In this episode Dr. Aaron Hartman, MD, shares his personal story of his daughter Anna, who was told she would never walk, talk, or crawl, yet at 19 she thrives. He uses this narrative to introduce his book Uncurable, which offers a blueprint for patients and families to challenge hopeless diagnoses. The conversation then shifts to a broader critique of systemic forces that bias women’s healthcare. Dr. Hartman and the host discuss how legal liability drives practices such as continuous external fetal monitoring and high C‑section rates in the United States, despite evidence from countries like Ireland and Scandinavia showing better outcomes with intermittent monitoring and lower intervention. They explore alternative birth settings—birthing centers and home births—as safer options. The episode examines over‑screening in women’s health, highlighting the harms of annual mammograms (false‑positive rates, unnecessary biopsies) and the recent shift toward biennial screening, as well as emerging technologies like the QT‑IMAGE ultrasound‑AI test. Pap smear frequency is critiqued, noting that annual testing leads to over‑diagnosis, unnecessary procedures, and potential fertility impacts, with newer guidelines recommending longer intervals. The hosts frame these issues within the concept of “medical feminism,” urging women (and all patients) to become educated, proactive advocates against gender‑biased medical practices, medical gaslighting, and medico‑legal driven overtreatment. Briefly, they touch on other blind spots such as antibiotic overuse in children causing obesity and allergies. Throughout, the episode blends personal narrative, historical examples, comparative international data, and calls to action for patients to navigate and improve the healthcare system.
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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.
The process of having a baby is a very legally risky endeavor in the United States. And so there's a common practice of external fetal monitoring. So any woman who's had a baby knows they have to put the monitors up. They watch the heart rate. Baby's heart rate's going 140 beats a minute. Speeds up, goes down. Does that so many times, is fetal distress. Let's do a C-section. Welcome back everybody. And we're going to make a slight detour and start talking more about the idea. What does it mean to be? A medical feminist. This is someone who recognizes a group that's being mistreated, maltreated, whatever terminology you want to use, and advocating for that. And in the concept of that, I want to speak to women in general who, you know, for many, we talk about the heart attack issue, about how we miss heart attacks in women. I want to talk about a couple topics that used to be controversial, aren't anymore, they're becoming controversial, particularly with women's health. And knowing about this is going to be huge, particularly if you're, you know, a female or married to a female or have females in your life, which is all of us, you know, and realizing that women are different than men. Women's bodies act differently than men. Just the miracle of bringing life into this world, which is a crazy thing to think about, um, requires unique physiology that only women have. And that also means that when things go south and go awry and hormones get off, we're not going to have a lot of unique— be difficult sometimes to figure out what's going on because of the unique biochemistry and the makeup of a female to do what women, only women can do, which is bring life into the world, which is a pretty cool thing to think about. I want to talk about this, about that process. So first, let's talk about Having a baby. We already talked about the hand washing and puerperal fever previously, so I won't go in that. That's a great example about how, like, literally women dying because someone wouldn't wash their hands, right? And that the guy who figured that out lost his life over it, which is, you know, this is history, y'all. This is not myth. This is history. So let's move on from there and talk about having babies. Now, the process of having a baby is a very legally risky endeavor in the United States. And so there's a common practice of external fetal monitoring. So any woman who's had a baby knows they have to put the monitors up. They watch the heart rate. Baby's heart rate's going 140 beats a minute, speeds up, goes down, does that so many times. This is fetal distress. Let's do a C-section. But let's go to a country like Ireland that does not do that, that basically will just listen to the heart rate every couple hours. If the mom's having symptoms, we'll listen more often. They do not do continuous fetal monitoring, and they have better outcomes. And actually, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists actually said we probably shouldn't be doing this. It's actually harmful. Yet we don't do it because it's a legal issue if you don't measure and don't test and something happens in the court of law, you're going to use, you're going to lose. And so we literally do something now in our country that literature is clear that you get worse fetal outcomes, more C-sections, yet we do it because of the medical legal environment. So how does that play into medical feminism? Women being proactive in their health.
And that's actually happened.
We now have birthing centers. We now have people doing more at-home births, not to say. What's good, better, different, but we're having more of that happening. And oh, by the way, countries that do that actively have better outcomes. So that's an interesting concept. That'd be great if we do some research here in the United States to see what it looks like here. The other thing is C-section rates. You know, C-section in the United States. Um, you look at our rates, some states have a 50, 60% C-section rate. Let's go back to Scandinavian countries and Ireland, 5, maybe 8 to 10% C-section rate because of the way they deal with women in pregnancy differently because of the way they let things go more naturally because of the Lots of reasons, you can't put them all, but you get a different outcome. And here in the United States, we look at things differently. We look at things procedurally, we look at them technically. We also— there's— we have a big medical legal thing, which probably causes a lot of harm. You know, I remember when I was doing my medical training at the Medical College of Virginia, young lady came in with abdominal pain. I examined her, I was going to send her home, talk to my attending. He's like, why didn't you do a CAT scan? I'm like, well, no rebound, no guarding, you know, went through all this stuff. He's like, okay, Student Dr. Hartman, I'm the judge and we're in a court of law. Student Dr. Hartman, Mrs. J or Miss J comes in the Medical College of Virginia at 9 o'clock at night on Friday. She's concerned about her health. She comes to the trauma center. She could have gone to many reasons. She could have waited the next day, yet she came in. Why did you not do a CAT scan on her? And like, what's the response? My physical, you know, point is that a lot of things we do in our healthcare system are driven primarily because of medical legal risks. I mean, C-section rate is one of those things that's driven by that. Mammograms is another great example. You know, female does a mammogram every year for 20 years, she increases the risk of breast cancer 25%. In Europe, for years they've been doing— starting— actually, the UK, we talk about socialized medicine, we talk about there's good, bad, and different. One of the good things about socialized medicine systems is they collect data like no one's business. I mean, Scandinavia, UK, you have amazing, amazing data. And these healthcare systems having access to Tens of millions of people. And because of that, the UK has decided we're gonna start mammograms at 50 and do it every 2 years because at the population-wide, we look at millions of women, you cause more harm just doing it younger and doing it more often. There's a false positive rate on mammograms of about 10%, meaning you do 100 mammograms, 10 women will have a positive that's not really a positive. They get a lumpectomy, they get a biopsy, they get a partial remover. Oh my gosh, this is indeterminate. We gotta remove more. That's gonna cause medical trauma. You know, all those kind of things, solely because we do a lot of procedures and every procedure has a risk. And so that's a big issue.
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.
Maybe 10 years ago, the AC, um, AHRQ made a recommendation, which is a big organization in the country that recommends screening for public health stuff, cutting back to every other year in the United States. And it was, the outrage was crazy. You hate women. Oh my gosh, why would you do this? More women are gonna die. Yeah, actually the opposite was true. Less harm, less risk, better outcomes. But because of medical legal and because of special interests, we kept it at yearly mammograms starting at, you know, screening at 35 to 40 and every year 40 above. We just recently this past year, the recommendation's been changed to everybody in the United States. But this is something that is ongoing now. And there's a new technology, new, actually it's called the QT-IMAGE test. It's a test that actually uses ultrasound and AI-powered technology. It's almost like getting a CAT scan of your breast using ultrasound and you get MRI quality images. The point is it's better than mammogram, but not covered by insurance. Hopefully that will help alleviate all these issues. But the point is, is something, why is all this a big deal? The biggest reason for a radiologist to get sued is actually a missed breast cancer. So you tend not to get sued by doing too many procedures and you may get sued if you missed one. The result is a lot more harm than good's being done. Pap smears. Remember I was in the military, 2000 and— 2003 to 2007. By 2005, 2006, the data was clear that we actually didn't need to do pap smears every year. And we didn't need to start them until women were 21. Actually doing pap smears on a 15 or 16-year-old resulted in more procedures. Very young cervixes change a lot. You might see abnormal, you know, abnormal pap cells from, you know, abnormal pap smears are more likely to happen. Intercourse at a younger age, smoking, and an immature cervix just has more inflammatory, more stuff going on. And so what happened was if you had a pap smear when you're younger, you're more likely to get a biopsy, a colposcopy, which can affect fertility. It's about 2006, that was clear. We can do these every 3 to 5 years. And if you do an HPV test, you can do it every 5 years. So I got out of the military, came back up here to Virginia, started seeing patients. Hey, look, let's do a pap smear every 3 years. People looked at me like, what are you even talking about? I do it every year since I was like 5, you know, that's joking, of course, but every year since I was 16. And it was, it took about 10 years for that recommendation to take on. Why? Because the fear for cancer, et cetera, et cetera, the fear for missing stump and the concern for getting sued. And which, you know, when you look at things just gender-wise, women are more likely because they interact with healthcare system more, they tend to be more of the caregivers. These kind of biases affect them a lot more. We've already discussed the whole thing with heart attacks and that, that's like a medical gaslighting and being a medical feminist kind of combined where we got heart attacks and women were wrong for decades. Now we finally realize, hey, a female middle-aged has GI upset, some abdominal pain. Do an EKG, right? So point is, I could go on and on about examples of how we mistreat, undertreat women, um, in our healthcare system. The point is like not to get upset, not to be like, oh my gosh, it's just to say, look, you need to be educated, know how, what the biases are and work around them. And as an individual, male, female, either way, you need to be educated and proactive for your own health. But this applies to all, applies to kids as well. We have, we're having a lot of debate right now about vaccines as being Aaron Hartman brought up a lot of issues with antibiotics in kids, you know, used to be thought to be safe. Actually, now antibiotics in childhood makes kids more obese, more allergies. We'll talk about that probably later on in these medical blind spot series. That's a big blind spot that we got wrong for so long. But the point is like being educated, knowing where our system has got things wrong before, knowing the data points in the past can help you predict future data points. It's not clear. It's history doesn't repeat itself, but it often rhymes. And so learning these things can help us be better advocates for ourselves, as well as better engage the healthcare system. And providers, doctors, providers who don't acknowledge the errors of the system, those are the ones you need to be concerned about, because if they don't— are not willing to recognize we've messed things up before, they're more likely to mess things up again. Anyway, I hope this one was helpful for you, and keep on diving into this topic of medical error, medical gaslighting. This past one was more about the idea of being a medical feminist, more towards women taking charge of the health, because our healthcare system I mean, in all honesty, has had some biases against women that, you know, from not washing hands and women and children dying to excessive procedures, poor fetal outcomes. It's a thing and need to be educated about so we can eliminate it. So hopefully this information was helpful. 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, MD, 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.
