In this introductory podcast episode, Dr. Aaron Hartman outlines a forthcoming multi‑week series that will explore three interrelated concepts he calls medical blind spots, medical gaslighting, and medical feminism. He defines blind spots as widely accepted medical practices that were later proven wrong, illustrating this with the historical case of Ignaz Semmelweis and hand‑washing. He distinguishes gaslighting as the dismissal of patients’ symptoms—particularly chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia—by labeling them psychiatric, noting how modern research now identifies neuroinflammatory mechanisms. He describes medical feminism as gender‑based diagnostic bias, using the example of atypical heart‑attack presentations in women that lead to higher mortality. Hartman attributes these failures to hierarchical, expert‑driven structures that resist change. He announces that the series will be delivered through Friday‑longer podcasts and short social‑media clips, inviting listeners to engage, ask questions, and share the information to empower patients and highlight ongoing systemic errors in healthcare.
Chapters
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 I wanna 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, 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 day, three ways to look 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, um, 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, 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 is a very hierarchical period. That's crazy. Of course, you know, male doctors are better, blah, blah, blah, blah, and all that kind of stuff. And he had this idea, maybe there's these infections, these things. This is 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, women and her babies were dying. Insane, right? Kind of hard to think that we thought that was okay, you know, 100 and, you know, 70 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, um, 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 the German physicians were like, this is crazy. 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 and was actually beaten in jail. That's when we used to beat the crazy out of people and actually died from a staph infection. And we can talk about this and laugh. Oh, it's so crazy. Can you believe that people would actually dissect the dead cadaver? This was before we had like different preservatives, formaldehyde, embalming stuff, you know, that was being used in the West. And 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. Now, how's that different from gaslighting? Um, well, an example of gaslighting is chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia, for example. So how is it different than the blind spot? The chronic fatigue and fibro, for example, the medical gaslighting, 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. 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, 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 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, her 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, um, 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 spare life in the womb. The way they react to things is different. And it even goes down something as basic as a heart attack, which is the most common cause of death in women and men. The 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 into medical feminism? Because we've got it so wrong that it actually— women die. So as you can see, you know, the blind spots, gaslighting, and the medical feminism are kind of the same concept. The construct that our hierarchy and our echelon of care and 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 our own, 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 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 feminism, 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. 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 over half a population, which is, if you say it like that, We got it wrong with 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.
