When the Diagnosis Was Not the Answer – How One Child Changed Everything About Healing | Stress | E116

This month we'll be doing things a little differently and actually sharing chapters from my book with you on the Monday podcasts. This is from Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds. Hope you really enjoy this, and if you enjoy the chapters we share here, you can get the entire book either on Amazon or on Audible. You'll find links to that in the show notes below. Hope you enjoy.

7 Modern medicine's medical Maze Anna and her cerebral palsy diagnosis changed our world forever. We went to the best specialist we could find, hoping for clear answers, but instead we found ourselves trapped in a maze of conflicting opinions and endless recommendations for surgeries. It felt like the system was more focused on fixing symptoms than helping Anna actually grow and thrive. The healthcare system isn't built for kids like Anna, or really anyone with a complex medical condition. It's a machine designed to churn out the same generic solutions for everyone known as the standard of care. For us, it felt like trying to jam a square peg into a round hole. Every step was a fight. Nothing came easy. Take Anna's need for glasses. She had strabismus, an eye condition where her eyes wobbled uncontrollably. The standard glasses were these hard, ugly things that constantly fell off and were completely useless. But my wife, Becky, ever the researcher, knew that vision was critical for hand eye coordination and brain development. She refused to settle. We were living in Tampa at the time, and Becky searched the entire state for a specific type of glasses that would actually help Anna. She discovered a brand called Miraflex, but no one carried them or even knew about them. Luckily, she eventually found an eye doctor willing to work with us and special order them just for Anna. It was exhausting and frustrating, but she did it. Now, 15 years later, those types of glasses are everywhere, easily available. But back then, it was one of many battles. Everything for Anna was like that, a fight, a struggle. At first, everything seemed impossible, but we pushed through with faith as our constant companion. That's the reality of special needs medicine. The system isn't built for individual needs and nuanced care, so it's especially not built for kids like Anna. It's built for efficiency, for standard solutions, and for quick fixes that check boxes rather than transform lives. It's a one size fits all machine, more interested in throughput than outcomes, more aligned with the priorities of the medical industrial complex than with the needs of actual humans. So families like ours are left to fend for ourselves, to dig, to research, and to challenge the experts who insist they know best, even when the best they offer is A barely functional status quo. We were never looking for miracles. We were looking for someone, anyone, who would see Anna as a whole person. Not a chart, not a diagnosis, not a problem to be managed. Because when a system isn't designed to see people, it fails them. And that risk of failure became my burden to carry. Doctors only told us what Anna couldn't do. They were focused on limitations. But we refused to let a diagnosis define her future. We learned to say no. No to unnecessary surgeries. No to cookie cutter treatments. No to a future dictated by disability. One of the biggest battles we fought was over mobility. Specialists had decided that Anna would never walk. Every treatment option they offered was based on that assumption. Procedures to minimize pain, surgeries to make her look better in a wheelchair, Interventions to make her seem more normal. But Anna was never going to look normal, and that wasn't the goal anyway. The goal was for her to be her best, whatever that looked like for her. We butted heads with the specialists over and over. Every time we asked, would this procedure make anna better off 10 years from now? The answer was almost always no or we don't know. One specific example was a surgical procedure to lengthen the tendons and ligaments in her legs because they were tight. This is a pretty normal issue in kids with cerebral palsy or even adults with traumatic brain injuries. These tight heel cords can cause pain, prevent a person from standing straight up, and can impact walking. This is just one of the many downstream effects of significant brain injuries. The muscles in the legs get tight and non functional. But the surgery to address this would have permanently taken away any hope of Anna ever walking. Still, they pushed it because it would make her legs look more typical and better in a wheelchair. That wasn't a good enough reason for us to agree to a life altering surgery. Instead, we traveled to Dupont Children's Hospital in Delaware to see the leading expert. The man who literally wrote the book on cerebral palsy. His team had a completely different approach. Yes, they had alternative procedures they could do. Their recommendation was a medical device called a Baclofen spinal pump that would be implanted in her back. But they recommended we wait. Not necessarily because it was the best thing for Anna long term, but because she was too small at the time to safely perform the procedure. Still, all I heard was, you can wait. There's no rush. And in that moment, that was all we needed to hear. So we waited. And just by not rushing into that one set of procedures, we changed the course of Anna's future. In the meantime, I threw myself into researching Alternative ways to improve muscle tone, Everything from massage to electrical and magnetic stimulation. We explored every avenue. At that time, there wasn't much research on kids with cerebral palsy and nothing on kids with brain injury from crystal meth exposure. So I had to dive into parallel literature on adults with traumatic brain injuries and neurological conditions like multiple sclerosis. Though not the exact same, they share similar mechanisms of action. Plus, I had nothing else to go on. This is called translational medicine when you take research from a similar but different situation and translate it to other similar but different conditions. Now, more than 10 years later, she still hasn't had a single surgical procedure. And despite everything we were told, despite the certainty of the specialists, Anna can walk with crutches, yes, but she can do it. If we had followed through with the first recommended status quo procedure, that would never have been. You might think pushing back against doctors is risky. And yeah, it can be. But we found that saying no often led us to better options. Even saying not now is often a better option. While doctors were focused on just managing symptoms and keeping the status quo, we kept looking. We explored alternative therapies. We focused on nutrition. We found practitioners who treated Anna as a whole person, not just a list of medical conditions. We used to have a sprinter van, like the Amazon vans that come to your home so that we could fit all of Anna's equipment into it. One day, I rolled her out to the van in her wheelchair, opened the door, and went back inside the house to get some stuff. When I came back out, she had already gotten out of her chair, walked up into the van, and put herself into it. I was amazed, happy beyond words, but at the same time terrified that she could have fallen and hurt herself. Yet the ability to do this is nothing short of miraculous. For the little girl who was never supposed to walk, talk, or crawl. That single moment encapsulated what years of fighting research and saying no to the status quo had led to. Anna defied every gloomy prediction. At 19, she is able to get in and out of her wheelchair by herself, put her clothes on by herself, and walk with her crutches with a spotter standing by just in case. Last year, she was swimming with a life jacket and could get in and out of the pool with assistance. But she is always surprising us. This spring, she started swimming without a life jacket. She has a spotter standing by and is able to get herself out of the pool without help. But this kid was supposed to be a vegetable. She continues to thrive. A diagnosis is just a starting point, not the End of the Road have.

You ever lost trust in your own body or in the doctors who were supposed to help you heal? It happens to millions of people who are stuck in the cycle of prescriptions, tests, and more questions than answers. That's why Dr. Aaron Hartman wrote his new book Uncurable. As a physician and a parent, he's lived through the pain of being told there's nothing more we can do. But instead of accepting that, he built a new path, one that combines traditional and functional medicine to uncover what's really driving illness. Uncurable is more than a book. It's a roadmap to help you find the root causes your doctor might have missed, reactivate your body's natural healing systems, and finally believe in what's possible again. If you've lost hope or trust in the system, this book will help you take back control. Go to UncurableBook.com and grab your copy along with Dr. Hartman's free resources to help you start your healing journey today.

I'm not suggesting that you abandon traditional medicine. The key is to find doctors who listen, who respect your choices, who work with you instead of against you. You can't just let things happen to you. You have to be actively working toward things, working for you. I can already hear the criticisms. Alternative medicine isn't proven yet. In places like Canada and Europe, they're already integrating alternative methods successfully. And the Cleveland Clinic is the largest functional medicine clinic in the US These places are out there. You just have to know where to look and be willing to do the work. Fighting the system is too hard. And sure it is. But the cost of not fighting? That's even higher. If you're feeling lost after a diagnosis, know have power. You can ask questions. You can demand better. The hardest path often leads to the greatest victories. Our journey continues full of highs, lows, breakthroughs, and setbacks. But one thing has never changed. Our mission to unlock Anna's full potential. And by fighting for her, we've discovered we're also clearing the path for countless others. What makes this journey so profound is how Anna's full potential keeps evolving. At age 10, she could recognize and read single words. By 15, she could write them herself. Today, she's texting her friends and loved ones. Reading, understanding, responding all on her own with no help, no prompts. That's not just progress. That's transformation. And it's a reminder that potential isn't fixed. It grows. When we fight for it, the system won't change for us. So we go around it, or we push straight through it. Because a family's love, armed with knowledge, relentless determination, and unshakable faith that it's going to work itself out and be okay, is unstoppable. Anna has taught us that the best medicine isn't always in a pill. It's in believing, in fighting, in. In never giving up. And that's what we keep doing, day after day. Many people feel like we did at the beginning of our battle for Anna. Stuck in a health rut with no way out. It's rough, but like Frodo's journey in the Lord of the Rings, there's always a path forward. Even when the road seems dark and impossible. Anna's story proves that even in hopeless situations, there can be a way out. This is your quest, your journey with the Ring of Power. And just like any great adventure, you need a team to help you succeed. A trusted Samwise to walk beside you, a wise Gandalf to guide you. And even an unexpected Sauron. The challenges that force you to grow stronger. Anna's journey didn't just change her life, it changed mine. As a doctor, what I learned through helping her shaped how I approach every patient. And because of that, I was able to help patients like Lizzie. Lizzie was a 15 year old girl battling an unseen enemy. Like every child of her age, the pandemic had shaken her. Returning to school left her uneasy and anxious. But what she was experiencing went far beyond stress. She felt constantly lightheaded, dizzy and nauseous, like she might collapse at any moment. Fogged thinking made it impossible to focus. Yet every doctor dismissed her case. It's just anxiety. It's all in your head, they told her. They handed her medications that only made her feel worse. With no answers and no hope, her mother brought her to me. In just 30 minutes of listening to her story, I had a strong suspicion. Pots. Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome. POTS is a condition where the body doesn't properly regulate blood pressure or heart rate when changing positions, such as standing up. This leads to symptoms like lightheadedness, dizziness and a rapid increase in heart rate. It's a condition I see all the time, one that's frequently overlooked. I performed a simple exam, a variation of the tilt table test Lizzie laid down while I checked her blood pressure and pulse. Then I had her sit up and I checked it again. Her heart rate went up 15 beats per minute. Then I had her stand up and lean against the wall. I lost her pulse. Her symptoms exploded. Her upper blood pressure number dropped below 90. Her heart rate skyrocketed to 140bpm. When I asked how she felt, she was dizzy and starting to get a panic attack, saying my, my anxiety is getting really bad. But this wasn't anxiety at all. It was pots, and no other doctor had seen it. Once we had the correct diagnosis, everything changed. We implemented a comprehensive protocol. Dietary modifications to stabilize blood sugar, increased fluid and electrolyte intake, compression stockings to improve circulation, and targeted physical exercises to retrain her autonomic nervous system. I also prescribed low dose naltrexone, which research shows can reduce the brain inflammation associated with pots. Within weeks, Lizzie's anxiety began to improve. Within months, she was back to her normal activities, attending school regularly and living the life of a typical teenager. The transformation was so dramatic that her previous doctors could hardly believe it was the same patient. Lizzie's story illustrates a critical point. When we look deeper, beyond surface symptoms and easy labels, we often find treatable root causes that conventional medicine overlooks entirely. Why so many patients are overlooked this is where so many people's journeys falter. Like Frodo being told to simply stay in the shire, patients are told to ignore their symptoms, that it's all in their head. They're handed medications that don't work or worse, make them sicker. And when those fail, they're often told either it's all in your head or we can't help you. But the truth is they can be helped. Functional medicine doctors take a different approach. Instead of dismissing symptoms, we dig deeper. Patients like Lizzie get real diagnoses for conditions like chronic Lyme disease, mold related illness, POTS, dysautonomia, mast cell activation syndrome, autoimmune diseases, hypermobility or HETS. These aren't rare conditions anymore. They are the new normal. The new normal. Listen to these shocking 18% of kids under 12 take prescription medications. Prescription Drug Use in the US 2015-2016 Martin et alost 30% of teens between the ages of 12 and 18 have taken some kind of medication. Two thirds of American adults are on at least one prescription drug. Percentage of adults aged 18 and older who took prescription medication during the past 12 months. Cohen and Makita 2023 and yet chronic illness is rising. IQ levels are dropping. ADHD and autism are becoming more common. Even Alzheimer's is showing up earlier in 2023, the youngest case of Alzheimer's dementia was reported. A 19 year old patient in China. The mysterious case of the youngest person ever diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Casella 2024 this is not supposed to be normal and we should not accept it. By now you have a pretty clear illustration of the mess we're in. So now what? What do we do with all this information? We have to challenge it. I know you're probably thinking. Easy for you to say. You're a doctor. Well, I'm going to teach you how to confidently stand up for yourself and to build an arsenal of tools that will help you do it. You don't have to be a doctor to know how to talk to doctors, how to question a diagnosis, and how to recognize flaws in a diagnosis or treatment plan. You just have to be informed. That's what I'm here for.

If you've lost trust in your body or in the system that was supposed to heal you, don't give up. Dr. Aaron Hartman's book Uncurable will help you rediscover what's truly possible. Visit UncurableBook.com to get your copy and start your healing journey today.