FORMATTED TRANSCRIPT: WHEN MEDICINE FAILS - DR. AARON HARTMAN

Opening Quote

"Our FDA, the Federal Drug Administration, just reversed the blackbox warning on hormone replacement therapy for women. Yeah. Oh, they've actually done it. Oh, brilliant. It was two weeks ago. Yes. Just did it. And so for 23, going on 24 years, we've undertreated anywhere from 40 to 60 million women in our country."

Introduction

Well, hi everyone. Welcome to Pushing The Limits. Today I have my friend Dr. Aaron Hartman with me. Welcome to the show, Aaron. It's fantastic to have you. I was on your show recently and now you're a return guest on my show. So it's fantastic to have you. Thanks for coming.

Dr. Aaron: I'm really excited to be here and talk with you. We had a great conversation last time. I'm really excited to find out what we talk about today.

Dr. Aaron's Background and His Daughter's Story

Lisa: Yeah. And we're going to dive into your backstory. So for a start, I think set the picture - give us a little bit of your background and, you know, if you don't mind sharing your daughter's story a little bit and how you ended up in the functional space and doing what you're doing now.

Dr. Aaron: Very traditionally trained medical doctor. Went to undergraduate, biology degree, medical school, residency, was in the military for eight years - every year doing something new. Got deployed overseas, did all this typical academic stuff you'd expect a physician to do as they go through their career.

In 2007, I met Anna, who's my daughter. My wife Becky, who's an occupational therapist, brought her home to be my daughter. Her foster home was closing down, and she asked me if I'd be willing to bring her in and I said yes.

Anna's Story

Backstory on Anna: her birth mother did crystal meth, did drugs the entire pregnancy. She had a stroke before she was born. She was born functionally blind. There's a part of your brain called the corpus callosum that attaches the left and right brain - hers on an MRI didn't develop. So her prognosis was poor. "She'll never walk, she'll never talk, she'll never crawl. She'll be a vegetable her entire life." That was what the system said for her.

And my wife said, "There's something there. She's going to be okay." And I just was like, "Okay, well let's bring her home and see what happens." Very beautiful - let's have faith, let's do all the right stuff. And in the process of that, her GI doctor - and this is where I had two inflection points, one is this and another one was six months later interacting with the healthcare system.

The First Inflection Point

Her GI doctor was like, "Hey, you need to put some meat on her bones. She's too small." It's called failure to thrive when you're less than the fifth percentile and you've tried everything you can do. "Next thing is we're going to do a surgical procedure, cut a hole in her stomach, put in a plastic feeding tube so you pour sugar water called formula into her belly to put some meat on her bones."

And back then I didn't know how bad formula was. And I just knew that for her to develop speech, you have to chew and swallow. In order to learn how to walk, you have to do the little army crawl thing. And that was not on the radar for the GI doctor.

So my wife and I said, "No, she's going to walk, she's going to talk. She's going to do all these things that you all say she's not." And we were reported to child protective services for child neglect.

Lisa: No. Yeah.

Dr. Aaron: And so it's one of those things where if they do this to a medical doctor, major in the Air Force, and my wife actually worked in the system, they will do this to anybody. And the reality is in the United States in the special needs world, they actually do this routinely to difficult complicated cases because the assumption is the parents are crazy or the parents are abusing that child. It's never that this kid has something complicated.

So we navigated that. And that was my first interaction with the healthcare system - they don't like it when you say no.

Lisa: No. Okay. They don't. Yeah. And we talked - you had something similar with your mom.

The Second Inflection Point

Dr. Aaron: But the second inflection point was six months later when my wife found a growth chart with kids with cerebral palsy, which was my Anna's official diagnosis. And she was in the middle - she was normal for her diagnosis, for her age.

And that was the second inflection point: the specialist doesn't know. What else does the specialist not know? And so all of a sudden, I stopped - I started to distrust everything. They recommend eye surgery, heel cord surgery, spine surgery, back pump surgery. We've had so many things recommended for her over her life. She's getting ready to turn 20 this April.

Lisa: Wow.

Dr. Aaron: A typical kid with her diagnosis has had 13 surgeries by the time they're 20. She's at zero.

Lisa: Oh my.

The Results

Dr. Aaron: And she has beaten every expectation, every odd. Mainly because we did not do anything the specialists told us to do. And it forced me as her father, as a physician, as a clinical scientist, as a researcher, to figure out: what can I do for my daughter?

And that was my journey, my personal journey of figuring stuff out with her and expanding it to my other kids because we adopted all our kids. My second daughter has cerebral palsy as well - well, you wouldn't know it looking at her. You would have no idea. She's 100% typical now. And my son had horrible eczema, asthma - within a year, that was all gone.

Then my wife has had her own health journeys. And then I started doing that with patients. And my daughter's story has changed my entire practice of medicine and how I work with patients now.

Lisa: Yeah. Oh, I'm just - that's just a mind-blowing story. And it doesn't surprise me, although that they would come after you when you're fostering a disabled child with all these problems, to do that just because you won't put them under the knife for a surgery.

And I know what's in those formulas. Unfortunately, they did that to my mom when she had a brain injury - put these feeding tubes down with this terrible Ensure crap that they pump into them. Of course, when you have a brain injury, that's the worst thing you can possibly do for them. But they don't know what they don't know, right?

And so you end up - and I didn't have the background that you have, obviously, but I'm a researcher. I study constantly and I'm very much that we can empower ourselves to go and work things out and do the best that we can and beat the odds. And you've beaten the odds with your daughter and with your children, and I've beaten the odds with my mom and consequently both of us with many of our clients as well. We don't always win every case, but you have a very different insight into the whole system.

Where Is Medicine Going Wrong?

Now, where is the medical system going wrong in your point of view? You know, having been traditionally trained, you've had both sides of the fence, you've seen both sides of the fence. Where are the blind spots? What's going on?

Dr. Aaron: It's multiple blind spots. There's the actual data blind spots. So in the United States - you in New Zealand, you may or may not have heard, probably have not heard - that our FDA, the Federal Drug Administration, just reversed the blackbox warning on hormone replacement therapy for women.

Lisa: Oh, they've actually done it? Oh, brilliant!

Dr. Aaron: Two weeks ago. It was two weeks ago. Yes. Just did it two weeks ago. And so for 23, going on 24 years, we've undertreated anywhere from 40 to 60 million women in our country. There's an estimated maybe up to 140,000 premature deaths in women.

Well, why is that, you say? Because hormone replacement therapy lowers risk for heart disease 50%. It lowers your risk for dementia 35%. And it was blackboxed by the FDA from 2002 all the way till today. And in my world, we've been using it forever.

Examples of Medical Blind Spots

But so you have these big blind spots like that. Peanut allergies is another one. The American Pediatric Association back 15 years ago: "Don't eat peanuts. Remove peanuts from kids." The result was a four-fold increase in incidence of peanut allergies in our country. Lo and behold, getting peanuts earlier minimizes the allergy risk to nuts. And so they've 100% reversed that.

So there's so many examples of blind spots - something people think to be right that's just not right, and they hammer it. "We're the experts." And I could go on about frontal lobotomies, I could go on about cholesterol - the cholesterol myth that eating fat's bad for you. There's so many things we've gotten wrong over the decades.

Smoking - people forget that doctors in the '50s said, "I smoke Lucky Strikes because they're good for you." Camel's got a poster saying "nine out of 10 doctors recommend Camel." I mean, you can't make this craziness up.

The Bigger Problem: The Hierarchical System

So you've got these things, but the bigger picture, I think, that sets us up for that is our hierarchical educational system that is based on a technocracy based on technical experts. "You're an expert, so you know the truth." "I am the science, I am the magic, I am the medicine," whatever. And it's like you have to have humility to know what you don't know.

And our very academic - I love my system, it's taught me so much, it's how I cut my teeth in taking care of patients in the ICU and the emergency room - but the way it trains people is they get out and they're like, "Okay, you're at the peak. You're board certified now. You've got your certificate. You've arrived." And then people kind of - "Oh, I'm there. I'm an expert now." And they're losing curiosity.

And it's very normal for a physician in our country to do the same thing, same kind of practice, 10, 20, 30 years later. I was at a medical conference last week and one of the speakers was like, "I can tell the kind of medicine a doctor practices by what year they graduated."

Lisa: Wow.

Dr. Aaron: I'm kind of like, that's kind of true. If you graduated in 2000 versus 2010 versus - I graduated in 2000 - you're going to practice differently. And unfortunately, that hierarchical system impacts new information. Depending on what you read, anywhere from it takes anywhere from 30 to 40 years for new science, new evidence, to become standard of care. And that's just too long.

The Vitamin D Example

And so they're not taking information as it comes and saying, "How safe is this? What's the danger?" and implementing that. Vitamin D and COVID is a great example. I started reading back in 2002-2003 when I was in my residency about how powerful vitamin D was, started testing for it and getting people's levels up to 60 back in 2005-2006.

COVID came around in 2020. None of my patients actually died from COVID because I've been working for almost 15 years getting their D levels up. Something as basic as that. And that was missed.

It's interesting - Ireland, the national government in Ireland actually mailed vitamin D to the people in the healthcare system. They have a socialized healthcare system there with cystic fibrosis and COPD and emphysema. Wow. And so we have one government that's like, "Hey, we realize this is the thing. We're going to mail this to you." And then our government is like, "It doesn't do anything."

So there's a lot of these things that set our system up for blind spots that are absolutely positively everywhere.

Bioidentical Hormone Replacement

Lisa: Yeah. I mean, I just have to laugh because every single thing you said - from the bioidentical hormone replacement, which I'm on and which I'm a huge fan of (done correctly and monitored, etc., knowing your genetics and your gut health and all of that sort of caveats) - but that Women's Health Initiative was one of the biggest disservices to women ever. And it was disproven years ago. And yet two weeks ago, you say, they removed the blackbox warning.

And like, hormones keep you young. If you do it right and you're monitored and you're looked after correctly, you can slow the aging process down basically.

Dr. Aaron: You know, it's interesting because with the published literature, if you're on hormone replacement therapy and you have breast cancer, it's less invasive.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr. Aaron: So wait a second - this is protective?

Lisa: I know.

Dr. Aaron: But they - you know, synthetic hormones were what was used in that study in the Women's Health Initiative. The synthetic progestins, which are the biggest culprit, the horse urine - and that is not progesterone. And I've done many, many podcasts on bioidentical hormones, so we won't go there. But again, vitamin D - huge.

And there's a massive - because I do a lot of genetics in my practice - there are a lot of people like my case, we have very common genetic mutations in the vitamin D line. So there's a number of genes that are to do with vitamin D receptors and activators and transport genes and so on. And a lot of our people have this problem.

Now, you look at COVID and the statistics - who died from COVID more? Our population. Now that could also have other correlations. Obesity is also rampant and we have other genetic things. But just alone, that vitamin D would have been good. Let alone the zinc and the vitamin C and other stories that were not allowed to be told during that horrific time in history where so many lies were told and still are today. And we're still fighting through that.

And these are the blind spots that cost people lives. This is not just an academic discussion between us. This is daily costing lives. And you're at the coalface. You're working daily with people.

Common Cases Dr. Aaron Treats

What are some of the common things that you're working with that you see that a lot of other doctors are failing with or not? When your standard medical doctors - what are the ones they're struggling with that you're having some breakthroughs with?

Dr. Aaron: I mean, I just had a young - I live on the east coast of the United States. A young lady flew out to see me from California today, this morning, actually. From multiple centers, multiple specialists, went to this place that's for complicated patients. No one can figure her out. What's going on with her?

I'm talking to her. She's tested positive for Lyme, Bartonella, and Babesia - positive, positive. Her mercury levels are 11. She has mercury toxicity. She has POTS and dysautonomia. And a lot of the physicians were like, "That's all in your head. You're just anxious." She saw a neurologist who told her, "You're just stressed. It's just stress."

It's like, so I was evaluating her and had her lay and sit and go against the wall. Your pulse went from 64 beats a minute to 110. And all you did was stand up and lean against the wall. Your sympathetic nervous system, your parasympathetic nervous system are not talking, and your heart rate skyrocketed. And oh, by the way, a lot - not all, but many - of the weird neurological symptoms that you are having, they got worse with this.

POTS Is Super Common

POTS is super common. Depends on what you read - maybe 3%, maybe 5% of the American population has it. Which 3 to 5% of 350 million people is a lot of people.

Lisa: Oh yeah.

Hypermobility and Elite Athletes

Dr. Aaron: Hypermobility - I see people who are double-jointed, they can bend their fingers back. A lot of elite athletes - actually being hypermobile makes you run faster, you jump higher, your cerebellum is bigger so you have quicker reaction times. So you're actually wired to be more competitive. There's more neurodivergence, which - neurodivergence, the ability to see a little quicker, see things a little - can make you better. 400% increased incidence of neurodivergence if you're hypermobile.

But you also have a higher protein need, you have a higher vitamin C need, a higher trace mineral and rare mineral need. And a lot of my people I see with hypermobility are empaths, which means they have this ability to sense emotion. It's actually a survival thing - you can actually sense danger better. You can read people better. If you're in a questionable situation, your intuition will get there quicker.

But if you've had physical, sexual, emotional abuse, trauma, that heightened sense of awareness burns, and now your sympathetic nervous system is jacked up.

The Complex Picture

And so between an empath, hypermobility, POTS, Lyme, heavy metals - and the thing is, people come to me with all of these and they went to Mayo for their POTS, they went to Duke for their chronic pain, they went to Mayo as well for their autoimmune because they got the weird autoimmune issues, they went to whatever the specialty center is for their neuropathy and nerve issues.

Lisa: And they're all looking at it differently.

Dr. Aaron: And the question is: what's the drug that treats these? And the answer is there's not really one drug that treats all of these. You have to find out what the person's issue is. And with a lot of people, sometimes it's a concussion that starts the whole ball rolling. Sometimes it's overtraining. Sometimes it's you haven't slept well.

I had one young lady in my medical school class who dropped out. It was probably related to the stress and poor sleep. And that stress can make your nervous system go bonkers. You get a triggering event and now your whole sympathetic-parasympathetic nervous system's messed up.

The Nervous System Controls Everything

And people don't realize: your nervous system controls your hormones. It controls your immune system. It helps regulate all of your internal organs. And if that is dysfunctional and dysregulated, nothing else works.

And so these are the things I see literally on a daily basis. And it's just - I'm still surprised by how - why am I, Aaron Hartman, MD, Midlothian, Virginia, small-time out of Richmond with my little clinic - why am I figuring this stuff out and all these big places aren't? That's just what boggles my mind.

Lisa: But it doesn't boggle my mind because you've very much connected all the dots together where they all learn in silos. And that's the way that the medical system is set up - for silos. You go to Duke for this and you go to the Mayo Clinic for that and you go to this specialist for this and that. We are one system, and nobody is having that overview. That's what I'm finding in my clinic too - you need that. And there's always more to learn.

I always feel like you've just told me something new about the hypermobility syndrome having all of those related issues. I'm going, "Hmm, might have myself there an issue. I might need to see..."

Dr. Aaron: Lisa, with your running - how many runners, how many athletes, how many volleyball players? But running, it's really funny - if you can get an extra inch or half an inch with every stride and you do that 25,000 times, all of a sudden you're miles ahead of other people.

Well, are you getting adequate vitamin C? The average person isn't. Most people's vitamin D levels are almost always low. Their zinc, magnesium are almost always low. They have low - if you do a urine organic acid test on them, they all have low amino acids. So these people need more protein. They need digestive support.

The Maserati Analogy

Just the way I think about it is: if you're hypermobile, you're like a Maserati-looking car - really fast, fast response. But you got to take care of it. You got to baby it. And if you put the wrong stuff in, it breaks down. They're very expensive to fix. Fixable, but expensive.

And so those individuals, you have to do self-care. You have to keep your mind-body stuff, adequate sleep, nutrition. When you feel stressed, you need to let your nervous system re-regulate, not push, push, push, go, go.

Exercise-Induced Dysautonomia

One thing I learned when I was doing my studies is that pretty much every endurance athlete - you can probably speak to this - develops a degree of dysautonomia when you're running 120, 150 miles. And there's special suits, special stuff you wear and electrolytes just to treat the exercise-induced dysautonomia you get. And I'm like, there's a whole athletic high-performance group that knows this. And the medical side is like, "Huh?"

Lisa: Oh, I mean, no way. I'm dealing with two young athletes - I'm thinking they must try and see you - elite triathletes, young guys with - who've had COVID vaccines, POTS, dysautonomia, all of the above that you're talking about. Issues in the heart, etc. And we're doing the hyperbarics and the red lights and the nutrient status and all. But it's a slow burn to get them back.

And this is a lot of - it takes time for biology to reconstruct itself, putting it simply. And having lived through this myself and lived through POTS, lived through chronic fatigue and exhaustion, and having pushed my body to the absolute limit, pushing my mind and my performance still to this day to the absolute limits constantly - now being a caregiver and running companies, and I'm sure you can relate to that - it's a really - we're not set up for that, are we? We're not really - we should be having downtime, we should be doing...

But how do we do that in this world where these young athletes have got to perform? They go to their coaches who don't understand. They're like, "You're just being lazy. You're just not training hard enough."

How Elite Athletes Really Train

Dr. Aaron: I mean, when I talk with some of the top integrative practitioners who are working with professional athletes here in the United States, what I hear is: the athletes are working out super hard, two maybe three hours a day, and the rest of the day is rehab. It's myofascial work, it's stretching, it's yoga, it's tai chi, it's hyperbaric, it's sauna.

But their actual workout is two, maybe three hours. When a lot of the people I see in my clinic are professionals, they got a full-time job and now "I'm going to run a marathon." And it's like, you're working eight, nine, 10 hours a day and then you're doing your training in the evening and on the weekends. And it's like, you're not doing adequate recovery. You're not doing adequate rest.

When I started lifting heavy weights in college, I realized I could put on more muscle mass faster if I spaced my body part day by four to five days when I was working out. That knowledge - you needed adequate rest.

The Overtraining Problem

And so really for a lot of these individuals: are they getting adequate rest? Are they in the mentality "if I push harder, I'll build quicker"? Because you get to the point in time where actually pushing harder, you go backwards. Cortisol goes up, your growth hormone goes down.

I mean, I was talking with one individual - he looks, you know, super big professional bodybuilder kind of guy in his early 40s, low testosterone. And the dude looks huge. And you're like, "I'm tired." He's just overtraining.

And it's funny how many - and people then, "Okay, well, let me get some testosterone now." It's like all you're going to do is lower your sperm count. So you got to - do you have kids? If you don't have kids - by your testicular size and then the testosterone turns into estrogen, right? If you don't do it properly.

So it's like really, if it's not done properly, you got to work on the HPA axis. What's your brain doing? What's your cortisol? What's your thyroid? These people tend to have elevated fasting glucose, they tend to have elevated insulin. If that's up, going to testosterone will make that worse.

Lisa: Wow.

Why Fit People Get Insulin Resistance

Dr. Aaron: And why would such people who are fit and eating correctly and doing things have this insulin resistance, pre-diabetes, metabolic syndrome?

Well, a lot of reasons. One, it depends on what you're eating. The mantra, at least in the United States for years, has been: high carbs, lots of calories, carbs, carbs, carbs. And they're calorically rich and nutrient deficient.

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For sure.

Dr. Aaron: It takes a lot of antioxidants. It takes a lot of minerals, which are co-factors for enzymes. It takes a lot of these things to actually process calories the right way. And you can induce - we have literature, we have tons - there's actually a book I've got here. It's actually right there: "Thiamine Deficiency Disease, Dysautonomia, and High Calorie Malnutrition."

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr. Aaron: Dr. Chandler and Dr. Lonsdale. Yes. And it's a great book about how, you know, if your diet is B vitamin deficient, you can actually induce dysautonomia and then you stress yourself and you crash.

The Nutrient Deficiency Problem

So many of these people are just eating these diets that are low in nutrients. Then they do physically demanding things that require more nutrients. They set themselves up like that. They don't get adequate sleep. And they're overtraining. And they're not - if I'm training this hard, I need a lot more vitamin C. I need more whey protein. I need more collagen. I need more rare earth minerals - strontium, lithium, barium, silica - things that you really only get from bone broth or eating organ meats, which have fallen out of favor since the 1950s.

So you add it all together and it's like, particularly for high-performance people, it's a recipe for disaster for overtraining illness. And I see on the opposite end, people get sick and they have a typical American diet and they get concussion, head injury, gut issues, autoimmune problem, long COVID, chronic Lyme, Epstein-Barr, whatever. And it's similar stressors to the body and they crash out.

The endpoint symptoms sound the same, but the roads that get there - they're different roads to get there.

Glycine and Methionine

Lisa: There's different roads to get there. Actually, I just been diving into the research on glycine and methionine. You know how we're sort of told "don't eat too much red meat and methionine is problematic"? And then glycine - we used to have a lot of bone broth, we used to eat the animal from snout to tail type of thing. Now we just eat the organ meats.

And there's a theory that if we ate more glycine, because glycine is used up in the methylene metabolism - and so if you're eating a lot of just muscle meat and not having the bone broth, the collagen, all of that sort of good stuff, then you're depleting your glycine. And by taking extra glycine or having bone broths, etc., you can actually improve a lot of those problems.

So there was some interesting research around glycine. But amino acids in general - I'm on Dr. David Minkoff's - I had him on my podcast - and ever since I've been on his product, which is Perfect Aminos, and it's amino acids. And of course, I'm an endurance athlete with an incredibly crazy past, but also now doing high-intensity work. I don't train as long, thank goodness. I've worked that out.

But without the Perfect Aminos, as soon as I go off having the Perfect Aminos - and I'm sure you can do it with an absolutely ideal diet, but my body just needs more amino acids. It needs more protein to repair. And if I don't, immediately the herpes virus comes out, you get the cold sores. And I haven't had a cold sore since I've been on those, except for the couple of times when I've gone off them because I run out. Immediately comes back. You know, I'm not taking enough protein, and probably still.

Bone Broth: Jewish Penicillin

Dr. Aaron: I mean, my wife tells me that bone broth is lovingly referred to as "Jewish penicillin" where it's like you get sick and you drink lots of this stuff. Every time I get sick, I don't eat. I lay in bed and I just drink gobs of bone broth.

And it's not just amino acids. I actually learned this by reading Weston A. Price's work, Sir Albert Howard has a book "The Soil and Health," reading a lot of these ancient farmers, learning in the agriculture business that cows, for example - and we're mammals too - need about 96 to 98 minerals, trace minerals and rare earth minerals, in order for our metabolism to work the right way.

How We Get Our Minerals

And the way cows get that is they used to eat tons and tons of grass, right? Well, how do you and I get that? We eat the stuff from the animals that concentrate it for us, because you can't eat enough cabbage to get your calcium or your magnesium or your zinc.

And so what happens is these animals concentrate those minerals for us. And there's different amounts - there's more iron in the liver, there's more glycine, there's more lithium, strontium, barium, silica in the bone connective tissue. They have more type 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 collagen, fibrils, etc., etc.

The point is that bone broth gets you these 96 to 98 rare minerals, trace minerals that you wouldn't get otherwise that are required for metabolic function. So it's not just the ratios of amino acids, it's also these minerals, trace minerals and rare earth minerals.

Sources of Minerals

And the only way to get those is to either eat things that concentrate them for you like seafood, shellfish - which for toxicity reasons I've gone away from the last couple years, it's hard to find clean stuff anymore.

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr. Aaron: And then bone broth - it's actually significantly easier to find clean ruminant meat because all you need is grass, versus we're on the east coast with the biggest bay in the world, the Chesapeake Bay, and all my patients who eat fish and oysters, they all have elevated arsenic and mercury levels. It's kind of sad to be honest with you.

Lisa: Wow. Wow. Yeah.

I mean, you're damn right there. The quality of our food is often a problem, and anything that's coming from the sea and mercury and all of that sort of stuff as well is problematic.

Finding the Balance with Training

So coming back to overtraining, let's talk about overtraining because a lot of people are doing this - myself included, probably still - where do we find that balance? Because you don't want to be lazy, you don't want to be sitting on your backside doing nothing, right? And you also want to get your fitness. And when you're working with elite athletes and stuff, they've got to perform.

Are they just burning themselves out? And you've got a very short lifespan as an athlete if you're going to be performing at that sort of high level. And you just have to understand that and you're going to pay the price. I know I did. And I did it for a lot longer than most people and got away with it for a fair amount of time. But I wasn't able to have children, wasn't able to - hormone imbalances, massive inflammation, massive teeth problems because all the minerals were just taken out of my bones. All of that type of stuff that people don't see from the glossy front of a book cover.

Dr. Aaron: Yeah. Yeah.

Lisa: We also...

Dr. Aaron: It's interesting - you're also more prone to dental issues if you're hypermobile as well.

Lisa: Oh, well, there goes another reason. Yeah.

Test, Don't Guess

Dr. Aaron: So nutrient-wise - but in today's world, I'm not sure what it's like in New Zealand, but in today's world, you can guess or you can test. And so I will do organic acid testing on people, amino acid testing. I will do trace mineral testing on people. I mean, you can't check for everything, but you can check a lot of stuff. You can check almost all the macros, a few of the micros. But you can get that testing and then tailor the supplementation to the person.

That's what I like to do. Check inflammatory markers, check hsCRP, sed rate, fibrinogen levels. If you're overtraining, I check for - there's a thing called chronic inflammatory response syndrome, which is also referred to as mold illness. And it's this innate immune system dysregulation problem where your more ancient immune system decides to just go bonkers. And that can be induced by things like mold and Lyme and things.

DAMPs: Damage-Associated Molecular Patterns

But also when you overtrain, you release these particles of tissue called DAMPs - damage-associated molecular patterns - and those things will tickle your immune system. So every time you train, work out really hard, you're tickling your immune system. So you need to help your body scavenge that.

It could be a massage, it could be sauna, it could be Epsom salt baths. Nutritionally, you're using things like vitamin C, trace magnesium, drinking plenty of fluids, rare earth minerals. You're alkalinizing your urine - getting bicarbonate, citrate forms to help. Your body goes acidic when you overtrain.

Lisa: Yep.

Dr. Aaron: And so after you train, can you get alkaline? Do a urine test. Strange enough, with dental issues, people tend to have a more acidic mouth. If your mouth is acidic, you'll literally dissolve your enamel. So you want your mouth to be alkaline.

So all of a sudden, you can test these things and individualize it to the person. But in general, everything I said right now probably sounds overwhelming to the average person, but you can actually get in and get yourself a personalized evaluation to find out what's going on with you. That's what I recommend. But having good nutrition is super critical for all these things.

Essential Testing

Lisa: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, organic acid testing, microbiome testing, DUTCH testing if you have hormones - these are some baseline testing. Are there anything specifically that you love in the testing realm that you think are critical? You've got to, you know, obviously checking amino acids for the protein part.

Dr. Aaron: Something everybody needs done is a fatty acid analysis, looking at your omega-3s, your omega-6s. Because we're - so many of us are deficient in C15. We're deficient in saturated fats. We're deficient in ALA, which is the essential omega-3 to protect cell membranes.

You know, you need omega-6s. You need the appropriate amount of omega-6s. Seed oils have gotten a really bad rap recently because seed oils are horrible for you. But essential omega-3s are an essential fatty acid, which means they're essential.

The Problem with Extremes

And we love to do extremes. So we removed saturated fats, removed healthy fats from our diets for 40 years and put in partially plastic lipids, which is what a lot of these fats are. And we love extremes. So now we're going the other thing: "Oh my gosh, now we got to just eat saturated..."

Lisa: Yeah.

Dr. Aaron: And so it's one of those things where fat is a natural detergent for your cells. Phospholipids, which are primarily found in organ meat, egg yolks, and caviar, actually are the detergent for your cell walls and membranes.

The Power of Eggs

There's some interesting literature: if you consume two to three eggs with the yolks a day, it has a significant effect on lowering your risk for dementia. That's how important these phospholipids are. So the choline, lecithin - lecithin turns into phosphatidylcholine, phosphatidylethanolamine, phosphatidylserine. And these phospholipids help with cell function, mitochondria function, brain function.

And by removing eggs and removing organ meats from our diets, we basically removed nature's source for these things.

Lisa: Yeah, it's a perfect food of everything, as long as you're not allergic. Because there are people allergic. But have you looked at the work of Dr. Dayan Goodenowe? I think I mentioned him maybe.

Dr. Aaron: Yeah, Dr. Goodenowe. Yes, I actually trained under him. I did his course, his plasmogen training.

Lisa: Yeah. Oh my god, that was heavy. It was heavy biochemistry.

Dr. Aaron: Very, very. But the thing about it is - it's amazing how important - you need omega-3s and -6s and appropriate amounts of fats to make these things. And if you're not making these things, you can supplement them. But the reality is, to get in every cell in your body enough of that in every cell in your body, that's a lot of supplements. That's gobs and gobs. You need the healthy precursors.

Real Food

And you tend to get your omega-3 and -6, the initial ones, through healthy nuts and seeds. But the key is healthy, organic, non-expeller pressed, non-heated, non-cooked, non-rancified - just real food. Just real food.

Lisa: And everything processed, of course, is done with canola oils and really crappy oils. And so anything that comes in a packet with E-numbers and preservatives and stabilizers and emulsifiers and all of that sort of crap is not going to cut it.

And yeah, the omega-6 - it's another great test to do, your fatty acid profile, and just see: have you got enough omega-3s to -6s?

Fish Oils and Plasmalogen

I had Dr. Michael Lewis on - he's a fish oil specialist. He's written the book "When Brains Collide." That was a really interesting deep dive. He'd had incredible success with people that were in ICU dying with brain injuries, saved them with really high doses of fish oils and things. Amazing science behind that.

Of course, Dr. Dayan Goodenowe, I'm a huge, huge fan of his work and how important the plasmalogens are. Unfortunately, they're bloody expensive. So a lot of people can't afford the doses that I would like to see them have. But then we can do things like eggs and all of that sort of good stuff.

Testing and Supplementing

Dr. Aaron: If we can't afford plasmalogen, you test for those things, fix them, and let your body - if you get them, I have a 23-year-old kid with PANS (which is a neurological issue) I'm working with right now. And did the plasmogen testing on him, put the precursors in, rechecked his levels, came back good, and just continue the support.

Once you get your levels up, you can put that support in there. But sometimes when the system - when the horse is beaten, the horse is ready to die - sometimes you got to put in a fresh horse, right? You got to get those levels up. But once you do that, maintaining it is way easier to do.

And that's where I think knowing when to test and when to supplement and when to use food - food is medicine.

Food as Medicine

We started - we were making brain mayo. I started making mayonnaise out of a balanced omega-3, omega-6, 4:1 ratio based on Yehuda Shenfeld's work for healing brains. Granola - grain-free granola based on certain ratios of almonds, pecans, flax, chia seeds, ground up, turning into granola - all of a sudden become a brain food for my kids.

And so just ways to use food like a drug. And that's what we did with our kids for years and years and years. And incredible results.

Closing

Lisa: Dr. Aaron, I know we've sort of run out of time today. I feel like we probably need a part two at some point because you're absolutely really brilliant. I do think I have a few people that might need your level of next-level brilliance added to their stack, and maybe myself as well.

But I just really want to thank you for sharing your very personal stories with your family and just praise you for taking on such difficult cases and not giving up when everybody else has given up. Because so many people are given up on, and so many people have no way out. And not everybody has the wherewithal and the education and the training that you've luckily had in order to sort this out.

But not staying stuck in that one paradigm - actually going, "Okay, I've learned that. I know all of that. What else is out there because this isn't working?" And I applaud that approach. I think that's absolutely - I wish we had more doctors doing that.

So Dr. Aaron, thank you so much for your time today. And we'll definitely have you back on. I think we didn't scratch the surface. I know we could have kept going for another half hour or so, but really appreciate the time.

Dr. Aaron: And that's one of the reasons why I wrote my book "Incurable." It's my daughter's story. It was to tell: if she can do this, you can do it too. And so if people are kind of not quite sure, one of the reasons I wrote "Incurable: From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds" is to give people a roadmap - this is what can be done. And there's always something you've never heard of before. I guarantee you there's something in the book, no matter where you're at in your training, you probably haven't heard of.

And so just - that's hope. And then just getting a team around you and just not ever giving up. Because once you give up, that's - one of the magic things with my daughter: we never gave up on her, ever.

Never Give Up

And so I just encourage your audience - I loved your story when we did the interview - you just didn't give up. And I was just amazed by - wow, you're not medical and you literally told them to stuff it and figured it out for your mom. And that's what people really need. And they can overcome pretty drastic things with that, by not giving up.

Lisa: And that's right. The title of your book is just brilliant. And mine was "Relentless" because that's what you need to be. You need to never give up. Nothing's incurable. And you just got to keep fighting for your loved ones and yourself if you're fighting through something.

You need a team. It often is a team of people because everybody has an area of expertise. And what you will also find is that they don't always agree. Not everybody on the team will agree, but you have to deal with that. You have to sit sometimes with that disagreement between doctors or between experts and then try to work out for yourself what you think is the best and then move forward. Because everybody will not agree with everyone else, unfortunately.

Dealing with Disagreement

But it's also a powerful thing because it gives you different perspectives. But not to just throw up your hands at that point and go, "Uh..." I see it a lot with the cancer patients that I've worked with. They get all the information from me and from other doctors that I've worked with, but then they go to their oncologist and their oncologist goes, "That's a load of rubbish." And then the person has to decide what they do with that.

And a lot of the times they'll go with the oncologist because he is the oncologist or she is the oncologist. And that doesn't always work out well. So you have to sort of sit with that dissonance and just be able to keep going through and not give up that journey either.

Dr. Aaron: Absolutely. Yeah.

Where to Find Dr. Aaron

Lisa: Well, Dr. Aaron, thank you. You'll be definitely invited back on soon. And I'll put the links down below. So where can people find you and how do they get your book? Just give us where to get hold of you, so to speak.

Dr. Aaron: If you just want to learn more about me, it's aaronhartman.com - that goes to my website that has takes you to the podcast, my social media, my practice website, my YouTube, all that kind of stuff. So that's the hub for all things me.

And then incurablebook.com is where you can learn more about the book "Incurable." So those are the two places I direct people: aaronhartman.com and incurablebook.com.

Lisa: Wonderful. Wonderful. We'll share those links down below. And I hope we stay connected and we'll have you back on soon.

Dr. Aaron: Great. Thanks a lot.