When Protocols Fail: What's Healthcare Missing? With Dr. Aaron Hartman

When the healthcare system offers only protocols, not answers, where do you turn? Dr. Aaron Hartman shares how his daughter’s story reshaped his entire approach to medicine and what it really takes to access personalized, precision care.

Most people enter the healthcare system hoping for answers, but end up with quick protocols, rushed appointments, and advice that doesn’t reflect their individual needs. In this week’s deeply human and eye-opening conversation, Dr. Aaron Hartman shares how his daughter’s medical journey forced him to rethink everything he learned in conventional medicine.

We talk about what happens when practitioners follow guidelines instead of patients, the hidden self-healing capacity inside the body, and why gut health, stress, and sleep are the three leverage points that move everything else. Dr. Hartman also reveals how to protect yourself from medical harm and what it actually looks like to receive care that considers your entire story, not just your diagnosis.

If you’ve ever felt dismissed, overlooked, or “unfixable,” this conversation will help you understand that the problem isn’t you. It’s the system.

WHAT YOU’LL LEARN IN THIS EPISODE

• Why medical protocols often overlook what patients truly need
• Three leverage points that help your body self-repair
• How to protect yourself from medical harm and get better care
  
  

CONNECT WITH DR. AARON HARTMAN

 Book: UncurableBook.com

 Special Message from Dr. Tamar Lawful: Discover the InHer Glow® Concierge Wellness Experience , a precision health program designed exclusively for high-achieving women ready to lose weight, boost energy, and reduce medications without guesswork. Spots are limited! Apply today at thelyfebalance.com/concierge

Chapters

• 0:00 Rethinking Pill-First Healthcare
• 3:39 Show Opening And Mission
• 4:32 Dr. Hartman’s Wake-Up Moment
• 7:28 Protocols Versus People
• 10:41 Uncurable And Harmful Advice
• 11:45 The Footplate That Beat Surgery
• 14:01 Choosing Low-Risk, High-Upside Paths
• 16:06 The Body’s Hidden Healing Power
• 18:01 Three Leverage Points: Gut, Stress, Sleep
• 20:23 Trusting Your Gut And True Precision
• 22:03 Avoiding Medical Harm And Getting Better Care
• 23:21 Clinic Work And Education Platforms
• 25:16 Where To Find The Book And Resources
• 26:53 Closing Reflections And Listener Resources

Transcript

Speaker 2: 1:58

Medications certainly have their place, but what if there was a way to support your body naturally by working with your genetics?

Speaker 1: 2:06

We are a pill for an ill society. We take 18 pills per person per American per day.

Speaker 2: 2:13

It was so hard to find somebody who took my insurance. And for me to get well, it took thousands of dollars. And I thought, but what do regular people do? This is not right.

Speaker 3: 2:22

Despite my best efforts, I wasn't actually reversing disease and helping people to heal in the way that I thought I would.

Speaker 2: 2:28

We want to empower yourselves to take care of this root called. We don't just want to cover it up. If you're ready to break free from outdated one size fits all healthcare, you're in the right place. Welcome to Raise this group with Nutrigenomics, brought to you by InHer Glow® by LYFE Balance. Here's a literature from we're all unique, right down to our DNA. So it's no wonder we respond differently to the same medications, food, and environments. How do you discover what your body needs? Which medications, foods, supplements, or exercises are right for you? How can you manage chronic conditions without highly wanting more prescriptions? That's what we're here to explore. I'm your host, Dr. Tamar Lawful, Doctor of Pharmacy, Nutrigenomic Specialist, and your partner in reimagining how we personalize care for better outcomes. Whether you're a patient or a practitioner, let's raise the script and bring healthcare to higher levels together. Because the future of health is personal. Have you ever walked into a doctor's office with a real concern only to walk out with a protocol that didn't match your experience, your body, or your intuition? Most of us have. But for today's guests, that disconnect wasn't just frustrating, it was life-changing. Dr. Aaron Hartman thought he understood medicine. He followed the training, the evidence, the guidelines, but the day specialist recommended invasive procedures for his daughter, ones that didn't make sense and didn't consider her. Something in him shifted. He realized the healthcare system wasn't built around patients. It was built around protocols. And that moment set him on a 20-year journey to uncover what the system keeps missing, the individuality of the human body and the hidden capacity it has to repair, adapt, and transform when you remove the roadblocks. In this conversation, Dr. Hartman opens up about that turning point, the blind spots baked into standard medical care, and the three leverage points that change everything, no matter your diagnosis. If you've ever felt dismissed or unfixable, this episode will help you see your health through an entirely different lens. Listen in. Dr. Hartman, welcome to Raise the Script with Nutrigenomics. I'm truly honored to have you here.

Speaker: 4:54

Super excited to be here and just looking forward to our conversation today.

Speaker 2: 4:59

Thank you. Now your story starts with your daughter. The moment you realized the medical system had no real solution for her, can you share that turning point and how it's reshaped your approach to medicine?

Speaker: 5:12

Alice, I had a very standard typical path. I was, you know, academic, went to medical school. I was in the military at the time. My wife, who is a um occupational therapist whose specialty was kids with special needs, one of her patients, Anna, her home was closing down. So she asked if we'd just bring her into our home. And we did. And so started looking at the whole process, fostering that adoption. And the first hurdle we ran into actually was feeding. Her diagnosis of cereal palsy, she was small for gestational age or failure to thrive. Did our best to feed her, but one of the specialist visits with a GI doctor, their response was, she's still small. Um, the next thing is to put a feeding tube in, cut a cut a hole in her stomach, put a plastic tube in, and pour in sugar water, basically. And it just didn't feel right. We knew in our gut there was it just wasn't the right thing to do for her. It would affect her ability to talk. It um affect crawling and walking, even though she was never supposed to do any of those things. And the specialist really didn't have a concern about that. Um, we did. So we opted not to do that. And the result was that we were actually reported to child protective services by the GI doctor for um medical neglect or child neglect because we refused to do what they they wanted us to do. And that was the first like aha moment, like the medical system doesn't like it when you say no. But the real inflection point was six months later when my wife, still doing research and whatnot, found a growth chart for kids with my daughter's diagnosis of cerebral palsy. And Anna was right in the middle. And that was the second inflection point. Well, I realized that the specialists didn't know. They're gonna make recommendations regardless of their knowledge base. And it was really up to me to figure it out. And so that's what forced me into having to get up early in the morning, do research, blog, look at blogs, look at all kinds of stuff, PubMed, look at what's going on around the world to get ideas of what I could do with my little daughter. And that's that ancient Cape Carnaveral over the last, you know, 18, 19 years has turned into a mile to moon and it's changed my entire practice of medicine.

Speaker 2: 7:13

Well, um, that had to have been a try and experience. Um, not getting answers that you felt were really in the best interest for your daughter, and then you and your wife having to just go on your own researching to find those answers. It's a struggle that so many people go through. And also when they feel like they are doing everything right and they're still not getting those answers uh that they need, and in the case of a child that can and the parents, um, I'm sure you felt helpless and um, but you weren't gonna give up. And that's commendable. Uh, Dr. Hart, and you've said that uh the healthcare system is structurally designed to deprioritize patients. What does that mean in real terms for the average person walking into an appointment?

Speaker: 8:02

Everything is protocol-based. You come in, you're diabetes, your A1C is eight, nine, whatever. These precep protocols, these these are the medications we do based on that. If you have a knee pain, you have MRI, you've got a tormeniscus, these are the protocols we do for that. And it's not patient-centered, it's um practice guideline centered. I'm sure you've heard the term you practice guidelines. And so, what happens if we don't treat people, we treat recommendations. And so you do that over and over again over thousands, tens of thousands of patients. All of a sudden, the system isn't serving patients, it's serving um these protocols, these procedures. And it's kind of the way we're trained the evidence-based medicine model, best practice model, standard of care model are all these big, big concepts, but don't take the individual patient, their preferences, their their actual personal history, and your clinical experience. Like my my personal, my personal expertise, I've had over 100,000 patient encounters in um seven countries and four continents. So this whole model doesn't take my experience into account at all. It just says this is this is what your diagnosis is, and this is what we do. And the result is we're not taking care of people and their needs, and actually the best thing for them actually often is overlooked.

Speaker 2: 9:18

I can see that because and because everyone is is different. You can follow the protocol, the guidelines, the practice guidelines, it might work for for some, but not for everyone. And when you get to that point where the doctors followed all the guidelines, it's still it's still not working. What do you do now? What do you do now? Now, Dr. Hartman, you also have an upcoming book on Uncurable. Is it out yet or is it still out?

Speaker: 9:45

It came out November 5th.

Speaker 2: 9:47

Okay. Okay, congratulations. This is a couple weeks ago. Now, Uncurable explores situations where good doctors unintentionally give harmful or incomplete advice. Can you give us one example uh that helps people understand how this happens?

Speaker: 10:03

I mean, my daughter, I can just I can give you example of example of example for her, for many patients, but I'll just stick with her because that's what the book is about. Um, one of the issues with her is with serial palsy with brain injury are tone. Your muscles get tight, but you get resultant weakness, and that affects your ability to move. And so the standard treatment for that is um splinting, um, Botox injections. And if that doesn't work, surgical procedures. So we actually, my daughter had tone issues with her hamstrings that are tight. Um, she had no calf muscles, so she couldn't, she couldn't actually hold her weight up. Without your calf muscles and strong hamstrings, you literally will fall over. And so she couldn't bounce stand anything. And so went to the local place and they were their recommendation was um to paralyze her muscles in her leg with Botox injections. And that was a physiotrist recommendation. So the pediatric orthopedic surgeon, and they recommended cutting her hamstrings and her and her gastrucks, which was kind of, I thought that was kind of weird. So we decided to go to DuPont, which was the is the top, at that point in time was the top place in the country for kids with serial palsy. The doctor wrote the textbook on serial palsy, actually was there at the time. We saw him. They recommended putting a baclefin pump in her back to inject bacylefin into her spinal cord to release the tone. All of those huge surgical procedures that would have 100% changed her trajectory of health. We opted not to do any of them. We focused on therapy, and I found a device I've been researching in the functional neurology world, um, using different electrical stimulation to actually change brain patterns and innervation of muscles, and found a device called a revitive, which is a foot plate she puts her feet on and actually stimulates her feet to make her calves contract. And over about six months, all the tone and her hamstrings and her gastrucks went away 100%. And about eight months to a year later, she actually developed enough calf strength she could actually stand up straight. Eventually changed enough that she was actually able to change the kind of daffos and splints, she splints she wore because she was able to sit stand up flat footed, which she hadn't done her whole entire life. A $300 device did that. And the surgeries would have been probably four or five hundred thousand dollars. And surgery, one surgery ends to another, tends to another. So that one small oversight, no one recommended an NMS device to us. Actually, in one of our communities, one of our patients actually who's also an in-person patient of mine as well, had found this device and was using it for um blood flow in her calves. And so I actually was introduced to it by a patient, but from my research, I knew that was exactly what I wanted. And just overlooking small things like that, not listening to patients, um, sometimes it can actually hurt people. And that's that's a case where listening to my patients doing my own research literally had a radical impact on my daughter. And actually, I've used that device with multiple other patients since.

Speaker 2: 12:51

Wow. Now, a question I have that came to my mind is um, what made you decide to go the route of the device versus the traditional versus the surgeries that the doctors were recommending?

Speaker: 13:03

You know, the question was is how is this gonna help her? And the their focus was just making her cosmetically look better in a chair, decreasing the tone. But you know, because I'm a medical doctor, my wife is a pediatric occupational therapist, we knew that three years from now, five years from now, that surgery was gonna cause other problems. It resulted in loss of muscle strength, contractures, and pain. That's the natural course. And we've been in the healthcare system, you know what happens to these kids who get these surgeries. And so for us, it was just like, unless she has to get it done, unless it's like life-saving, there's something awful going on, but it wasn't at all. It was just you go to the specialist, and all they have to offer you are these surgeries. So that's what they offer you. And so we kind of learned that you know it's one of those things you go, you know, if you got a hammer, everything's a nail. And we learned we realized for our daughter, it had to be more nuanced than that. It had to be individualized. And whatever we did had to have minimal risk and only an upside. And we look at surgeries and medications, you know, there's always a downside. And so we took a risk on ourselves, and but that also put the impetus on me to figure it out for my daughter. And it was a pretty heavy burden that I carried for probably 10 years, like a stress that I had to keep on looking for answers. Because every time you hit a wall and you hit you hit so good and stop, what's the next thing? And so the um good thing about that is over the last 19, 20 years, it's changed my practice of medicine. And because of what I did with my daughter, it's literally had a positive impact on thousands of patients I've seen since. So it's one of those things where her struggle and her disability has actually changed the lives of thousands of people.

Speaker 2: 14:30

I love that. That's amazing. And in a way, that device seems to have gotten to the root cause and really helped strengthen her muscles so that she could be more functional versus the surgery would actually made it worse. And uh it brought to mind um something that I read that you talk a lot about, uh, the hidden healing power, hidden healing power inside the body uh that traditional healthcare often tends to overlook. Can you explain to our listeners, Dr. Hartman, what does that mean? The hidden healing power and why don't most people hear about it from their doctors?

Speaker: 15:07

It's just common sense. I mean, your body was made to for um was made to heal itself. Your body was made for wholeness. And if you just give your body the things it needs and remove the roadblocks, your body will do what it was made to do, which is self-heal and self-repair. I mean, when you're young, you can break a leg and you can you're running on it four weeks later. When you get to be older, it might take four months or a year or so. But we all see this in nature. You get an injury and you heal. It's just part of what happens. And you start learning, you study genetics, you study um biochemistry, you study all the different modalities of our body hormones, and you realize that there are things you can do to actually help your body heal. If you have low vitamin C, get more vitamin C. If your vitamin D is low, get that level up. If you have a low protein consumption and your um branch chain amino acids or amino acids associated with collagen or connective tissue healing are low, put those things in. And these they're super basic concepts that make sense logically, but our healthcare system is focused on diagnosis and treatment, diagnosis and treatment, not okay, you got a diagnosis, whatever it is, diabetes, arthritis, cognitive decline, obesity, whatever the diagnosis is. What could set you up for that diagnosis? Can you remove those roadblocks, give your body what's lacking, and will your body overcome that deficiency on its own? And many times the answer is yes.

Speaker 2: 16:28

Yeah, amazing. The body is amazing and equipped to take care of itself if we give it what it needs. Um a question that I was thinking of is these leverage points you mentioned. Um, you talk about identifying a patient's leverage points. How do you uncover those leverage points, especially if there's a patient who's been dismissed or told that everything is fine?

Speaker: 16:54

There's there's multiple different leverage points. Um could be detoxification pathways, gut health, stress, nutritional deficiencies, environmental toxins, um, a whole host of things that can be leverage points. But there's three major leverage points that affect our body's healing, which is your gut health, stress, and sleep. And so I've found those to be the three major sticking points for patients when we're on a journey and they they they kind of get stuck. Their A1C is not coming down, the cholesterol numbers are sky high, their inflammatory markers are off, their gut or autoimmune markers are not improving. That's their gut health, which a big leverage for that is eating real food, right? But also other things you can do. Stress, which can also be trauma. I mean, there's the idea of trauma or stress being a major impact on your health, is just now coming to public consciousness in the last couple of years. But there's literature on that going back to actually World War I and before, actually. And then sleep, if you don't sleep or you're not getting quality sleep, that's going to affect your body's ability to heal and self-prepare. So there are multiple, a multitude of leverage points that I'll identify through um different lab testing, whether it's hormones or sleep apnea or whatever. But but when people get stuck, what I found the majority of the time, it's those three leverage points, which anybody can work on. Anybody can work on their gut health, stress and sleep at home. And what I found out is 80% of people will get on the path to self-healing and self-repair if you kind of push those big, you know, push the big rocks first and then focus on the small rocks later. Um, unfortunately, our healthcare system, because we have really cool tools and gadgets for small rocks, we focus on those, but not the big ones. And it's really the magic is not is is when you take care of the major things first, then the small things can can move so much easier.

Speaker 2: 18:35

I agree. I agree 100% with that, Dr. Harmon. Tackling those major things first. And also the ability for and when we identify, you help your patients identify those leverage points. Um, I'm sure it's the same thing with you as it is with me and my clients, is they get they have a sense of clarity and this aha moment of uh what's going on or why they've been feeling the way they feel. And then once they get to that clarity point, things start to shift in a major way.

Speaker: 19:07

And just the whole thing about personalized precision medicine is people knowing their body, being educated to know their body well, to know like getting that enough knowledge so they can actually trust their gut. And that's an interesting thing I talk about in the book as well. And there's a whole field of neuroscience coming up now that the whole gut feeling, trusting your gut actually has science behind it now. Like you should really trust your gut, you know. But you have to be you have to be educated enough that you can actually trust your intuition and then find out what those things are, those leverage points are and moving on them. And that requires the individual to be educated, but also have a team around them, a care team, including a provider, practitioner, coaches, whatnot, that are on their side, that will listen to them. And, you know, evidence-based care, the most up-to-date evidence, patient preference, and clinician expertise on their click their experience. And we need to go back to that foundation, not just fancy tests and fancy imaging. Medicine's more that care is more that it's actually to be personalized precision for the individual, you have to take their entire history. And sometimes it's like, where did you grow up? What kind of house did you grow up? Where in the country did you grow up? What country did you grow up in? I've seen patients from over in um Romania who had a lot of thyroid issues, and you start talking to them, they were 200 miles downwind from Chernobyl. That changed a lot of what I did for their healthcare program and the their um their um what we were designed for them. But it was just when that little that little small detail that took me, you know, four or five visits to get out of them.

Speaker 2: 20:32

Yeah, definitely precision. Um, you have to consider the whole person to really get the that full picture of what's going on and what can be done uh next to help them. Now, Dr. Hartman, I have a couple more questions for you. Uh, what are three ways that people can protect themselves from medical harm and actually get better care even in a system that's rushed and fragmented? What would you say?

Speaker: 20:56

I mean, this is a big deal because you know, according to some of the current literature, potentially medical error is the third most common cause of death in our country. And when you say that, I don't say that lightly, I say it based on um information from Harvard, from coming from a Harvard database, Medicare database published through Dr. McCarey, who is the um the FTA right now. He was actually at Harvard when he, I mean, sorry, he was at John Hopkins when he published that out there. And um, the idea is like, you know, if in order to prevent that from happening, you have to one, know yourself, you have to be with a practitioner or physician, whatnot, who respects their limitations. You know, the Hippocratic oath is first and foremost do no harm. And you want to work with someone who appreciates they can potentially hurt you, which unfortunately many, many younger physicians don't really appreciate that, and realizes what they do, every potential cure can kill, every medication procedure. And so the practitioner needs to appreciate that. They need to listen to the patient and you need to feel good again about what's happening. That's that requires a conversation, that requires a relationship and requires time. And if you don't have that conversation, that that relationship and time, you are more likely to make rash decisions solely based on one person's opinion, um, which could potentially cause harm.

Speaker 2: 22:09

Yeah, that's some good advice right there and valid points. Now, uh, could you are you able to tell us about the work that you're doing now through Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine and the resources that you have on your website?

Speaker: 22:22

Well, we um doing a lot of things right now. We have um our clinic, our brick and mortar clinic, which is Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine. Currently, we have four practitioners, two physicians, a nurse practitioner, and a um physician assistant. And we're seeing patients. We the type of patients we tend to collect are patients who've been to multiple doctors, multiple specialists, and been told there's nothing wrong with them, they can't be helped, or it's all in their head. And we kind of connect the dots to realize it's actually the mold, environmental toxins, the post-concussive syndrome from years ago, maybe it's their undiagnosed Lyme disease, um, it's chronic inflammatory response syndrome, massive activation, like these things that you may not have heard before, but are ridiculously common. And we just kind of connect those dots and help put them to get put together a personalized precision plan for them. So that's like our bread and butter, meat and potatoes that we've been doing. Um, I've I'm also a crusader for education. So I've to date written over 400 blogs that you get through our website, um, our YouTube channel. I think we've got at the stage over a thousand different videos on there. And then I've got my own podcast that we're getting close to 100 episodes where I've had conversations. And the goal with all these things is to educate people. I've even vetted a um over 400 books that we have on our website, about 70 of those books that I've read, for that I think will be helpful for people's education. And we're getting ready to launch actually in the next couple of weeks a Aaron Hartman MD AI, which will be literally all of those tools put into an AI tool. So you can literally ask me a question and it'll actually pull from that database of stuff I put together. So education is a huge thing. And then the capstone of this has been my book, which outlines my personal journey with my daughter. And um, beginning of 2026, we're launching an online program, Connected Health, that takes like the key things, got stress and sleep, some basic, you know, functional lab evaluation, a self-assessment tool. And it gets people 85%, 80% there. And most people that that's all they're need. And so we're actually launching that in um early 2026. So we're trying to put this whole basically we I want to meet people wherever they're at. I want to meet them where they're at. And so that's kind of we're trying to put this whole platform together. So no matter where you're at, if you just want to learn, be educated, come on, we've got tons of free stuff. You just want to listen to some cool podcasts, we got that too. If you want to come see someone in person, we got that. If you can't find someone, you can't travel, or you have um resource issues, then we've got that resource for you as well. So we're trying to just meet people where they're at.

Speaker 2: 24:40

I love it. I love that, Dr. Hartman. Uh, everything for everybody, whatever it is that they need, uh, you have those resources there for them. And uh definitely looking forward to the the AI, the app that you have, uh, so that people can be educated right at their fingertips. So you have a lot uh in the works, and we're looking forward to uh seeing that. Now, for anyone who wants to learn more, Dr. Hartman, or connect with you or explore your book, Uncurable, where should they start?

Speaker: 25:10

Help for the book is uncurablebook.com, and that takes you to our landing site, and you can take you to ultimately to Amazon to buy off Amazon. And the Audibles are gonna be out in two weeks, so that's coming soon. And as far as more about me, Aaron Hartman MD, which is my website, and that'll take you to my practice website that kind of goes to social media, to the YouTube, to podcasts. So that's like the one place it takes you to all other places. So between those two sites, you can kind of work your way around to all the other stuff.

Speaker 2: 25:37

Okay, great. Well, it has been a pleasure speaking with you, sharing your insights with us, Dr. Hartman. Thank you for being part of Raises Grip today.

Speaker: 25:45

Great. Thanks for what I love about Dr.

Speaker 2: 25:49

Hartman's story is that it reminds us of something so many people forget. You are not a protocol, you are a whole person with a history, a biology, a genetic blueprint, and a lived experience that deserve to be seen. So if this episode sparked something for you, if it helped you understand why you felt unheard and why the standard path hasn't worked, I encourage you to explore more of Dr. Hartman's work at AaronHartmanmd.com. He has incredible resources for patients who want answers that actually reflect their whole story. And if you'd like to learn more about how your DNA, lifestyle, and environment work together to shape your health, you can visit me at thelyfebalance.com. That's T-H-E-L-Y-F-E-Balance.com. That's where you'll find resources, programs, and conversations like this one to help you design wellness that fits your life, not the other way around. You'll also find your inner CEO Blueprint, or free guide that walks you through five DNA-based strategies to boost energy, clarity, and confidence without extremes or burnout. And for my healthcare and wellness professionals, don't miss the DNA strategy starter kit. It's a practical roadmap to help you integrate nutri genomics into your practice so you can create true precision wellness plans for your clients and patients because health isn't guesswork, it's design. Talk to you next Friday. Until then, always remember to raise the script on health because together we can bring healthcare to higher levels.