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Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine

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Midlothian, VA
Richmond Integrative and Functional Medicine

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Aaron Hartman, MD
Restoring health & hope with science-backed solutions and innovative healthcare.

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10/28/2026

Almost every week, a hypermobile patient asks me some version of this: I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do, and I’m still stuck. What are we missing?

Usually they’ve already done a lot, and some of it helped. They might be thirty or forty percent better than when they started. Then the progress stops, and the search starts. A new diet. A new supplement. A protocol from someone online with a story a lot like theirs. Green-lipped mussel extract from the Mariana Trench.

I understand it. Searching is how a lot of these patients got diagnosed in the first place. But after a lot of years with hypermobile patients, I’ve come to believe something about these bodies that changes where that search should go. It's the least exciting answer, and it's the one I keep coming back to.

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/hypermobility-treatment/

10/14/2026

If you’re on a GLP-1, someone has told you to eat your protein. That’s good advice. But there’s a second group that needs feeding, and almost nobody mentions it.

Your gut already makes its own GLP-1, with help from specific bacteria. When your appetite drops and the fiber disappears, those bacteria can starve, and a starving gut turns inflammatory, working against the very drug you’re taking.

I sat down with Dr. Julia Malkowski to talk about what those bacteria actually need, and why reaching for a probiotic first can make some people feel worse.

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/glp-1-gut-health/

09/30/2026

A member asked me this on a live call: I don’t tolerate exercise very well, I don’t build endurance, and I often feel awful afterward. Does exercise still have the same benefits when it costs me that much?

Before I answer that, here’s the part that surprises people most:

A lot of hypermobile people don’t feel bendy at all. They feel tight. Their back hurts. They can’t touch their toes, and they assume none of this applies to them.

Here’s what’s happening. When someone tells me they’re stiff, I ask about the past. How flexible were you at ten? And the answer is almost always some version of: oh, I could put my hands flat on the ground.

You were hypermobile. You spent twenty or thirty years compensating. And because the muscles around a loose joint tend to be weak, the fascia tightened down to do their job instead. So you end up loose at the joint and tight across the fascia, in the same body on the same day.

Which means the stretching you’ve been doing is treating the compensation instead of the reason the compensation exists.

That changes what kind of movement helps. It also changes how much of it you should be doing, and that second part has an actual number attached to it that almost nobody gets told.

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/hypermobility-and-exercise/

09/24/2026

You can love your child more than anything and still feel like dysregulation is running your home.

The blowups.
The walking on eggshells.
The constant bracing for what one small thing might become.
The guilt after everyone has lost their footing.

This is not just another parenting book filled with ideas you cannot use when life gets hard.

The Dysregulated Kid is a practical path for parents who are ready to move out of survival mode and toward regulation.

Inside, Dr. Roseann shares the tools, language, and action steps that help parents understand what is happening beneath the behavior, so they can stop reacting to every hard moment without a plan.

Because your family deserves more than getting through the day.

Stop living in dysregulation.
Find your path back to calm.

The Dysregulated Kid : dysregulatedkid.com

09/23/2026

When I tell a hypermobile patient we’re starting with their gut, I usually get a look.

It’s a fair look. Functional medicine has a reputation for answering every question with “the gut.”

But hypermobility is different, and here’s the part people can picture once it’s explained. Connective tissue doesn’t only build your joints. It holds your organs in position. Built a little looser, they sit lower, and your bowel slows down.

What surprises them is the second route, which has nothing to do with the structure of your abdomen at all. It runs through your nervous system, and most of my hypermobile patients are traveling both at the same time.

Both roads end in the same place. Once you arrive there, it stops being a joint problem and starts being a list.

I wrote up the whole mechanism, including what happens at that destination and why it keeps feeding itself.

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/hypermobility-and-gut-problems/

09/16/2026

One day the pain is in your shoulder. Two days later it’s in your hips. Three days after that, your knees.

The same pain, relocating. Most patients can narrate that sequence if somebody asks them to. Most have never been asked. They’ve been asked to rate it from 1 to 10.

I sat down with Dr. Richard Horowitz, who has spent more than four decades and 13,000-plus patients on tick-borne illness. He told me that pattern is one of the few findings in medicine that actually shortens the list. Only a handful of other diseases produce it, and an ordinary primary care office can rule out nearly all of them with cheap, standard labs.

Which means the most informative part of a Lyme workup can happen before anybody draws blood.

I wrote up the whole conversation: the symptom pattern that should prompt the test, and how to read the result when it comes back.

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/lyme-bingo-band-interpretation/

09/09/2026

Dr. Richard Horowitz went looking for a chronic Lyme treatment and found it in the leprosy literature.

Here’s how that happened.

In 2015, researchers at Johns Hopkins established that the Lyme bacterium can do something tuberculosis and leprosy already do. It powers down. Same organism, same genome, no mutation, no resistance gene. Just dormant.

Almost all our antibiotics target processes that only happen in a growing cell. A sleeping bacterium isn’t doing any of that. So the drug arrives and finds nothing to act on. The organism never has to resist anything. It only has to be asleep when the drug shows up.

Then the course ends, drug levels fall, and the survivors wake up. Which is exactly what patients describe when they tell me they crashed four days after finishing a round of antibiotics.

Here’s the part I find genuinely interesting: medicine had already run into this problem. In leprosy. And solved it. Multiple drugs at once, given long enough to catch the dormant fraction when it eventually wakes. Nobody treats leprosy with two weeks of one drug.

So Horowitz

went and read how they do it, borrowed the combination, and published his first study in 2016. Then spent almost a decade getting the dose right.

I sat down with him in August. The full conversation, including what the protocol can’t do and who it doesn’t work for, is here:

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/lyme-dapsone-persisters/

09/02/2026

Nobody gave her an Alzheimer’s drug.

A 67-year-old woman had a blood marker called p-tau217 at more than double the Alzheimer’s threshold. Nine weeks of oral antibiotics later, it was normal.

Her doctor treated a chronic infection.

Which raises a question I haven’t been able to put down. If treating Lyme disease moved an Alzheimer’s biomarker, what exactly was that biomarker measuring?

I’m 53. Four out of ten people my age are expected to develop dementia in our lifetime. And maybe, just maybe, Lyme disease is at the base of some of it.

https://RichmondFunctionalMedicine.com/lyme-alzheimers-biomarkers

08/26/2026

Loose joints get all the attention. The part that matters more for anxiety is that connective tissue is packed full of nerve endings.

When that tissue is looser than it should be, the structures it holds move slightly past where they belong. Thousands of times a day. Every reach, every stair, every hour in a desk chair. What that produces is a steady stream of micro-tears, too small to feel as an injury and invisible on imaging.

But the nerve endings register every one of them, and what they send upstream is a damage signal.

Which is how you end up sitting in a quiet room with the people you love, nothing wrong, and still not at ease.

I’ve written up the full mechanism: what that constant stress hormone load does across three regions of the brain, why cortisol makes connective tissue looser and closes a loop, and why this pattern so often gets written down as a mood disorder instead.

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/hypermobility-and-anxiety/

08/19/2026

Your car gets an oil change. Your body needs one too, and it’s the part almost nobody talks about.

The damaged fat from years of processed oil doesn’t just pass through you. It gets built into the walls of your cells, into your mitochondria, into the membranes that run every signal in your body. So you can throw out every bottle of canola oil tomorrow and still be carrying years of it around.

Here’s the hopeful part: your body can do an oil change. Flood in clean fat, help it burn off the damaged fat, bind the rest and clear it out. This isn’t fringe. Hospitals already treat anesthesia toxicity with a phospholipid that pulls the toxin out of the brain. Fat has been sitting in the pharmacy as a medicine the whole time.

The full step-by-step protocol is here:

https://richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/oil-change-protocol

Address

1 Park West Circle, Ste 301
Midlothian, VA
23114

Opening Hours

Monday	8am - 5pm
Tuesday	8am - 5pm
Wednesday	8am - 5pm
Thursday	8am - 5pm
Friday	8am - 5pm

Telephone

+18048933920

Website

http://www.richmondfunctionalmedicine.com/, https://made-for-health.captivate.fm/listen

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