UnCURABLE | Part 1
The Day “Incurable” Became Hopeful
How One Diagnosis Changed Everything
Aaron Hartman MD
November 4, 2025
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I can still remember the day I met my daughter.
Not as a doctor.
Not as a researcher or clinician.
But as a father who suddenly realized that everything he believed about medicine was about to be tested.
Becky and I walked into a small foster home in Florida to meet a little girl who had nowhere else to go. She was sitting on a Winnie-the-Pooh blanket in a blue Bumbo chair, her tiny body slumped forward, one eye patched, her hands curled tightly to her chest. She couldn’t hold herself upright. She couldn’t speak.
Her name was Anna. She was 12 months old.
And every specialist had already labeled her incurable.
When Medicine Has No Answers
Anna had been born with profound brain damage. She’ suffered a stroke before birth. She was blind in one eye and functionally blind in the other. Her birth mother had used crystal meth throughout pregnancy, and her MRI showed that the part of her brain connecting the two hemispheres — the corpus callosum — hadn’t fully formed.
The charts said she’d never walk, never talk, never see, never live independently.
As a physician, I understood the implications of those words.
As a human being, I felt my stomach drop.
Becky, though, saw something different.
She was Anna’s occupational therapist at the time — and she saw a spark no test could measure.
She looked at me and said, “She’s going to be okay.”
I didn’t know what “okay” meant. But I knew I couldn’t say no to that kind of faith.
So we brought Anna home.
That moment — that quiet yes — was the day everything changed.
I just didn’t know it yet.
She’s going to be okay.
The System vs. the Spark
The medical system doesn’t like outliers. It likes predictability.
It likes charts, protocols, and tidy prognoses that fit neatly into textbooks.
When we refused to put a feeding tube in Anna’s stomach — because Becky knew it would harm her ability to develop speech and swallow safely — the system pushed back hard. In fact, the specialist reported us to Child Protective Services for “medical neglect.”
Imagine that: being investigated for feeding your child real food instead of formula through a tube.
Six months later, Becky found a growth chart made specifically for children with cerebral palsy.
According to that chart, Anna was in the 50th percentile.
She wasn’t failing. She was thriving.
That discovery changed more than a diagnosis. It exposed a blind spot — not just in one doctor, but in a system that often confuses compliance with care.
When I Stopped Practicing Medicine
Through Anna, I began to see that modern medicine, as brilliant as it is, has blind spots the size of galaxies. It’s exceptional at crisis care — but not at nurturing healing.
When doctors said, “She’ll never walk,” we started movement therapy.
When they said, “She’ll always need surgery,” we tried neuromuscular stimulation — a simple foot-plate device that activated her calf muscles and retrained her brain.
When they said, “Her brain can’t change,” we explored hyperbaric oxygen therapy and nutritional genomics.
Slowly, she began to change.
After her first round of hyperbaric treatments, she could finally write her name legibly — something years of therapy hadn’t achieved. Her vision improved. Her laughter became louder.
It was during those months that I realized:
I hadn’t stopped being a doctor. I had just started practicing real medicine.
Real medicine doesn’t mean abandoning science. It means using science to serve the human story — not the other way around. It means listening to patients, trusting intuition, and remembering that the body was designed to heal if we remove what’s blocking it.
Hope Isn’t Naïve. It’s Biology in Action
Every year, Anna surprises us. She reads. She texts. She jokes with her grandparents. She sings constantly — recently she told me she wants voice lessons.
She is, by every measurable standard, improving.
And that’s supposed to be impossible.
I used to think hope was an emotion. Now I know it’s physiology.
When you create safety, nourishment, connection, and belief, the body changes.
Faith and science aren’t opposites; they’re complementary languages describing the same miracle.
That’s what UnCURABLE is about — not a single child’s story, but a new way of seeing medicine itself.
It’s about turning the word “incurable” upside down.
What Anna Taught Me
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Don’t accept prognosis as prophecy.
A diagnosis describes where you are — not where you’ll stay.
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Love is medicine.
The most potent therapy for the nervous system is connection. When a child feels safe and believed in, neurons fire differently. Healing starts there.
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You are not powerless.
Every small decision — from what you eat to how you sleep to what you believe — sends messages to your biology.
A Bigger Story Than Ours
What began as a fight for one child has become a calling. Today, through Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine, I work with patients who feel dismissed or forgotten by a system that tells them, “We’ve run out of options.”
Anna reminds me every day that there are always options.
Sometimes they’re just hidden beneath the noise of the “standard of care.”
That’s why I wrote UnCURABLE: From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds.
Because this isn’t just our story — it’s a blueprint for anyone who’s tired of being told “there’s nothing more we can do.”
From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds
Anna was never “cured.”
But she’s healing — and that’s far more powerful.
Her story is proof that healing doesn’t always mean reversing every symptom; it means refusing to live inside the limits someone else set for you.
If Anna can do it, you can too.
Dr. Aaron Hartman is a triple-board-certified physician in family, functional, and integrative and medicine. He’s the founder of Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine. He lives in Virginia with his wife, Becky, and their three children — including Anna, who continues to teach him what’s possible every day.
Discover the full story behind Dr. Hartman’s methods.
His new book, UnCURABLE: From Hopeless Diagnosis to Defying All Odds, reveals the principles that helped thousands of patients — and his own daughter — heal when the system had no answers.
