Episode 155 | Nov 6, 2025

Revealing the Blind Spots in Healthcare, With Dr. Aaron Hartman

Where are the blind spots in our current standard of care, and what happens when a physician decides to search beyond them? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes family physician, clinical researcher, and author Dr. Aaron Hartman to explore how truly personalized medicine takes shape when curiosity, compassion, and evidence align. Dr. Hartman shares how his daughter’s early challenges became the catalyst for a new approach to care that honors biology, context, and the body’s capacity to heal.

“There are so many of these blind spots and aha things that, in hindsight, you’re like, I can’t believe we did that… One of the things that makes functional medicine powerful is training people to be looking for these things, not to ignore them.”

Dr. Aaron Hartman

As a clinician involved in more than 70 clinical studies and founder of the Virginia Research Center, Dr. Aaron Hartman bridges research with real-world practice to find leverage points across lifestyle, environment, and physiology. He explains how rigid systems can miss the obvious, why “first do no harm” means scanning for hidden assumptions, and how practical tools from targeted nutrition to simple neuromotor supports can move complex cases forward.

His story starts at home. After adopting their daughter, he and his wife met one-size-fits-all recommendations that did not match her needs. Questioning a feeding tube and digging into growth charts led to years of early-morning study, deeper looks at toxicology and genetics, and a shift toward interventions grounded in science and function. As his daughter began to grow, speak, sing, and balance, Dr. Hartman saw a core truth reinforced: the body tends to repair when obstacles are removed and essentials are restored.

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Transcript

Dr. Sandi: So many people come to functional medicine as practitioners as well as to become health coaches because for various reasons, the traditional medical system is not serving them. This is the case with my guest today, Dr. Aaron Hartman. His journey with functional medicine started when he and his wife adopted their first daughter from foster care. She has cerebral palsy and countless dietary issues. So, they went from specialist to specialist and even as a physician, he felt let down and confused. His daughter’s health struggles forced him to confront an uncomfortable realization. Our current healthcare system doesn’t have all the answers.

His wife refused to give up hope. 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. He has become the go-to doctor for difficult and hard cases in Central Virginia. Dr. Hartman’s new book, “UnCurable: From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds” chronicles his personal and professional journey focusing on his daughter’s diagnosis, the medical system’s treatment options, and the road that Aaron was forced to take to get his girl the best care possible.

As a clinical researcher, Dr. Hartman has been involved in over 70 clinical studies. He is the founder of the Virginia Research Center and currently is serving as an assistant clinical professor of family medicine at the VCU School of Medicine. I know you are going to really enjoy my interview with Dr. Hartman. Welcome to “Health Coach Talk.”

Dr. Hartman: Sandi, it’s awesome to be here. I’m super excited and looking forward to our conversation today.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you so much. So, let’s start with something that you do that I just think is so unusual, especially in medicine today. You said that you get up at 4 a.m., to research treatments that the medical system ignores. That is a level of dedication that is unheard of today. What drives you and what inspired you to go into the kind of medicine that you practice? And what about those early morning chores?

Dr. Hartman: Well, actually I don’t get up that early anymore. I did that for probably about 12 years from 2007 until about 2014. No, I’m sorry, maybe 2016. But as I’m getting older, I’m 52 now, I’ve realized I need my 8 hours of sleep at night. So, I’m sleeping in. I’m super lazy. I’m sleeping until 6 in the mornings now, so that’s super late for me.

But what got me to do that was actually my daughter. Part of my story, I’m a traditional medical doctor, traditionally trained. And when we brought her into our home, we interacted with the healthcare system in a way we did not expect. One of the first interactions, my daughter has a condition called cerebral palsy, which is a brain damage she suffered from having a stroke before she was born and crystal meth exposure throughout her birth mother’s entire history. And so one of the issues with those kids is they’re small. It’s called failure to thrive. And your GI doctor was like, “Hey, this is for these kids. This is what we do. We put a feeding tube into their stomach.” And my wife, and you’ve met my wife before, she’s a pediatric occupational therapist. And we had higher hopes for our daughter. Their prognosis was pretty grim. She’ll never walk, she’ll never talk. She’ll be a vegetable for the rest of her life. And if that’s the prognosis, you’re not really expecting to see anything happen. And the standard of care was to put a feeding tube into these kids.

And so I’m talking to my wife. Chewing and swallowing affects speech development… All these early things… People don’t realize all this stuff kids are doing is preparation for the next stage. The little army, kind of GI Joe crawl the kids do, it’s preparing for a real crawl. It’s preparing for, you know, tiling. It’s preparing for walking. But you can’t do that if a tube is hanging out of your belly. You can’t work on speech if you’re not chewing and swallowing and making those little boluses of food and swallowing them. So, we said, “No, we’ll pass on that.” And the healthcare system did not like that. We were actually reported to child protective services for the child neglect for not feeding our daughter basically fake food.

The turning point for me really intellectually, which led to the early mornings, was six months later where Becky found a growth chart for kids with my daughter’s exact problem. And she was actually in the middle. And that was the second inflection point for me. The specialist had no idea that my daughter was normal for a kid with her condition. They were getting ready to do a surgical procedure, which in kids, one leads to another leads to another. You know, the typical kid who’s my daughter’s age now, she’s 19, has about 13 surgical procedures by the time of 19. She has had zero.

And so I kind of realized, “Oh, my gosh, I have to figure it out.” Like the specialist, all of a sudden you go from trusting all these people to questioning everything, which I’m sure a lot of your listeners have gotten to that point. And so it’s like, “How am I going to figure this out?” So, I started getting up crazy early and just initially I was just desperate. So, the closest thing to cerebral palsy was autism. So, I went down that pathway, started going down the toxicology pathway and then that just snowballed. And so once you started getting a glimmer of light, wait a second, I could do gene testing. And then based on that, give her nutritional stuff. I can do fatty acid testing and give her things based on her actually composition of her cell walls. And, oh, wow, she’s actually doing better. That lit a fire under me. And there’s nothing like a fire in a parent’s belly for their kids, you know? And so that inspired me.

And then I started experimenting with patients. I just continued that practice on for, you know, maybe 15 years. I still read a lot. I just try to get my eight and a half hours of sleep now.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. So, what you’re describing is something I know that our audience can relate to if they’re health coaches. So, many come to us and come to functional medicine and health coaching because they had a crisis themselves or a loved one. And they just felt that the standard of care just was not working. And I think that’s what you described. So, that standard of care and, and… We’re talking about when you experienced that, which was years ago, but it seems like it’s even worse today.

Dr. Hartman: People don’t realize we always have these blind spots to what we do. Marty Makary wrote a great book called “Blind Spots” that came out a couple of years ago when he talks about, you know… A lot of people in the functional medicine have been using that phrase, you know, whether it is smoking. It took the Surgeon General of the United States 50 years and 7,000 research articles before they said, “Hey, smoking is bad for you.”

Ignaz Semmelweis, Europe…he was a Hungarian physician in Austria practicing, I believe, lost his career over handwashing. It took almost 30 years before people actually said, “Hey, we should wash our hands before we deliver babies so the moms don’t die from puerperal fever from having a baby.” And so the question is, like, what are our blind spots now? Some more recent ones are, we used to do frontal lobotomies to treat mental health issues. That was actually the last one—I believe I was looking at this for the book that I wrote—was actually 1991. That is not that long ago that they actually did a frontal lobotomy on someone for a mental health issue. And so the question is, what are the blind spots today? What are we missing today? Because we’re not magically more brilliant than we were 40 years ago or 20 years or 10 years ago. And I’m sure your audience, you have these blind spots. And one of the more recent ones, maybe just maybe, bioidentical hormones. 2002, World Women’s Health Initiative, “Hey, oh, my gosh, hormones are bad for women. We should stop giving all women hormones.” So, quarter of a century.

And now recently actually Marty Makary, in his book, he talks about…he quotes one of the studies that if you’re a female taking bioidentical hormones and you get the diagnosis of breast cancer, it’s less invasive. So, all of a sudden, you know, this paradigm for quarter of a century maybe just maybe we got it wrong. And so there’s all these blind spots. And one thing I’ve learned is to look for them. What am I missing? What is the unknown unknown, the thing that 20 years from now we’re all going to be like, “Can you see this, Sandra? Can you believe we used to do this back when we were younger and more spry?” And there are things. There’s always going to be something, because there’s always going to be knowledge gaps. And so I think the first and foremost, “Do no harm,” in my mind, is like avoiding those blind spots, avoiding those road bumps that we’re all going to think were idiotic 20 years from now but is standard of care right now.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a good point. One that comes to mind, I was just talking to Dr. Lindsey Berkson who is noted in terms of working with bioidentical hormones. And she described her journey that her mother took DES during her pregnancy. And she was here from the same community, and she was delivered at the same hospital in Chicago that I was, so Michael Reese. And that was the standard of care. And so it was… I don’t know. It may have been. There were no records that we could find from 1950 but in 1949 when she was pregnant, but it certainly would have been a possibility because that was the standard of care. You were done in pregnancy, you started to spot. To avoid a miscarriage, you were given DES as…

Dr. Hartman: One thing on that, Sandra, is that DES was a hormone, right? But people forget that the competition for DES before it got approved to treat women with nausea during pregnancy was actually bisphenol A, and they were head to head. DES went out, became a drug, and a bunch of really smart German scientists were like, “If we polymerize this, we could hook it together. We can actually make a plastic-like material. It’s 100% safe. Let’s line everything with it now.” And as you and I know, now we call those things neuroendocrine disruptors, and we’re just now starting to get that out of our food system. That’s been our food system for decades.

And so there are so many of these blind spots and aha things that, in hindsight, you’re like, “I can’t believe we did that.” And we’re doing that stuff now. We’re doing it today. And I think one of the things that makes functional medicine and what you do powerful is training people to be looking for these things, not to ignore them, not to assume you know it all. And, you know, first and foremost, do no harm. What are the basics? You know, 80% of heart disease and 70% of cancer can be prevented by diet and lifestyle alone.

So, all of a sudden, the foundational stuff is safe and basic and powerful. And with my daughter, you know, we built all the cool fancy stuff we did with her on top of foundational stuff. Yes, we did hyperbaric and peptides and stem cells and exosomes and lipid therapy and whatever you can think of. But it was always on top of using food like medicine, using healthy fats for brain development, using organ meats to help with young nervous system development like all these things that for ancient cultures were commonplace and we’ve forgotten about in the West.

Dr. Sandi: So, getting back to your daughter and just remarkable story, so what were some of the changes that you saw as a result of what you were initiating, which was not the standard of care?

Dr. Hartman: Well, I mean, the first changes were she actually started to grow. I mean, she was small for size, failure to thrive, which we realized was not the case. She started growing. Speech development, you know, for the first two years of her life, all she said was, “Hi.” You know, we saw her start to talk, put words together. Now at 19, she sings. She spends hours a day singing to her grandparents, sings herself. She had issues like balance problems. One of the issues with kids with special needs is brain injuries. If you can’t balance and you’re uncoordinated and you fall out of a wheelchair, or if someone turns and you fall and hit your head, that could be the end of decades of therapy, right? And so we noticed her balance getting better, her being able to hold herself up better. Her startle response. With adults as well as kids with brain injuries, you have a startle response. So, if something happens, your natural response is to throw your head back. If you’re falling backwards and you throw your head back, guess what? You make the brain damage worse. And so these are usual reflexive things that… These are infantile reflexes you’re supposed to grow out of. When she was two and three and four, she still had those.

Well, one of the therapies we used with her was a thing called a Revitive, which is a footplate that costs like 300 bucks and actually made most of her leg tone go away, and actually her upper extremity tone. And so now if she falls, she actually does like an adult, where she kind of crunches down, balances herself, and she actually doesn’t fall anymore. And it sounds super simple for you or I, but revolutionary for anybody with a traumatic brain injury—a kid or even our elderly patients. You know, we started using a device called a Galileo, which is an alternating vibrating footplate. Some interesting research on this coming out of Germany from the Princess Sofia Hospital in Cologne or Cologne, however you want to say it. Germany was using this for kids with brain injuries to actually help with balance because how it interacts with spinal arcs in your back helped her to develop tone and stand up. But it also, interestingly enough, in older people helps with osteoporosis, balance, and peripheral neuropathy.

So all of a sudden, something that helps her can also help older people with balance, bone issues, and coordination. And it’s like, this is a one-time purchase. You know, these things, when we got it, it was like $7,000. Now you can buy them for $1,500 bucks. And so it’s like… I hate to say it, but some of these things are stupid simple, and yet our system is like, “Well, since it’s not fancy, complicated, and expensive, we just kind of fly over it.”

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. The standard of care is often that’s one size fits all. But that’s so different from what you practice, which is personalized medicine. Can you describe how you practice when patients come to see you? What’s different about your approach from that standard of care?

Dr. Hartman: I mean, we do like a two or two and a half hour intake, which I’m just getting your story. I’m finding out where you grew up, where you’re from, where your mother is from, if there’s a family history of cancer, what kind of exposures, was anybody in the military, Vietnam? Did you all come from the same place in Chicago? I mean, extensive history, what your symptoms are now and how they’re related to all this stuff. And the physical exam, you know, physical exam is a 20 or 30-minute process of actually looking at your body, looking for neurological status, checking for your peripheral nerves, looking at your brain from a functional neurological perspective. Actually, I learned this studying under Datis Kharrazian at his institute, learning how you walk and talk, and just walk down the hallway tells me how your brain’s working. So, it’s an in-depth process but then we do advanced testing after that.

My background is in family medicine, so we were taught that 80% of the diagnosis is a history and physical. I know other people out there really love fancy labs and will do fancy lab stuff, which is cool, it’s helpful, but I usually use a person’s history and physical to get that 80%. And you can actually figure out most of what’s going on. It’s amazing how many actually do the labs that come back and validate what you’re thinking. If someone’s hypermobile with gut issues, you’re going to have B-vitamin deficiencies, your vitamin C is going to be low, the trace minerals will be low normal. And if you do organic acid tests on them, the amino acid levels are more universally low. I can predict the labs based on the physical exam.

And so I’ve kind of put that all together. And then based on that, I say, “This is, Sandra, what your personal buffet looks like.” And then again, you know, evidence-based medicine is supposed to be based on three things: up-to-date literature, patient preference, and clinician experience. Now the current system ignores patient preference and clinical experience as anecdotal and not scientific. It only looks at one type of science and ignores the other three parts of this supposed, you know, evidence-based medicine. If the patient is not going to do something, it doesn’t matter how fancy what I say is if they have a reaction. And so then you also take the patient’s response into account and how the bioresponse from the buffet I created. And then you actually walk a journey with them figuring out what works for them and what doesn’t.

Dr. Sandi: That is so comprehensive and radically different from what I hear. I was at an event and I was talking with a retired orthopedic surgeon who was having some cardio issues and finally got in to see a cardiologist, and he said, “You can do a physical exam.” And I was just looking at his computer. I got 10 minutes with him, and I was on the emeritus. I was a former physician on staff at this hospital. So, I think, well, you know, I would have maybe, you know, a little better service but absolutely not. So, you can imagine how the average individual coming in would feel if this is someone emeritus staff of the hospital. And I felt completely ignored. It was so frustrating. And that’s what we hear all the time. You’re lucky if you get 15 minutes with a doctor, and they’re just focusing on refills for your prescription. Or at my age, it’s, “Well, did you have your flu shot? And do you have a grab bar in your bathroom?” That’s what I was asked the last time. And I just started thinking, “You better get a grab bar.” “Yeah, but I do handstands every day.”

Dr. Hartman: I was going to say, you should say, “Have you seen my social media?” I’m like, “I don’t think I need a grab bar. I might use the bar for like ballet, but I’m not really going to use it that much for actually useful for me.”

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, but it’s not personalized and you walk out just feeling so frustrated. So, what can we do if somebody really wants to be educated, to take charge of their health, how can they protect themselves from this system that’s supposed to help them and yet they feel ignored and they feel like they’re not being heard? What’s the answer?

Dr. Hartman: Well, you said it, you need to be educated. You know, in my book “UnCurable,” which was basically a story of my interaction with the healthcare system and my daughter, there’s one whole section I talk about some of the new science on your gut. I got you a gut instinct, like what’s your intuition? I have a gut feeling. There’s actually some really interesting neuroscience. Actually, that gut feeling has a scientific backing to that actually having validity. And you know, how many moms, how many women, how many empaths, how many people have said, “That doesn’t feel right,” or, “It just feels wrong.” And that was kind of the initial response with our daughter, like, this just doesn’t feel right. Like there’s actually emerging science you should actually trust that and not ignore it. But then you have to fill in like, “Okay, so what do I do?” And you have to get educated.

But one of the things I tell people is trust your intuition, trust your initial reaction. And then if you’re not sure why you’re feeling that, fill it up with education. And so one of my passions is actually to educate people. So, since 2017, I’ve written probably 400 plus blogs now, which I have on my website. I don’t know if you have individuals or clients recommend or even colleagues recommend books to you and you get 500 or 600 recommendations, you read 100 or 200. So I’ve kind of done that and actually have a reading list of recommended books on my website. I update it usually once or twice a year as I read new books, you know, and I say, “Look, if you want to learn, this is the buffet for you.” But people really need a reliable, dependable resource, and they got to get educated. If you’re frustrated with the system but you’re not willing to do the work, you’re potentially can become a victim of the herd mentality. And so you really, you know, trust yourself, trust your intuition, but you need to put a team of people around you that can help you. And it’s not just on you because, you know, I don’t expect people to become doctors. I mean, you work with people, Sandra. You don’t expect them to become health coaches.

Even patients of mine, interesting enough, actually from working with me, get interested in joining your program to get educated, not because they’re going to become coaches but because like, I need to know more about the foundational basics. And that’s where people just need to be engaged and then surround themselves with like-minded people. If people around you are telling you, “Well, that’s not what my doctor says,” or, “There’s no science behind that,” or, “It doesn’t work,” you know, I’m like, “Really, no science?” Like, the largest functional medicine clinic in the world is at this loser place called the Cleveland Clinic. You’ve never heard of it, right? Literally one of the top hospital systems in the country has the largest functional medicine clinic in the world. This is legit.

So I think, don’t surround yourself with people that are going to discourage you. Put a team around you, get educated, and trust your gut. It’s kind of how I tell people to start the process. It’s amazing what you learn. That’s kind of how we started. I started from a different place as a medical doctor, but that’s my kind of general recommendation to people.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. First of all, I love the idea of recommending books. And for health coaches, that’s what… We have a huge list and growing all the time. I mean, behind it, I don’t have storage space for all the books I have, but there are so many great books, and that is a great resource that they can refer to and helping people sort out what is good information, who are trusted resources out there, and to really feel like you need to take charge of your health.

So, many years ago I was running a group. I was a health psychologist, and I had a group of really motivated people with type 2 diabetes, and we were going… It was kind of like a book club. And Dr. Mark Hyman’s book just come out about blood sugar solutions. So, we were going through that book as a launching pad for a discussion, how they could start to change their eating habits. One woman came in after the second or third visit, and she said, “Well, this is my last time in this group. I went to my endocrinologist, and he said, ‘You are wasting your money. That is worthless. Diet has nothing to do with it. It’s genetic. You are on this medication. You are never going to be able to get off it. So, just quit that group.’ ” And you know, of course, the rest of the group, they’re just demoralized because everyone’s making progress. That was, of course, the day before continuous glucose monitors or being able to track what these changes are doing. And so she just said, “No, I can’t come anymore. My endocrinologist said no.”

Dr. Hartman: That’s unfortunate. One of the things I didn’t realize… You and the coaches you’ve trained and your probably know the whole idea of like leaky gut, for example. Like in the ’80s, it was hooey nonsense, only woo-woo crazy people. And now it’s like cutting-edge science. But when I was writing my book and I’m trying to like, you know, get footnotes right for stuff, and one of the footnotes I was looking at was like 2022 academic papers saying leaky gut basically is myth. I’m like, literally three years ago, an academic journal is saying this thing that we know is hard science, and literally you can get a PhD of it in psychoneuroimmunoneuroendocrinology at Georgetown, right? It’s like, the point is that there’s still people out there that all they learn is what their journal articles tell them to read, which is curated through an editorial board, is curated through a board of governors, blah, blah, blah. And so all of a sudden, like, the education of these experts lags the literature sometimes by 30 years or more in this case. And people just need to realize. It’s unfortunate but it’s the reality.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. I remember in the early ’90s, I had been getting a lot of referrals from a big cardiology practice in the area. People with panic or just they were doing well. The hypertension was getting better. So, I was talking to this cardiologist in his office because some of his patients had been seeing me, and he said… We both went to the same college, Northwestern, and he stood up. He said, “Okay, shame on you, a Northwestern graduate like me. I was doing breathing. What do you mean you’re teaching my patients breathing? How could that possibly help them?” And he pointed to his JAMA journal, “See this New England Journal or JAMA, the day that there’s a study about breathing in these journals, that’s when I’ll refer people to you.” Well, fast forward to today, there’s hundreds in those journals. But, yeah, it has been an uphill battle. I think we’re seeing changes, but I want to talk to you about a program that you describe as Head, Heart, Hands for medical decisions. So, how does faith intersect with this evidence-based medicine?

Dr. Hartman: One of the things I did in my journey is actually went to seminary and actually just thinking deeply about things, like taking one topic and spending a year on it. You become an expert at it, literally. And one of the things when I was walking through this… And my thesis was on adoption because we adopted all of our kids. One of the things that came up was like the concept of a holistic knowledge, not just, you know, academic numbers, not just like hands manual but also heart knowledge. It’s this whole idea of a complete holistic knowledge. And so as I kind of thought deeply about that, like, that’s people’s experience.

There’s another book I read like a decade or so ago that was actually a general surgeon talking about how surgeons learn to do things, etc. And it was interesting how surgeons that were mechanics before they became surgeons were much more adept at the manual aspect and even visualizing things than ones who basically just came to surgery through their training. And so that’s the head… And we all know super bright people that have no common sense, right? We all know those people. We know people that are amazing with their hands. They can visualize and build things but they can’t remember like dates from, you know, whatever. And then there’s the heart aspect, which has a spiritual component, has an emotional component to it. And that’s like literally when you wrap your knowledge with your entire being.

And that’s what’s my superpower, to be honest with you. That’s what gave me insight. When I got a hunch with something with my daughter, like, this doesn’t feel right. Hey, I read a book by Dr. Doidge about this device called a PoNS and ended up going up to Canada to try it out with her. Like, it’s interesting how that intuition, that heart, and then your spiritual faith… Like for me, you know, I personally believe our bodies were made to self-heal and self-repair. And so someone telling me, “This is as good as it gets. Don’t expect anything else,” was counterintuitive to what I grew up believing in, you know?

And so all of a sudden, like, how do you live that out? It’s like, well, I’m going to look and search because you look at this young girl and patients look at you… You know, autoimmune issue, gut problems, traumatic brain injury, long COVID, you’re not going to get better. And like, my underlying faith is that no, it’s just we haven’t found yet the thing, the blocking, because our bodies were ultimately… I’ve never had anybody disagree with me with this statement. Our bodies were made to self-heal and self-repair. If we just find the roadblock, the thing that’s blocking your natural healing process and give your body what’s lacking, it will do what it was designed to do—self-heal and self-repair.

And part of what I do is looking at what’s blocking. And that could be food. It could be mold in the environment. It could be toxic relationships. It could be trauma. A lot of my patients’ healing stops at 50% or 60% because they have trauma in their life they haven’t worked through. They have relationship issues. And so it’s really interesting how that heart and faith stuff became almost like my superpower. It’s also the thing that got me getting up. It like the fire. You can be smart and work hard, but your octane is going to be your emotions, your passion, what you believe to be true in your heart.

And that’s what drove me to do what I’ve done with my daughter. And then to say, I’m willing to try. I’m willing to take a risk to try this with complete strangers, with patients, you know? And so that’s, I think, made me a more full and complete physician person. I’m a totally different person than I was. My wife will tell you this, you know? We’re probably going to be seeing you here in a month or so at the annual conference, but my wife will tell you I’m not the person now that I was before we met my daughter. She literally changed… She actually gave me a heart, to be honest with you. She taught me… The thing I tell people is my daughter taught me to love.

You know, everybody in my life… I’m getting a little off course here. But everybody in my life, my wife’s an attractive young lady. You meet someone, you expect things out of people. I have friends, family, you expect things out of people. My daughter is the only person in my life that I was willing to do anything for that I never expected anything back in return. And that changed literally who I am as a person. It gave me emotions. I’m getting a little emotional right now. It actually gave me this thing that has driven me, and I feel like that in many ways, that’s one of my superpowers is like that heart aspect. And if you ignore it, you’re ignoring part of who you are. And you look at great scientists, great artists, great people who have achieved great things. They usually have that aspect somewhere hidden. They might not be bold about it, but it’s usually somewhere hidden, like this idea of something else, something greater that I’m in the service of, that I’m searching for, that drives them.

Dr. Sandi: I certainly appreciate, Aaron and Rebekah, what you’re sharing and just could not agree more. And there’s a book, “The Heart Speaks,” and you said in HeartMath, we do a lot of processes involving feeling warmth flowing to your hearts. And as you feel that warmth, you send that back out with loved ones and with yourself as well, for whatever you saw in your body.

But it’s really critical that we, in my work—and I’ve been doing this in my life for 50 years—but when I was a teacher with kids with special needs, it was focusing on an integrative approach and this mind-body connection and the importance of everything that you’re thinking and feeling and how that connects on a physical level, of course, as well as an emotional and mental level as well.

So, you are so dedicated to this. And when I founded FMCA, it’s the same thing as this mission, purpose, feeling like there’s such a dedication to changing the system. And for those listening, what are some red flags—maybe three red flags—that you talked about, gut and trusting? How can you sense this is time to find a new doctor or get a second opinion?

Dr. Hartman: First thing is, you know, there’s always an air. If you go into a room and you say, “Hey, I’ve heard about this, I heard about that, I saw online, I did an AI search for whatever about whatever,” you know, doctor comes from the Latin root actually means to teach. And so if your doctor is being a doctor, they should be willing to teach, right? And actually learn… Like, the Revitive device I told you about, a patient told me about it. I didn’t find that on my own. I’ve actually learned so much from my patients, actually a lot. That’s the reason why this is called the practice of medicine.

So, if the person is not willing to at least hear… And what you say might be 100% wrong because, you know, whatever. But if they’re not willing to listen to you, like, “I found this thing about, you know, my weight or my headache or my gut issues, what do you think about them? What are your thoughts?” And if the response is a standoffish or “That’s silly,” or not even open to the concept, there’s been many things patients have brought to me that my first response was like, too weird, hooey. The second response was the same. It’s taken a couple of times. And over years I’ve actually started doing things that people brought to me, and it’s made me humbled to realize, “You know, there’s a lot of smart people out there. I’m not the only person who, like, works hard and figures things out.” You have to be open to that. So, if the person’s not willing to like, at least hear your thoughts and opinion, that may be time to move on.

The second thing is, you know, the clinical experience. Is that person actually integrating…? Is their practice changing based on their experience? As they learn, do they mature? Are they growing? Are they doing the exact same thing now as they were doing 10 years ago? I tell patients when they see me, “You know, if you see me six months from now, I’m allowed to totally change my mind because I might read a different book, I might read a bunch of articles, I might have a patient that changes everything about the way I look at, you know, dysautonomia, Pott’s, or whatever the issue is.”

The third thing is they have to be someone who’s willing to come alongside you in the journey. And that’s a personal thing. You know, it doesn’t matter how smart you are if you don’t know how to integrate the information. That’s the difference between like a brilliant academic and a good clinician. Good clinicians aren’t necessarily the smartest person in class, but the person who actually knows how to integrate that and figure things out.

So I think, you know, those three things. And ultimately, you have to trust them. You have to feel like they actually want what’s best for you. I’ll be in the morning reading things and reading an article about X, Y, Z, or whatever. I actually was just finishing this great book, a polymeric on cancer care. It’s a book about repurposed medications to actually help treat cancer patients. And I had three or four patients pop up in my head and a couple people opened up my little portal and said, “Hey, read this thing this morning, da da da da da. Next visit we need to look at your vitamin D levels,” you know, because I’ll drop this little nugget here. If you’re a breast cancer patient and your vitamin D level is between 80 and 100, it lowers your risk for breast cancer metastasis equivalent to Arimidex. So, it’s like, wait a second. Huh? Now, like literally getting your D level closer to 100 is that powerful as this hormone-blocking thing. And what’s the downside? Okay, we’ll check your PTH and ionized calcium and stuff to make sure we don’t give you hypercalcemia. Interesting enough, the toxic levels are closer to 200 and 250, not the magical 100 number on the labs. So, that made me way more comfortable, that there’s patients now that I’m changing that. And so are you working with someone who actually will do that with you, for you, alongside you? And that’s personalized health care.

Dr. Sandi: Yes. Wow. Well, I wish that everyone had a physician like you who has the dedication, the mission-driven approach to really find answers, to be humble in terms of what you don’t know, and to find the answers and to have… You are so caring, and it just really comes across. And thank you for trusting our health coaches as well. So, Dr. Hartman, where can people find you?

Dr. Hartman: Well, if you want to know about me, my website, aaronhartmanmd.com is just about me and what I do. And from there, it takes you to my practice and a bunch of things. And then actually the book that’s coming out on November 5th, which I’m not sure when this comes out, but it’s actually called “UnCurable.” And the website for that is “UnCurable” spelled with a U, uncurablebook.com. It’s basically my story of interacting with the healthcare system, how they responded, and basically walking through my personal development, how my daughter’s…her life has changed and how… But the goal is to empower people to do the same with them. One of the things I tell people is that if this little girl who had permanent brain damage can learn to walk, talk, and defeat all the odds, just imagine what you can do. Like, you did not have a stroke before you were born. Your birth mother most likely didn’t do crystal meth throughout the entire pregnancy. Like, your ability to heal and self-repair is probably at least as good as hers, right? And the hope of the book is that it’ll inspire people to kind of be proactive with their health and surround themselves with a team, which many times includes a coach, someone to help guide you through the maze of chaos.

Dr. Sandi: Yes. Well, this has been just a delight to be with you and thank you. And we will absolutely await your book. And I can’t wait to read it and recommend it.

Dr. Hartman: Thank you so much.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you.