Dr. Aaron Hartman argues that hypermobility, a connective tissue condition affecting roughly 20% of people, is an overlooked driver of chronic disease. He links it to arthritis, IBS, autoimmune conditions, and POTS, and claims hypermobile people are 400% more likely to be neurodivergent.
Chapters
This is actually a spidey sense that if you're particularly in women who historically have done a lot of the caretaking and nurturing in families, having that spidey sense is a difference between your kids surviving childhood, your family surviving, and neurodivergent individuals, which includes this. You're 400% more likely to be neurodivergent if you're hypermobile. Pick one thing that I would say is the root cause of many, if not most of the health issues I see in my clinic. What would that be? What would be the one ring that rules them all? If you're familiar with Lord of the Rings, what's the one thing that connects all these other things together with health issues? It's actually our connective tissues. So I want to do like a little, you know, around the world review of things that can be directly associated with malfunction, dysfunction, poorly formed connective tissues. What I'm referring to is hypermobility. Hypermobility spectrum disorder, some people refer to as HEDs or hypermobile EDs. I'll eventually talk about EDs in this series, but I want to just focus on generalized hypermobility because it's what I see most in my clinic and it's what patients suffer with most. I do see EDS as well, but that's. I mean, it's common, it's more rare. I mean, I would say it's rare, it's less common. But if you think 20% of the population is hypermobile, that's the thing to focus on and look at. So what kind of illnesses or things could be associated with hypermobility? Really bad arthritis, particularly women who are suffering with advanced or progressive arthritis younger than suspected. Why is that? Because if your joints have a little bit of give, a little loosey goosey, they actually wear a little quicker and you'll have your major joints like your knees, your hands, your thumbs, ankles, big toe, actually age a little quicker because of the looseness of your joints. What else can be related to hypermobility? Chronic back pain, SI joint issues. I've actually seen individuals who get sciatica or like pinched nerves in their neck, even arthritis in their neck because the joints are connective tissues are loose and they get more of a wear and tear, but also get more impingement on those nerves as their connective tissues tighten up. So lots of musculoskeletal issues, pain issues. If you're dealing with anything, any of those, you need to think about your connective tissues, but take even a deeper dive. Gut problems, ibs, inflammatory bowel disease, food intolerances, food sensitivities. One of the things that's interesting with hypermobility is it affects your ability to digest food. And so you can actually develop more food intolerances if you don't break the food down quite enough. But also just because your organs kind of are more saggy, so to speak, you can actually have your gut, your food sit longer in your GI tract. It ferments and can actually create a lot of bad bacteria relating to sibo dysbiosis, IBS kind of symptoms. But even at a deeper level, the hypermobility is associated with more autoimmune illnesses. So your Hashimoto's patients, your rheumatoid arthritis patients, your celiac patients, if you have any of those issues, think, hey, do I potentially have hypermobility? But even at a deeper level, there's a direct correlation with hypermobility and mast cell activation syndrome. And mast cell activation syndrome is one of the, like the Pentad super syndrome, it's this term we use that that associates mast cell activation with hypermobility, gastrointestinal problems, dysautonomia and autoimmune problems. So if you have any one of those five, an autoimmune issue, a gut issue, a pots dysautonomia, hypermobility or mast cell, then you need to look for the other ones. And mast cells specifically is your individuals who are super sensitive to stuff, they react with foods, they react with dyes, chemicals, some people have multiple chemical sensitivity, they get weird rashes, a whole host of interesting symptoms, and can have hypermobility as a root cause to it.
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How about anxiety disorders I talked about in the first video I did about this? How there's an association with increased activation of your nervous system with hypermobility and individuals that are hypermobile are more prone to have a low level anxiety, a little bit of panic. Now I want to take a deviation from there to the world of neurodivergence. Strangely enough, if you're hypermobile and you know, part of what I do is try to connect all these dots because if you step back and hear what I'm talking about, you're like, how is this all connected? And the answer is it's all connected. Neurodivergence. So these are your, you know, severe, you know, you can be mild or moderate autism. Your people on the spectrum disorder, adhd, dyslexia also can include your Asperger's, which are your really super bright people who have, you know, crazy minds, but a little quirky, have some social issues. But part of that as well is being an empath. And this is something I kind of discovered in my clinical practice where again, neurodivergence, 400% more likely to have this if you're hypermobile. And what an empath is is someone who's like, has like a sixth sense. Or maybe they're. Some people use the word clairvoyant or they have a spidey sense. But the idea is that you have this. Your nervous system is so upregulated or attuned, you actually can feel energy in the room. So it's kind of like the individual people come in the room. You kind of feel like there's bad energy there. You might be hanging out with your spouse, you all make a new friend and you're like, your spouse is like, oh, this is a great person, it's a great guy, blah, blah, blah, whatever, great gal. And you walk away. You're like, I don't. Like, I don't. There's something about that person. And then you learn a year or two later, hey, they were dishonest, they cheated on their spouse, they cheated on their taxes. They were just not a good person. Like it's almost like this. It's actually a spidey sense that if you're particularly in women who historically have done a lot of the caretaking and nurturing in families, having that spice sense is a difference between your kids surviving childhood, your family surviving and. And in neurod, in neurodivergent individuals, which includes this, you're 400% more likely to be neurodivergent if you're hypermobile. But there's also the whole dysautonomia thing, pots, which I've mentioned before. The point is there's so many autoimmune issues, musculoskeletal issues, mood regulation issues, gut issues, all of a sudden, if you're hypermobile, you have to start connecting all the dots if you. And what I'll have to happen in my clinic is I'll see people with, you know, what appears to be, you know, three, four, five, six, seven unrelated things. You start going into the hood and you're like, wait a second, are you hyper mobile? Huh? And then you have to think, do you have Ehlers Danloose or not? And so what I want to do, the next talk is talk about Ehlers Danloose, because that's a specific type of hypermobility that definitely needs multiple specialists involved, definitely can't be missed. And unfortunately, in our current healthcare system, when you talk about hypermobility, people, most people go to eds, which is not what most people have. And so because of that, this gets overlooked. These people get gaslit, they get ignored, and ultimately they don't get the care they need. So I'm going to talk about, you know, what this is and what's not the difference between EDS and just generalized hypermobility. And so we'll talk about that next. If you have any questions, put them below. If this information is helpful, let us know. If there's any topics you'd like us to talk about, let us know as well, because we want to put stuff out there that's useful to individuals. Take care. We'll talk to you soon.
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