#2987: Aaron Hartman (?)

Aaron Hartman is a Richmond-based family physician who is also one of many (see e.g. last entry on Angelique Hart) who has recognized the financial benefits of incorporating “non-mainstream modalities” into their practices and who, because he has no scruples he has an open mind, has promptly joined the dark side. In addition to his main practice, Hartman sees patients through Richmond Integrative & Functional Medicine, which he launched in early 2017 to target those who are either gullible or somewhat desperate because they can’t find a proper treatment for whatever ails them in conventional medicine, and who has money to spare. As with functional medicine practitioners in general, Hartman offers a range of alternative treatments, including intravenous vitamin C and other supplements. And he’s got anecdotes and marketing glitter to prop up his recommendations (there’s little else).

 

Functional medicine, as we’ve had ample opportunity to note (e.g. here), is quackery: Basically, the idea – insofar as there is a clear idea – is to run a battery of often expensive tests, usually including dubious ones, for anything whatsoever to see if some value along any parameter is unusual. Or, in other words, if you don’t know of anything wrong, they’ll find something. Then they prescribe some unnecessary and often questionable (as in the case of Hartman) treatment regime to address it. Of course it’s lucrative (marketing gambit: the diagnoses and treatment regimes are personalized). And as an added boon, the practitioner will frequently be able to harvest some testimonials, since whatever they addressed was actually not anything that bothered you neither before nor after treatment and you, as a patient, won’t know that it didn’t need addressing and will base your assessment on what the practitioner says.

 

How lucrative? Well, Hartman also offers a membership program – i.e., he runs a quack concierge medical service – which, for the regular plan, requires a membership induction fee of $730 and a monthly maintenance fee of $135 (during the next 12 months of membership); the executive “optimum wellness” plan, however, is a fair $1,500, although it offers, in addition to access to the practice, “advanced testing”, including organic acid analysis, comprehensive stool genomic and functional analysis, nutritional analysis, and something called a “comprehensive vascular biological inflammatory analysis”.

 

Diagnosis: It is, of course, hard to sustain the belief that Hartman is merely a loon, but we’ll tactfully assume that it is. And there are lots of these people out there.

 

Hat-tip: Respectful Insolence