently. They might have more GI issues because the way the heart sits, they will get more GI issues. They might have more shortness of breath kind of stuff, abdominal pain. It presents atypically. The classic, you know, substernal crushing elephant on your chest pain. That actually is more of a male phenomenon than a female phenomenon. Why does this fall into medical feminism? Because we got it so wrong that it actually— women died. Blind spots, medical gaslighting, maybe even medical feminism. What am I talking about? I'm talking about our healthcare system, how it overlooks people, overlooks diagnoses, and just plain out gets things wrong or misses them. So So I want to talk about this over the next several Friday podcasts, take a little deeper dive in this idea of medical blind spots, gaslighting, and medical feminism. Now, when I first heard these three put together, I was a little taken aback by it. I'm like, okay, what is this really trying to say? What does this mean? I want to walk you through that first to help understand where I'm coming from, because these are actually three different sides of the same elephant, three ways of looking at the same thing. So let's start with medical blind spots. What are blind spots? Blind spots are things that in our healthcare system that we think to be right that are just plain wrong. Things that we once thought that we actually laugh at now that we believed as truth, as fact back in the day. There's many examples of these. I like to talk about handwashing because that's one of the many blind spots that we got just plain wrong. Ignaz Semmelweis, by 1830, 1840-ish, he was a Hungarian doctor in Austria, I believe, and he noticed that women who had babies that the nurse midwives delivered them, they had much less puerperal fever, which is basically the moms getting this infection, the staph infection actually, during the delivery process and dying, the baby's dying. So, and he noticed that was a lot less when the nurses did it than the physicians. Now this was a very hierarchical period. That's crazy. Of course, you know, male doctors are better, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that kind of stuff. And he had this idea, maybe there's these infections, these things. This was before germ theory took hold. Because he realized, strangely enough, that the physicians were actually going down the basement and doing autopsies on dead bodies, going up and delivering the babies without washing their hands. And 25% of the time, the women and their babies were dying. Insane, right? Kind of hard to think that we thought that was okay, you know, 170 years ago, but that's the way it was. Anyway, so he started washing his hands using like a bleach kind of solution, super dogmatic about, super crazy about it. And all of a sudden, lo and behold, his rates dropped to that of the nurse. Midwives. And all of a sudden, it was like, huh, something's going on here. But, you know, the German physicians were like, this is crazy. There are— we are high-standing individuals. How dare you say, you know, we have these things on our hands could cause this illness? And he actually eventually was jailed for being crazy, out of his mind. That's when we used to do that to people. It was actually beat in jail. That's when we used to beat the crazy out of people. And actually died from a staph infection. Now we can talk about this and laugh. Oh, that's so crazy. Can you believe that people would actually dissect the dead cadaver. But this is before we had like different, you know, preservatives, formaldehyde, embalming stuff, you know, that was being used in the West. And can you— it sounds kind of crazy, but this actually was something that was a big deal, and the guy actually lost his career and his life over it.
And it took almost 30 years for it to catch on.
Now we all wash our hands, we know hand washing is a big deal. This was a blind spot, and this is an example of a medical blind spot, something that we thought to be right, that was wrong. And they usually were dead wrong.
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.
Now, how's that different from gaslighting? Well, an example of gaslighting is chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, for example. So why, why, how is it different than the blind spot? The chronic fatigue and fibro, for example, the mechogastrolone is a thing that people had. But when I was doing my training in 1996, I was told it was a psychiatric illness. Affected women much more than men. So of course, of course, right? This actually borders on the feminism a little bit, but we'll get that in a second. And so of course it's a psychiatric issue and I was trained to give women antidepressants, Prozac, Cymbalta, and they got better. Of course it's a psychiatric problem if they get better with these medications. And so we gaslit them. It's all in your head. There's nothing really wrong with you. And let's treat your psychiatric illness. Okay. Fast forward. Now we actually, the United Kingdom, now it's referred to as myalgic encephalomyelitis, which we actually realize is a brain on fire, brain inflammatory condition. It can be related to a whole host of things, but ultimately the microglia, which are a cell in your brain, get inflamed and you get this fibromyalgia chronic fatigue syndrome. Now the thing about them is I won't go into detail, but they all have sleep disturbances, fatigue, and immune dysregulation is a part of it. And now we know there's actually treatments for it, et cetera, et cetera. But back then when we didn't quite know what it was, we told the patients, mainly women, it's all in your head and you just need a shrink, psychiatrist, some brain help. And now, and we were wrong. We now, we now, it's still the thing about it with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, still in the medical world now, a lot of physicians still think it's a psychiatric issue, even though in the functional medicine world we're doing lots of cool things like letters, naltrexone, like gut work, treating chronic Lyme disease. I had one patient that I'm working with now, or several 70s had chronic fatigue and fibro for 40 years, 40 years. And she's been in remission now for probably about 2 after I treat her Lyme disease, right? So this still goes on, but it's a little different than the blind spot. The medical feminism is us playing out, looking at a situation in women and getting it so wrong. It's really, it's really bad off. An example of this would be heart attacks in women. So what do I mean? Well, before we understood, you know, women are different than men, you know, surprise, surprise, right? Their physiology is different. They can actually bare life in the womb. The way they react to things is different. And it even goes down to something as basic as a heart attack, which is the most common cause of death in women and men. But women present differently. They might have more GI issues because the way the heart sits, they will get more GI issues. They might have more shortness of breath kind of stuff, but more GI issues, abdominal pain. It presents atypically. The classic, you know, substernal crushing elephant on your chest pain, that actually is more of a male phenomenon than a female phenomenon. Why does this fall in the medical feminism? Because we got it so wrong that it actually— women died. So as you can see, you know, the blind spots, the gaslighting, and the medical feminism are kind of the same concept. The construct that we, in our hierarchy, in our echelon of care, in our, you know, our technocratic, technological, expert-driven healthcare system— the experts know best, and we will categorize people. And because of our lack of openness, just get things plain wrong. So what we're going to do on these Fridays or the next several weeks is take a deep dive into these 3 categories and talk about some examples. On the social media, I'm probably talking about 30 different ones, taking short 2-minute deep dives. So if you're interested in this concept, you could actually follow us on both the YouTube as well as the social media to get into these. But the idea is like, these are things we're getting so wrong, we've gotten wrong. And my point is, if we've done it this bad in the past, we're probably doing it now. The point of this is not to, you know, shame ourselves, to have a guilt, you know, guilt journey or whatever, but to say, look, as a patient, as someone who engages with the healthcare system, we've gotten it wrong so many times. Maybe we're getting it wrong now. And we're going to talk about this for a few over the next couple of weeks. So between this and the YouTube clips, you'll get a really good idea about blind spots, medical gaslighting, and then medical feminism to really understand how it's still going on today. And actually, when I say medical— I'm becoming more of a medical feminist, realizing that we actually mistreat, undertreat women. That's probably the better way to say it. So anyway, hope this is helpful. Um, if you like this topic, please ask us more questions. We try to put these topics out there to help our patients, to help individuals. And so share this information, that's how we get that out. And so I'm really excited to be talking about this over the next several weeks— things we thought were right that are just plain wrong, how we've messed things up, and how we've actually mistreated You know, over half a population, which is pretty— if you say it like that, you messed up, got it wrong with half our pop— over half our population. That's pretty embarrassing for, you know, people supposedly as smart as we are. So anyway, take care, and I'm looking forward to this conversation with y'all.
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, MD, and I wrote Incurable: 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.
