When Medicine Had No Answers - How One Family’s Journey Redefined Chronic Illness Healing

Today's episode is pretty interesting and fascinating. There are so many parallels of my life, my journey as a mother with Dr. Aaron Hartman's journey. It's just we unravel it all. It's incredible. And I just really, deeply admire this man. His journey with functional medicine started when he and his wife adopted their first daughter from foster care. He taps into a little bit more on this story that's so, so interesting. She has cerebral palsy and countless dietary issues. They went from specialist to specialist. Even as a physician, he felt let down and confused. His daughter's health struggles forced him to confront the uncomfortable realization that our current healthcare system simply does not have all the answers. His wife, however, refused to give up hope. Wish I got to meet her for today's interview. She ultimately pointed him to functional medicine. His daughter and other two kids began to thrive. After years in family practice, he felt called to make a dramatic shift. He now helps patients identify leverage points in key areas of their lifestyle and health that harness their body's remarkable power to heal and begin living the vibrant life that they deserve. His new book, From Hopeless to Diagnosis to Defying all the Odds, chronicles his personal and professional journey, focusing on his daughter's diagnosis, the medical symptoms, treatment options, and the road Aaron was forced to take to get his girl the best care possible. As a clinical researcher, he's been involved in over 70 clinical studies, is the founder of the Virginia Research center, and is currently serving as assistant clinical professor at vcu. I am incredibly excited about this conversation. It goes in so many directions, so let's dig in. Doctor Hartin, thank you so, so much for being here today on Modern Thyroid and Wellness. I am incredibly excited about this conversation for reasons you probably don't even foresee, but welcome to the podcast.

Great to be here. I'm kind of curious now what these unforeseen reasons will be. It's kind of. You got my. My antenna up a little bit.

A little cryptic, Right? So I think our stories have some similarities. I would love for you to share how you evolved through the traditional medical sphere, the conventional practice of medicine, into functional medicine. And, you know, part of our similarities are I actually have a daughter with an extremely rare genetic disease. There was 35 children in the world that had it when she was diagnosed a few years ago. There is currently one doctor mainly that studies her condition. And for years, the first few years, we. We knew what it was. Finally, it was simply an observational study, so there was nothing that could be done for her. Her name's Rosie. My listeners are pretty familiar with her story, but I'd love for you to tell our listeners a little bit about you and your story.

Well, I'm kind of curious, actually, to hear about Rosie. I'm always curious about. My wife, actually is an occupational therapist when we're in Florida. We got married, moved to Florida during my time in the military. And she worked with a lot of kids with special needs, rare diagnoses. There'd be like 30 or 50 in the world. And for some reason, she got all these patients. And Anna actually was one of her patients. Part of Anna's story is that her birth mother did crystal meth the entire pregnancy. And so she had a stroke before she was born. She was born functionally blind. And actually the corpus callosum, which attaches the left and right part of her brain, wasn't even formed when she was born. So that just means the two sides of her brain weren't even communicating with each other. I was, at that point in time, I was doing the typical traditional physician thing. Finished medical school, did well in my residency in the military. Learning new things, you know, always curious. I was leading new things. And my daughter was basically the jet fuel that just threw gas on the fire. And there are two major inflection points that really impacted the way my. My career went. The first one was when we brought Ann into our house, fostering her, thinking, you know, at that point in time, I wasn't. We weren't sure what we're going to do. My wife already knew she wanted to adopt her, and she had to wait for me to fall in love with her, you know? You know, because I'm a little slow on things sometimes. One of the first things was, was feeding her because she was failure to thrive, which means she was left in the fifth percentile. She was just itty bitty, which is very, very, very common with kids with special needs. Okay. It's not an uncommon thing, but the GI doctor was like, look, you've been doing everything you can do. Next thing is to cut a hole in her stomach, put a feeding tube in so we can pour formula, sugar, water, basically, and to put some meat on her bones. And that's all they were thinking about. Yes. She's never supposed to walk. She's never supposed to talk. She's never supposed to crawl. She's supposed to be a vegetable. But we had better hopes. My wife was like, everything's gonna be okay. I see something there. And so I just was kind of really having faith in her vision and just kind of following behind her in many ways. And so we said, no. No feeding tube. That's gonna affect speech. You have to chew and swallow. That's the first part of speech development, part of learning how to walk is doing the little army crawl, right? And it's kind of hard to do that with a plastic tube kind of hanging out of your belly. And so we said no. And the GI specialist reported us to Child Protective Services for child neglect. I'm not sure what your personal experience in the special needs world is, but it's very common for kids with these rare things to basically the parents. One child's by proxy. Your kid doesn't have this rare thing. It's the parent. The parents, you know, gaslighting the kid. The kid's really okay. And this happens all the time to parents. And so. And sometimes they actually lose their kids from some time because they get reported to Child Protective services for these weird symptoms that obviously the parents are causing. Right. But my wife knew the. The nurse that investigated us, they talked about this doctor, how they like to do procedures to the kids. And we got, you know, saw nutritionists, and they said, keep on doing what you're doing. And that was kind of it. But that was the first inflection point where it was like, the system doesn't like it when you say no. The second inflection point was, which is what changed everything, was six months later when my wife found a growth chart with kids with cerebral palsy with my daughter's diagnosis. And she was 50th percentile, she was normal for her diagnosis. And all of a sudden it's like the specialist doesn't know. And all of a sudden it was like the weight, the burden was on me. I have to figure this out because I don't even know I can trust a specialist anymore. And for the special needs world, you may be familiar with it, like, one surgical procedure leads to another, leads to another. You know, fast forward 19 years. Anna's turning 20. She's going to be my first child who leaves my home actually, in April.

And she's had zero surgeries independently.

Yeah, she's. There's a place in Virginia called the Vanguard Landing, and it's actually a community for adults with special needs. It kind of. So there's like three of these places in the country, actually, where it allows them to go there and live their best life. They have supports there. It's a really unique community for people who need some kind of observation, help to live their best life. And so. And she's super excited about it. But the point is that no surgeries leaving the house in a couple months. She would not taken that pathway if we had done the traditional standard of care recommendations, which it's so funny. My wife and I joke about, like we've literally done nothing the specialists have told us to do. And my daughter's thriving.

That makes me so emotional. I mean, my goodness, you know, I just. How just one thing after the next. What a miracle for this, this child, Anna, who's now an adult. But incredible, incredible story. And I think there are so many parallels between what my patient experience, what my patients experience, from a gaslighting situation to a special needs situation, and walking that road yourself is such a unique experience where you can see kind of both sides of medicine and incredible, incredibly, incredibly powerful. Wow. I just. And those organizations that facilitate adult special needs people living on their own, it's. We have one in Austin and I have supported them from the day I found out who they were probably eight years ago now. I think it's the most incredible, incredible thing. Way to take her story and just amplify it and change so many lives. In your book, uncurable, I know you talk about medical blind spots. I can imagine what those are in the special needs community. But I would love for you to tell us what you're referring to. Kind of extrapolate that too, outside of the special needs community. And what does that mean for regular people like you and I?

Special needs community. What's interesting, like blind spots, medical gas line. So, for example, great example. Back in the 60s, early 70s, and before you bring a kid in who has texture issues, developmental behavior issues, doesn't have can't see social cues, and it was called frigid mother syndrome. It was the mom's fault. Right now we call it autism, but back then it actually was blamed on the mom. And so this example of kids that are a little different, little off, you know, France situation, you know, with her mother doing crystal meth in the stroke, nothing, not a lot was expected for her in the. The. What do you say? The expectations were set so low, it's like, oh my gosh, like, like, hopefully she at least meets beats one of your expectations. Not all of them all the time. And so the thing about it, my daughter's a very, very extreme example. But you think about the food pyramid that literally got wrong for 50 years. And finally we can talk about that. But the point is, like, now it's like real food. It's like mostly plant life. Carbs are very small. We can discuss red meat and all that kind of stuff. But the gist is we all, and you know, we all need more protein, right? So all of a sudden it's, it's pretty, you know, there's some nuances, but it's pretty spot on for the first time in over half a century. You know, hormone replacement therapy was, you know, verboten for almost a quarter of a century. What, 2020, 2002 to literally November of 2025. And now it's the black box warnings removed. And These are just two example, modern examples. Smoking. You know, in the 50s, I would have told you, I would have told you, McCall, you should smoke Lucky Strikes because they're good for your lungs. In the 70s, it was controversial whether smoking was bad for us or not. Now obviously we know it's bad. I got almost, I got pretty, I got pretty braided on X for saying vaping was bad for people. Because there's no data, there's no proof. I'm like 30 some year olds getting, you know, popcorn lung and their brains being small in early Parkinson's. That's, I'm sorry, it's not a randomized trial. It's not good enough for y'. All. I got it. And so there's so many examples in healthcare of blind spots. You know, they're the obvious ones. You know, frontal lobotomies. We used to do brain surgery on people with mental health issues. When I was dreaming my book, I found this data point that was really hard to believe. The last frontal lobotomy for a mental health issue was done in 1991 in France. Just think about that. Yes, we stopped doing it in early 70s, late 60s, early 70s in the United States. But so the question then becomes, what are our blind spots now? Let's talk about peanut allergies. The American Pediatric Association 2005 ish, maybe said, hey, we got this brilliant idea. No peanuts, because peanuts cause peanut allergies. So we'll remove them 2015, you know, over a decade later, oops, the instance of peanut allergies has gone up 500%. And oh, by the way, 2015 study showed actually you want to minimize peanut allergies. You exposed earlier lowers the risk 83%. Okay, that's pretty amazing. So all of a sudden now it's like, where we, where are we missing it? What are the blind spots? And so I take first and foremost do no harm very seriously. So whenever I approach a patient, my first question always is, stop, let's do nothing. You know, what's the safest thing to do if this medication, the surgical procedure is the best thing. You have a heart attack, you have a stroke. Okay, we've gone this pathway. But the mass majority of what we do in our country is chronic healthcare. And so literally doing nothing sometimes can be the best thing for your patients. And the last data point I want to drop, drop here, which is a little bit of a mic drop. If you believe data coming out of the Harvard Mass General published in the British Medical Journal by Marty Makary. Potentially medical error could be the third most common cause of death in our country. Things doctors do. So all of a sudden the wrong medication, wrong procedure. And if you, you being a mom in the special needs world, I'm assuming you're. Because my wife is, is a pediatric ot. So I'm sure you've worked with people like my wife. And so, you know, you probably exactly. You love, you love the ots and pts and speech and all those people are like your best. The doctor, sometimes you're all kind of like that doctor does this just, you know, we're gonna work around and kind of thing. But, but all of a sudden now it's like this happens all the time. And the big thing is like how what are the blind spots now that are right in front of us? So my daughter, literally every step of the way, you know, cut her heel cord, the lengthen her legs, you know, cut her spine, do a spml, do a Baclofen pump, let's cut her eyes for this thing. Let's. I mean, she's had multiple surgeries recommended. We've done none of them. And she's beat every expectation.

That's just incredible. And I think, you know what's interesting and what I've experienced myself is like when you're living in these areas of medicine, like thyroid patients too, where there is no answer, right? Special needs Cerebral palsy. Rosie, because she has such a rare genetic disorder, there is no one invested until really a private company now is beginning investment in a cure or a treatment. You have to look and navigate this landscape and figure out a different way that you can build out yourself. And your daughter's journey reminds me so much of, of doing that, going against what clinicians say. And I remember sitting in Rosie's comment. There's a parent conference every year where we go and we learn about the latest information that's accessible. It was just, you know, the first diagnosis I think was in 2018, so it's maybe 2016. So it's a very, very new condition. And I remember going and sitting there the first year and hearing that there is no treatment. There's just this study where they're observing these kids. Good luck. But we're all here to support you. You know, I went back the next year and Rosie had her first massive regression. Her condition is regressive at certain areas at certain timelines in her life. She lost her ability to walk, she lost her social connection completely. She lost her speech and was just completely disconnected. We did all of these things that we could do for her. And I've never really talked about this publicly, but a lot of things. We took her for stem cells, we did H spot therapy. We did another Nemechek protocol. We reversed her entire regression. You know, like, we got her completely back. I went back and was talking about it and everyone just sort of shuns you. You know, it's like, yeah, you. None of that stuff is studied. You don't know if that's going to have any impact. There's none of that's been scientifically studied. I'm like, I know because there are no scientific studies for what I can do for my daughter, you know, So I think there's so many people living the reality of existing in those blind spots and it's becoming a place of issue. That then leads to medical gaslighting. Take listeners through what medical gaslighting even is medical gaslighting?

Basically, you come in with these symptoms and a lot, in a lot of my female patients, it might be brain fog. You lose like, you know, very type A, high producing women who have had a couple kids now they can't remember what they did. You know, they used to remember what they did in childhood. Now they can remember what they did like a week ago. Waking up tired, exhausted all day long. My wife actually had a crazy, debilitating illness for five years where literally she struggled through every day. I'd come home and she just collapse, you know, and you have this and just kind of work through it. And then you're like, ah, you know what? You're stressed. It's just stress. It's just. It's hard being a mom. It's hard. It's hard. It's so hard. It's just so hard. It's very hard. I'm like, yeah, it's hard. But what else is going on besides you know? And then you look behind the. Look behind the wheel. Oh, it's your reactivation of Epstein Barr. Oh, you had, you picked up Lyme disease on your visit to wherever on the east coast or whatnot. Oh, the house you moved into you mentioned thyroid stuff earlier on. We were talking today a couple hours ago, but moved into moldy house. And now you have these electrical zaps and tingle things and you got these weird buzzy things going on, and it sounds like you're crazy. It's interesting in the medical literature, one of, one of the people I trained under when I was doing my. My sirs mold training actually is a psychiatrist in Maryland who got into the mold world because of her psychiatric patients, Bipolar patients, crashing, going off to college, doing well, then going to college and crashing out and realizing there's a brain inflammatory component from mold. And so all of a sudden, now these things that, oh, it's nothing. It's just all in your head. It's your hormones. It's your hormones. Your hormones are off. It's like, okay, they change literally every day of the month for like decades. Like, there's a little more to it than that. And all of a sudden you get under the hood and realize there are actually things that can be done. It's not just, you know, I'm sorry, sweetie. You know, it's just. It's just your lot in life. And that happens all the time, especially to women. You know, whether it's, you know, missing heart attack, you know, pneumonias look different in women. There's a lot of issues even like the way we used to treat breast cancer back in the day. You know, almost everything got radical mastectomy. You just think about you, a lump, lump rack, mastectomy, chemo, radiation. We're a lot less aggressive now. But it's interesting how the natural gas lying happens, that occurs, and it unfortunately tends to affect women and at risk populations more so than men. That's just that, just that. That's not political statement. That's just a reality of my clinical experience.

Yeah. And I think too, you know, it always comes to mind with women, aren't women diagnosed five years later than men for cancer? On average the same type of cancer? Because we go in and we're just sort of dismissed for quite some time.

It's tricky because women interact with the healthcare system more than men. I mean, you start doing paps and female health, you know, guys don't go until they either prostate check, they turn 50. Right. And so women take their kids in. So women are more used to interacting with the health care. They also have a higher sense of like, there's this, this protective sense, this nurturing sense that is more worried about the kids colds and the kids things, which is great because you don't want Your, it's a survival thing. Don't want your kids dying, right? So who's going to, you know, the dads are like, put some tape on it and run around the mom's like it should be pneumonia. And you know, and so all of a sudden now like our system. When you see people interacting with the system more, they get ignored, they get overlooked and all you're stressed and you don't sleep and you know, life is stressful. Having family is stressful, being a professional stressful. That's true. But it doesn't mean you ignore people's complaints. And that's one of the things that I've learned over the years is listen to people. You know, I was taught in medical school, you know, if you listen to a person long enough, whatever's going on will declare itself. Now the goal is to figure it out before the cancer pops up or whatever. But it's almost like now everything's become so technical and procedural oriented and technology oriented that it's almost like it doesn't matter what you say, let's do some tests and images. There's nothing there. Go along. It's like, whoa, wait. Medicine is supposed to be Primarily the diagnosis. 80% is made by the patient history and lab testing things helps you with that. The nuances of the 20%, we flipped it upside down and we do fancy tests. If they're negative, nothing's wrong with you. It's like it's a really bizarre world to be in, especially with our knowledge base now and everything that's going on. It's, it's kind of regressive in many ways.

And I think too just the system, it's set up for such short appointments that it's really hard to give patients the amount of time they need to give a proper history. When we're seeing them in, you know, 8 to 12 max, 15 minutes without procedures for, you know, just quick check in visits. So I absolutely, I agree. I love that you're able to kind of recognize both aspects of medicine, the benefits, because we have, you know, for acute care, for cancer, for all of these things, we have incredible, incredible access in our country for those. And then we also have some shortcomings. I love your balanced approach. I know you're not like anti medicine. How do you think patients who maybe don't feel like they're being heard, they're taken seriously. How do you think they find the balance between respecting conventional medicine and maybe questioning it or not taking it as the ultimate, ultimate truth? Just like you didn't with your daughter.

I think the thing is, is finding someone who will listen to you, who might be like. Because my first 10 years of my career was like, people come in. This is after medical school and residency and traveling different places in the world and working in mission hospitals. You see things you haven't seen before and you're like, huh? You do the testing and you see someone longitudinally, maybe a year or two later you figured out. And so being working with someone who's willing to like sit in the unknown with you and be like, I'm not quite sure what's going on, but we'll figure it out together. And that natural curiosity which is supposed to be part of the practice of medicine, I feel is lacking largely today, justifying a practitioner who will listen to you, who listen to your story and investigate along with you. You'll figure it out. It might take a while, it might take a bit, but you'll figure it out. And then when you work with someone who's done that over and over and over and over again over decades, all of a sudden they get to it really quicker. They get to a lot faster, you know, a lot faster figuring things out now than I was obviously 20, 20 years ago. I think find that person. You got to respect the system, the insurance based system, like 10, maybe 15 minutes. So maybe two to max. Three questions or problems when you see the doctor. Actually in the book we have a bunch of resources and one is how to, how to talk to your doctor. Part of it talks about how when you go respecting their, respecting their time, starting like, hey, I respect your time. I know it's limited. Let's just talk about these two or three things and if I need, I'll set up another appointment. And just starting with respect, because I think a lot of times people will show up and go, I wouldn't. I want to have the next 45 minutes of time with you. And all of a sudden now what happens? The doctor practitioner is like, oh my gosh, like I see that name. I'm already trying to figure out how to get them as fast as possible. So you have to kind of realize that our system has limitations, need to work within them, or you find a functional practitioner who of course is outside the healthcare system, you have to pay extra for it. It's costly. So if you're going to work within the system, I think you need to respect the boundaries, but also find someone who's willing to like walk alongside you. And that's getting harder and harder these days to find it is what Are.

Some red flags that, like, if someone's seeing a clinician in the conventional model, what are some red flags that they might experience either symptom wise or from the clinician that says, hey, maybe I need to a, change to another clinician in the system or B, really just consider a functional medicine provider that's cash, pay, et cetera.

I think if you're talking with someone and they're like just not really listening to you and you know what I'm talking about. Like you say whenever to them and they like, you list your fibers, whatever you're going through, and they only listen to, they pick one thing. Oh yeah, chest pain. Let's get an EKG and let's do an X ray and let's do a stress test. Like, well, you had chest pain and like all this other stuff going on. What's the one thing that might kill you now? And that's a lot of the way our system's rigged is the one thing that might kill you now. Ignore the other 20 things that might be going on, right? So you know, being, being with someone who like will listen to you and if, if they go down that, if they're always going to that, that one thing and just they hyper focus and won't ever like listen, hear you out. Maybe it's time to, you know, look for someone else. Or when you come in the room, you talk or they come in, you're talking with them, they are dismissive of like when you, when they, when you say, like all having shortness of breath, my hair is falling out and I'm being constipated, my cycles are off. And you say, could it be related to X, Y, Z? They say, oh no, it couldn't be that. You know, I've learned my career not to talk in absolutes. The more and more I learned, the more I realized I don't know that much. You're after, after three board certifications, you're starting clinical research company publishing Lancet. You know, being a PI at over 70 studies, I'll tell patients all the time, like, I'm still learning. I, you know, if you come back and see me in six months and I'm telling you the same thing six months from now, then I probably need to find another doctor because I haven't heard anything. And so also working with someone who's tossing learning and you know, they're, they're learning because they, every year or so you have a new approach, a new, new thought process. It's kind of crazy to think that the way we treat blood pressure and diabetes is very much the exact same as was 15 years actually in 202007 GLP ones. I started using them in 2006, 2007. So literally that's. That was the newest kind of hot thing with diabetes stuff. And there's not been a whole lot of new stuff in, you know, not quite 20 years. And so that's how standard medicine works. And so if the person you're working with is doing the same things they've been doing for a long time, maybe as well, you should start looking for someone else.

Yeah, I agree. In incurable, you describe people should really look at health, their health differently and become the CEO of their own health. What does that mindset shift look like? Like, especially for someone who feels exhausted, Like, I remember being that person and being like, I'm leaving this doctor's office. How in the world, through all of my brain fog and fatigue, am I going to find someone to help me? What does that look like when it comes to an actual human. What is being a CEO of your health look like?

Means you have to kind of have the overview of all the things going on with your health as well, be able to delegate, you know, and so that's where putting a team together. So you have your primary care person, your functional person. If you're a female, you have your OB gyn, you have your endocrinologist, your rheumatologist, whatever that team is. But you need, you need someone who's like your main get it done kind of person. And that typically is your. Someone like me, your functional medicine practitioner who has a knowledge of all these fields. Like the general contractor of your house. Right? They could put the acm, but they don't do it. They could do the electrical, but they don't do that. They have someone else do it. You need that person who can help guide you so that when you have questions, hey, could this be mold? Could it be Lyme? You know, my gut? Could it be leaky gut? Could it be Sibo? Is there mast cell issues? You know, is this, you know, someone who can be like, okay, yes, we've already done this, this and this. We've already addressed that. Oh, good point. I didn't think about that. It slipped my mind. Let's go down that pathway. So it requires you to be educated, but also be able to delegate. And one of my passions about that is to educate people. You know, on my website, we've to date done about 400 different blogs on different topics. And then my podcast just I've done a lot of things to educate people. There's a book reading list on my website as well where I've vetted about 500 different books and we have about 70 or 80 on that reading list. Books I feel like would be helpful for people if you're going down a journey. So people also have to be willing to get educated. It can't just be, I'm going to look at, you know, social media posts and figure out your healthcare that's like, you know. Unfortunately a lot of people are using TikTok and things like that to be their consultants and figure things out. And that's kind of dangerous. But that's the general concept.

Yeah, and I see that, I mean with thyroid people, I mean I say all the time, look, if you think that you can sit back and passively engage with your thyroid care and not be the person kind of driving this, the, the car, you're not going to get your life back. You're going to end up struggling substantially. And I know you're, you operate in so many of these same sort of blind spots of people who've been told that hey, you're normal people who have been told nothing's wrong. Oh, you know, you know, just change your lifestyle, whatever it is. What do you feel like in your practice? Some of the most common areas are the most common conditions that people are experiencing that have been missed kind of pervasively in the regular medical field.

I mean wonder damaged buildings or sir, Chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which is mold fits into that. But it's a big circle and can include environmental biotoxins, breast implant illness, it can include some types of like long Covid as well. And it's it the biggest, 80% of it is related to water damage. Building, which the, which most of the literature actually comes from the Environmental Protection Agency, the epa. But yet you go to a physician, they're like mold, huh? But yet the EPA has tons of stuff about this, this very thing. Tick borne illnesses. Literally. The government just a month ago had a, had an open forum table. I actually watched about half of it. Just kind of curious what the experts want to talk about. And it's just basically the government level saying look, Lyme disease is a big issue. We should bring it to public consciousness. I mean there are more cases of Lyme disease every year than women diagnosed with breast cancer. Like it's. Yeah, yeah. So it's, that's diagnosed, that's not active, that's diagnosed. So tick borne illnesses serves a third thing that, that I have A passion about is actually hypermobility. And this is something when I mention to people, they kind of like they're huh. Like if you're a kid who's neurodivergent, you're 400. I'm sorry. If you're hypermobile, you have a 400% increased instance of being neurodivergent. Well that's interesting. Hypermobility is a part of this thing called the. It's a super syndrome of five different things that include autoimmune issues, gut problems, dysautonomia and pots. If you're familiar with what, what that is. GI issues and hypermobility, I'm sorry, Mast cell activation syndrome. But hypermobility is this superpower that can become kryptonite. A lot of athletes will have it. You know, people like if your thumb goes back, your elbows kind of go back. You know, someone who's super flexible. It's, it's, it's a survival advantage they have people have actually their cerebellums are bigger, their amygdala is a little bigger. So you have a frequent response times. But at the same time you're more prone to trauma induced issues. If you've had a physical, physical, sexual, emotional abuse, it lights up your brain more and you have a higher need for protein, rare earth minerals, trace minerals, and you're more prone to tick borne illnesses and mold related illnesses. So it's this, this physical exam finding that you see a bun. I see all the time. 20% of kids actually are hypermobile. 13% of college students are hypermobile. So it's something that's overlooked all the time, but yet it can be part of your underlying mold, Lyme, thyroid, autoimmune, whatever kind of thing. So and so that's something I see all the time, I look for all the time and people are hypermobile and all of a sudden you have to. Nutrition is a big issue. Getting adequate types of protein, including things like collagen based bone broth kind of stuff, Fats are ridiculously important for cleaning out your cell membranes. Which fats are back now? Right. So it's something that's overlooked commonly that most, most practitioners don't even know to look for that if someone is hypermobile, you have to take their physical structure into consideration when you're figuring out a program. Form 2.

Follow up questions with that. You've kind of sparked my curiosity. The differential between 13% of college students being hypermobile and 20% of children. Do you think that's because maybe perhaps neurodivergent children, less of them maybe go to college or do you think that the incidence is actually increasing in real time and that's what we're seeing.

It's really funny because you go to adults, it almost disappears. The numbers are getting lower. It's. I think it's like if you talk with pediatricians who deal with kids with ADHD and pandas and pans and OCD or which is like most pediatricians, they'll be, oh yeah, they're loosey goosey. They would have tone issues. They w sitting, they see it all. They know, they know that it's a, it's a thing. You go to adults and they aren't even looking for it. And part of the fascia, what happens is as a protective mechanism is your fascia actually tightens down. So you'll see adults go, I'm not flexible, I can't touch my toes. When I was young, I could flip back and do really funny things. And part of that is your fascia actually will tighten down. So you actually become less hypermobile as you get older. There's a thing called a bait and score that's used for diagnosing elders Danlos, which is a severe version of this. It's amazing how many people. And part of that is actually as you get older, the score to be positive goes down. So they kind of recognized. They kind of recognized. And that's mainly for research purposes. To d. For research purposes. But you get less hypermobile as you get older because of, because that fascia tightening down. And so that's an interesting phenomenon. I think it's part of it. And also it's again, neurodivergence. Okay, where are we looking for neurodivergence? We're not looking for the, the 50 year old quirky whatever. We're looking for the six year old ADHD, OCD kid. So I think that's. There's multiple biases going on.

Absolutely. And I'm curious what sparked your interest in hypermobility? Was it these complex medical conditions that you're seeing and just noticing the correlation, Was it your wife, Was it your daughter? Because there's like the worlds are colliding right now.

Yeah. Well, it's funny when you, when you're seeing, you know, my, in my career I've had over a hundred thousand patient encounters and we see lots of people and you're seeing 30 people a day and then doing a physical exam on them. I can't believe I used to do this. It's kind of crazy just to look back but you start noticing things. Oh, you know, you're examining someone, you touch their neck and it's very velvety. You kind of pull on their skin. Pulls. You, you're examining, you touch the skin and the skin's very super soft. You have stretch marks like you're a 20 year old female, no kids. Like, why do you have stretch marks on your arms? Why do you have stretch marks on your thighs? That was my growth spurt. I'm like, that's not typical. You start just seeing these things that you storm in your brain. You storm, you storm. I don't know what to do with that data point. You kind of hang on the wall and then you start connecting dots. So it was a slow process for me and during my functional training when I learned about mast cell activation syndrome, ended up getting a group of mast cell experts led by Dr. Afrim and they talked about hypermobility all the time in that group. And part of the research is actually suggesting that in some individuals a hypermobility actually might be a mast cell activation phenomena. So there's a lot of things at play here in hypermobility, but it's just definitely something to be looked for. And it's just something if you, if, if you see patients and you pay attention to them and do a physical exam on them, some something you will see. If you don't see it, then you're not paying attention.

Right. It's how much we can hone our skills if we just pay attention over time. Right. I know an interesting thing about you that you talk about in incurable is how faith is a part of your decision making and resilience in medicine. And I'm curious how faith has shaped your practice of medicine while obviously still being so heavily grounded in science and participating in leading all of these studies. I just would love to pick your brain on that.

Well, I mean, one of the reasons we adopted our kids was just, you know, part of my faith is that true religions take care of widows, orphans and strangers. Okay. Which was a fancy way of saying homeless people, nationless people, parentless people. And so my daughter, like my wife was like, hey, her foster home's closing. For me, it was a very mechanical. I used, my wife used to call me the Tin Man. I was very like methodical, like these very duty driven. These are the things that I say I believe. And so therefore, okay, we'll bring in our house. And part of my journey is actually falling in love with Anna. Her actually helping me get a heart. Because when you start fighting for your kid it, it changes who you are. And so that's the first part, like just me. And I also went also with seminary degree and part of what I learned in seminary was this full knowledge is a combination of head, heart and hands. It's not just intellectual knowledge, it's not just hand knowledge, it's not just heart, it's those combined. And new neuroscience is showing this gut hunch. There's actually science now behind that. I got a hunch, I got feeling. Don't ignore it. Because if you're, if you fine tune it, you can actually use that as another superpower. That's where you kind of get into the whole thing with empath. Having this emotional ability to feel people's emotions. It's really interesting phenomena. But so as I, as I brought her in, I started developing a heart and I started being, my, my knowledge started becoming more holistic. I started actually like, okay, this person's in front of me. It's not just an academic challenge. It's like I want to help them. I'm getting emotionally involved and it just made my, my perceptions, my thinking better. You know, you're reading in the morning, you're reading an article, and all of a sudden someone's head name pops in your head. Come on, we'll type this down. That was part of it. But then as I started getting people that are really, really sick with really rare diseases like autoimmune, autonomic ganglionopathy, which is basically your whole GI tract shuts down and it doesn't work anymore. Which supposedly there's 50 cases a year of that. And I was getting, I was collecting these things in Richmond, Virginia. Like, how's that work? You know, what do you do with these people who have no hope? And part of my faith was like, you know, you were made for health, you were made for wellness and well being and living your optimal life. Being chronically ill, that's not the way things are supposed to be. And so because of that, I didn't, I never gave up on people. I never gave up my daughter. My wife was sick for like five years straight. Like literally. She doesn't remember much about that part of the family life because she literally was so exhausted. But not giving up on her. You know, if I didn't believe that our body was designed to self heal and self repair, I probably would have been like, there's nothing else I can do for you. Which our healthcare system says all the time, right, I can't help you anymore. I'm kind of done. Like, I just I don't give up. You're not in that. My faith informs me, like, if I. If someone's not getting better, it's not because there's no hope. It's because I haven't figured it out yet. We haven't overturned something yet. Maybe it's not time yet. We keep on working. And so that has actually transformed my practice of medicine, transformed how I look at people and it's amazing how people are like, they just want someone who believes in them and won't give up on them. And like, who doesn't want that, Right? So I think that's how faith has infused my job. And it's been like my superpower. I don't give up, you know, and on my daughter's journey and changing my practice of medicine, it's literally affected thousands of people's lives at this stage, which is. That's really cool too.

It's so cool. It's interesting. Years ago, I did a TEDx talk on like, love is the real medicine. I had pulled all of my patients and I asked them, what has been the most transformative aspect to your care with me? Is it medication changes, is it supplements, is it lifestyle? Or is it being treated like a fellow human being and friend? 78% of people said it was just being treated with care, compassion, connection, and what that does, what you're doing is so cool because not only does that positively impact patients, I truly, truly believe it prevents medical burnout on the clinician's end, which I think is pervasive. Pervasive at this point, like maintaining a person's humanity, seeing them as a real human, keeping that connection is incredibly powerful on both ends. So I commend you for being able to do that. I think it's challenging in all of medicine, but I especially feel like it's challenging for physicians. I feel like part of Yalls training is almost stripping yourselves of your humanity. You know, working extremely long hours, whether you're sick, whether you're sleep deprived, doesn't matter. Like, you just do it. You're a machine. And I think in a way that kind of strips along the way, maybe other people's humanity as well.

Definitely an industrialization in the education system as well, the, the hospital based system. It's very rigorous. It's my. One of the things, my dad, dad was the Marines. He was like, you know, you do Camp Lejeune, they tear you down and they, you know, they build you back up. And that's very much what happens in medical school, where it's like you just have to hunker down, you know, literally I was studying 60 hours a week in medical school, and then you're reading textbooks and stuff and you kind of lose a lot of relationships. You lose a lot of yourself just to get to this thing. And then you go to rent, and that's just preparing you for residency, which is even worse, right? And so it's a hundred percent really easy to kind of get the humanity beaten out of you and into that. You start treating people like widgets. Like you're a thyroid widget, you're a heart attack widget, you're a weight loss widget, you're a cancer widget, you're. Or your department, you're an er, you're a surgery, you know. And so all of a sudden it's like we have this ecosystem built up and we treat people as where the specialty they fall in or the department they're in. And you lose people's humanity, but you also lose like everything is infinitely complex and infinitely interconnected and just that understanding. You know, one thing's when I was doing my research, because I got in this whole field of energy medicine, this is, this will kind of is a little bizarre. But think about this for a second. Your body's healing is actually connected with the, the earth. And that's like a weird thing to say, but there's a thing called the Schumann forces, which is the electromagnetic fields pulsing at 7.83 hertz. That's created by lightning strikes. There's about like something like 20 or 30,000 a day across the planet. It just happens to resonate at the same level as your alpha brainwave activity. And then the Earth's magma moves. Moving under the Earth's core creates this flux, which creates, you know, the compass north, south, but that resonates about 6, about 7 hertz, which is similar to what your heart rate variability resonates if you look at it on a, on a readout. So all of a sudden it's this interesting thing between the Earth's energy and our body. And so you're saying that's kind of weird, but we're now using electromagnetic field devices, RTMs, to treat depression, neurological issues, the researching of Parkinson's. Your heart rate variability is all the rage now, right? And it's interesting how like, that's a very, like a macro, like how interconnected we are with our planet. And so if that's the case, it's like, wow, like what about the micro? And then we get the microbiome and the virome and the proteome and all this kind of stuff. It's like it's fascinated by the infinite complexity of everything.

Me too. And it's cool. It's a cool time to be alive and see more and more unfold things that we never thought were real were possible. It's fascinating. And then that also sparks like a thought of like, well, if we're connected to the earth at different frequencies, then certainly we're connected to each other and we share energy, we exchange energy. Right. And so I think there will be more and more science coming out about that. I love and so admire all of these various components, these approaches, these outlooks, these paradigms that you use in your practice of medicine. I'm sure as a father, as a husband, all the things. Can you tell us a little bit? Because I, I know that you're. All of that culminates with incurable. I would love for you to share more about your book with my listeners. Tell them where they can find it. I still have one more question after this too, but tell us everything.

Well, incurable, it's, it's basically my daughter's story. How we interacted with the healthcare system and how she's beaten every odd. I think part of the message is if this little girl literally abandoned the hospital with crystal meth exposed stroke before she was born, if she can beat every single solitary odd, then you can too. So first is just hope, like you can, you can do it. The second thing is just to give people a buffet of options because we put, we put a lot of free stuff in there and there's a healthy home guide based on the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, that you can check your house out. Is your house a clean place? You can actually follow that through, watch some videos. We have a lot of free things in there just to get people the tools. I want people to start realizing they can do it too. You know, start cleaning your food up, clean your environment up. Yes, there's a whole list of like cool biohacks and cool things we did, including hyperbaric and stem cells and peptides. But the foundation is clean food, clean environment, meaningful relationships, adequate sleep, physical activity and perfecting the basics. And that's part of the book as well. So it's just to give people hope, give them some basic tools and then let them go from there as far as where you can find it. The UncurableBook.com is where the book book sets with information that that takes you to Amazon. It's also available on audible if you want to go to audible and get it. So that's kind of my feel.

I love it. I love it. So one last question. After everything you've learned from your daughter, your work, your patients, your own journey, how do you now define the concept of health?

Health is being the optimal version of you, the best version of you that you can be, period. Whether you're 80 or 12. It doesn't, you know, an 80 year old is not gonna be 12 year old and vice versa. But whatever. The best version of you that you can be at your age, at your stage where you are with your resources, et cetera. And I think people underestimate that. They say, oh, I'm too old, I'm too young, I don't have enough money, I don't have resources, I'm like blue zones. They don't have hospitals, they don't have fancy stuff. Yet people live there live to be a hundred day more than anywhere else in the world. Why? What's special? There's no fancy technology, no fancy stuff. And so I think just people being the optimal version of them they can be and helping them realize what that is and realize no matter where you're at, it can be a little better.

I totally agree. Tell listeners where they can find out more about you and your work. I know we'll drop the link for incurable in, in the show notes, but tell listeners where else they can find you.

I have a lot of different things, but I've created a website, aaronpartmanmd.com and that takes you to my. If you want to go to my practice website or podcast or YouTube or social media, whatever the book as well. So just Aaron Hartman MD is like the landing platform that goes to all the, all of the places after that. I've got some really cool pictures of me, my daughter as well hanging out there.

So I love it. Well, thank you for sharing so much wisdom and just brilliance and more about your daughter Anna as well. And I just appreciate you taking the time to be on the podcast.

Thanks a lot for having me. Really appreciate it.