Hello, friends, and welcome back to the rabbit hole.

I'm your host, Danny, and today we have the pleasure of having Dr. Aaron Hartman on the podcast.

He is a triple board certified physician who worked in the Air Force as just a regular doctor,

but the diagnosis that his daughter had led to surgeries that him and his wife did not want to consent to, which led him down the path of functional medicine.

Functional medicine, unlike the traditional healthcare system, is patient-centered science-based approach that identifies and treats the root cause of disease rather than just the symptoms.

They really look at like the whole person instead of

just take this medication and get on your way. We cover so many topics in this episode. If you have a

question, I might have asked Dr. Aaron for the answer. Hi, Dr. Aaron. Thank you so much for joining

us on The Rabbit Hole. I am really excited to hear your story because I feel like so many people's stories start out the way that your story does with like a sick family member, then the medical industry, like wanting to just like throw pharmaceuticals at it or like surgery. And most people kind of end up at the end of the day with like an, I don't know what wrong with you like take more medicine and so will you tell us tell us your your daughter's story my story

it's a little different little same to what you're talking about I was in the military

traditional doctor academic you know doing all the usual. And what got me off the being path,

so to speak, down the rabbit hole is literally down by this point, time, about 50 bazillion rabbit

holes. Yes. It was, we brought our future daughter into our home. And my wife is a occupational

therapist that works with kids with special needs.

Very complicated kids.

And we brought her in our home.

And she has a diagnosis of cerebral palsy.

But how she got that was her birth mother did crystal meth the entire pregnancy.

Oh, wow.

She had a stroke before she was born.

And she was born functioning blind.

So pretty poor prognosis. Yeah. And the GI doctor is like, hey, by the way, she's also small. It's called failure to thrive. So let's put a feeding tube in her belly, put a plastic tube in there, and just pour sugar water called formula into her belly. And that will fix the problem. She'll gain some weight, problem solved, right? Right. But we had higher goals. My wife was like, everything's going to be okay. She's going to be fine. And so to that, my response was, well, why would I put a feeding tube in her? Because part of learning how's talk is chewing and swallowing. Like literally chewing and swelling is how kids learn to talk.

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