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It's about breaking the cycle of neurological stress.
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It's just how God made us. The nervous system is the boss, right? Kids have never learned to regulate it. You can't access something that was never built.
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How do you break the cycle?
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Yeah, you gotta go deeper. So the vagus nerve is the key access point. That's what the power of touch truly is. This isn't a pediatrician versus a chiropractor story. It's both.
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What happened to your son, Oliver?
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Christina delivered him on all fours. And on the second push, he shot out like a rocket. I watched my son go, not be caught. And they said he had a 20% chance of living to age 1. And if he did, a 99% chance. Epilepsy, autism, cerebral palsy. And they only said 99, brother. Because it would have sounded quite harsh to say 100 out loud.
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Hey, everyone. Welcome Back to the Dr. Axe Show. Today we're going to be diving into a topic that so many parents and women are asking about right now. Why are we seeing more autism, adhd, anxiety, sensory issues, food sensitivities, autoimmune conditions, and chronic challenges in children and families than ever before? My guest today is Dr. Tony Ebel. He is a doctor of chiropractic that specializes in families and pediatric care. He also is the founder of PX Docs Network and one of the leading voices connecting neurological dysfunction to things like birth trauma, toxin exposure, and poor diet. And over the last decade, he's helped thousands of families better understand what's happening beneath the surface. When a child struggles with focus, behavior, immune health, digestion and development start to be challenged. And so today, we're going to dive into why autism, adhd, anxiety, autoimmune disease are on the rise and exactly how to fix this in children and in families. Dr. Tony, welcome to the show.
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Ah, Dr. Josh, thank you, man. God is moving mountains for this mission. And your mentorship, your guidance is one of those ways God's been working through this mission. So it is an honor to be here, brother.
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Well, I'm excited. Well, I've known Tony for probably 12, 15 years, so quite a long time. I've always been so impressed for your heart, for just families. And you've got a really thriving practice up in Illinois, where. I know, I mean, people fly in from all over the country, even all over the world to see you. You know, a lot of kids with issues like pandas and autism and ADHD and a lot of these chronic neurological disorders. These, you know, parents sort of get in this place oftentimes with their kids where they just don't know what to do. They've seen a conventional doctor, maybe they've seen a natural doctor and been prescribed a couple supplements, but they're still having issues. First question for you is, why do you think we've seen such a chronic rise in autism, adhd, and a lot of these other conditions we see in kids today?
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Yeah, and the list goes on, unfortunately. Honestly, that answer is not what I think most people are going to think it is. And the answer follows the path that parents end up going, where they go down one road, the conventional road. Answer that the conventional doctors of all kinds, every specialty within the conventional system is going to tell parents this is just genetic. Autism, adhd, anxiety, autoimmune, asthma, the list goes on. It's just genetic. And I'm a super nerd. So my undergrad degree, as you know, I grew up on a farm. Undergrad degree was molecular biology. Genetics. You don't have to look much down the genetics road to go. That's not the case. And parents today know that. The second place, though, and you brought it up within the question there is they get online awesomely and they go down these functional medicine, natural, you know, they'll take whatever route that they can to find the root cause and help their kiddos. And so conventional medicine says it's just genetics, functional, natural, holistic. Kind of brings about this environment, toxins, conversation. But parents don't really know where to go with that. And truthfully, toxins aren't brand brand new. They're a big part of the perfect storm. And I know we're gonna get into that. But the truth is, toxins have been around for a couple of generations before our pediatric health conditions really exploded. So the place we always draw par is way upstream in the developmental pathway. We just have more nervous system stress and dysregulation through moms and their nervous systems. We're not supporting them, we're not empowering them. We're medicalizing pregnancy, infertility, we're diagnosing them as pregnant. And so that stress carries through the umbilical cord. And in that umbilical cord, okay, we know to not have toxins in there, know those things, but we just have moms at the highest levels of stress possible. And that umbilical cord is the power cord. So that stress, the cortisol, those things that's indicated. And we see that in case histories all the time. And then the big one is birth trauma. We call it the moonwalking event. We call it the hidden in plain sight. It's the most exciting but life transforming moment, right? Your beautiful kiddos, our kiddos. And everything is happening all at once. And it has become fully medicalized. It is physically traumatic. And I know those are heavy words to kick this thing off, but we're literally grabbing a hold of millions of kids by their head and neck, which is the same thing as saying nervous system. When we break it down and we're using forceps, vacuum and C sections at this incredibly high rate. Like every medical intervention, those things save lives when they're absolutely needed. But like every medical intervention, they have side effects. They have short and long term consequences. And what we figured out all those years ago was that especially that second one, birth trauma, that's exploded. The rates of intervention have Literally shifted in the last two to three generations. Look at any one of them, they're 2x3x4x higher. And that gets into the brainstem, that wreaks havoc, that triggers the sympathetics. I'll nerd out as we go. But it starts that storm. And that's where kids are sick. They're sick. They don't grow out of colic, they grow into constipation and gut issues. They don't grow out of difficulty sleeping, they grow into neurological dysregulation and exhaustion. The pediatrician keeps punting it and it just gets a different diagnosis from a different specialist down the road. But they've been under that significant neurological stress most of the time, 85% of the time in our practice. Yeah.
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And this is the root cause thing you're looking at here. And I think there's a few things that you said that are really important. One is conventional medicine has absolutely no answers. Right? No answers. We're gonna drug this, we're gonna medicate this, or just keep saying we don't know more of the holistic doctors, whether it be a functional medicine doctor or even most chiropractors or, you know, an integrative doctor, they might say, hey, here's some vitamins and minerals, you know, hey, here's some zinc. We want to decrease this toxin exposure. Let's start eating organic and get, you know, move away from glyphosate. So some of that's happening and maybe even getting on an anti inflammatory diet. So what I see with a lot of kids that come in with, let's say, a lot of these conditions, we talked about autism, it could be adhd, Pandas, those things, they'll oftentimes go to this natural doctor and see a 25%, even 50% improvement. But they don't break the cycle. Right. That's the thing, is this cycle keeps on going. And that's the key, is you gotta break the cycle. And this is where I've been so impressed with, and I've studied a lot of the way that you treat kids and patients. And that is it's about breaking the cycle of neurological stress. And you know, Pandas is a great example of this, where you get this infection. It could be streptococcus or some sort of virus or some sort of microbial or pathogen. And then this kicks off an autoimmune reaction. But the problem is, even when the virus might be able to go away, the reaction keeps going and going. So first question for you is, how do you break the Cycle.
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Yeah, you gotta go deeper. So you find it by going deeper into the case history. And that starts us on figuring it out and saying, okay, the toxins, the inflammation, the diet, the roundup, those are big issues, but they came downstream, so there must be something earlier that triggered stress deeper within the body. The deepest place we can go with within the body is the central and autonomic nervous system. The way God designed our kids is when that development is happening, it's the neural tube, right? It's the brain. All the classes we had to take
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all those years ago that we don't
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really remember, but we know the context. So the neural tube, the autonomic central nervous system, is there. And so what happens is, no matter what kind of stress a child's body goes through, especially in its early formative stages, it's its most plastic, right? It's the most moldable. That it is. And every kiddo with pandas, every kiddo with autism, level two, level three, we go back into their case history, and we find that their nervous system has been stuck on sympathetics. That's the cycle, that's the loop. The sympathetics are running the show, which is the same thing as saying as the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic is just suppressed. See the difference with kids and having this conversation with stress stuck on that vicious cycle we're talking about in kids, they've never not had it stuck on. They've never activated their parasympathetics, their vagus nerve, their prefrontal cortex. So it's different than with adults, where maybe an adult can take the supplements, the detoxification and the nutrition, and then maybe do deep breathing, get into the sauna and try and reset and regulate their nervous system. Kids have never learned to regulate it. You can't access something that was never built.
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Well, think about this. A lot of these kids, to your point, birth trauma being such a big thing from the moment they come out of the birth canal, right? What happens is there's been this sympathetic trauma, and then they're just constantly living this sympathetic state. Imagine if your nervous system is constantly being stressed and it just never goes away throughout their childhood. The other thing, this, you know, is connected to autism. I've taken care of thousands of children with autism, and it is so critically important that you shut down and get them in that parasympathetic state. Because if not, you just can't. They can't ever heal.
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So it's critical. So the deepest way to reset it. So if. And it's just true. And these are all part of it. My job is, I always say this, it's two truths at the same time. Our job is easier than ever because parents are awesomely finding all these resources. They're cleaning up their diet, you know what I mean? Like they're helping the system heal, they're working on the gut, they're going anti inflammatory. But it's also harder than ever because the, I guess for today I'll call it almost the physicality of that nervous system being locked in, especially with birth trauma. But even toxic stress, it's this way, emotional stress. These kids are physically within their neuromotor system, stuck in that sympathetic loop. So that's where neurologically focused pediatric chiropractic, we have the ability with that manual input to go right at the central nervous system, autonomic nervous system, and hit reset. That's what the power of touch truly is. If you think a hug or you know, for a kiddo that maybe has like a sensory weighted blanket, if you think that's a good reset for the proprioceptive parasympathetic system, it is. Try getting a very specific pediatric chiropractic adjustment. Different focus. Obviously within chiropractic we know exactly. And that's what we did in our clinic. We found okay, in these case histories and in the research, birth trauma, sympathetic dominance, it's there in the brainstem, in the neurospinal system from the beginning. But if you know it's there, that's one thing. How do you fix it?
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The biggest myth about inflammation and chronic symptoms is that they're all separate issues. In reality, your symptoms behave more like a chain of falling dominoes. When one goes down, it triggers several more and before you know it, everything feels off. This new test completely changes things and I know exactly what to look for. I'm currently offering a simple at home blood test that actually tests for the right things. Targeted biomarkers that reveal the very first dominoes impacting your hormones, inflammation, your thyroid and your metabolism. Plus a full hour with one of my senior health advisors to review your results and show you exactly how the health institute can help you stop the chain reaction and finally balance your hormones and heal. If you want to check it out and grab one before they're gone, just go to mybloodwork.com now I want to ask you this. So you're talking about pediatric chiropractic, right? And so I want to talk about chiropractic for a minute. What's happening in the body? And I'd love To share my thoughts, too, and feel free to piggyback off this, because I think there's a lot of confusion. You know, the other thing I think a lot of people don't know about chiropractors is chiropractors. DC Truly stands for Doctor of Cause. It's looking at what's the root cause. Chiropractors have always first looked to the brain and the nervous system and taking care of that organ system and that system in general. And to your point, I think diet is incredibly important for all these conditions we're talking about. But if you have. Let's say you have a shoulder and it's dislocated, doing fish oil, doing turmeric, getting the perfect diet, it's gonna help decrease some of the inflammation, but you're still gonna have pain, and there's still gonna be a major problem there until that shoulder is put back into the correct location, until everything is established and healed in that area. And one other thing. There's a misconception, I think, when it comes to chiropractic care, you know, sometimes there's talk about, you know, moving the bone. Now, during adjustment, you are moving a bone somewhat, but the point is you're not actually moving it over and correcting the location. Here's something that's really important to understand when it comes to healing. One of the great. And the Bible talks about this. It says healing is in the blood. And so when you have. There's fascia all throughout, kind of between your spinal vertebra that can get bound up. Think of it like glue. And so you have lack of motion. Think about if you put your arm in a cast and you never move the joint, it's gonna deteriorate, it's gonna stiffen, it's gonna start to hurt. That happens in the spine. So chiropractors go to those segments of the spine. They do adjustments to create more motion there, which brings more blood flow, more oxygen, more nutrients. Now, here's the key thing with the spine. The spinal bones surround the spinal cord and nerves that then feed out to every organ, tissue, and cell of your body. So if there's dysfunction and things are not moving properly in those spinal segments, what starts to happen is you start to. Over time, you can even have decreased organ function, and other health issues start to happen there. And so what chiropractors do is they go and they optimize the movement and integrity of the spinal cord to better increase organ function and overall health of the entire nervous system. And so anyways, I guess I Just wanted to put it like that because I don't think people fully understand. So feel free to share.
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It's both simple and profound. I love that. And I think it does deserve time to just isolate into that conversation and say, what exactly is happening, you know? Cause we can break down and say, okay, why is it needed? Where does the subluxation. Where does the sympathetic dominance. Where does that stuck perfect storm cycle start? But then it still didn't invite. Even when you figure that out, it invites the question, like, how do we reset it? Right. And that is the adjustment. The adjustment has the capacity to do that. So I always teach it in two ways. There's the Iowa farm kid simple way, subluxation, which is what we're talking about within the nervous system in the spine.
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And a subluxation is when something is misaligned.
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That's what that word means, three parts. So simple Iowa term, you have. You have misalignment. If you're going to have misalignment, you're going to have fixation. Things aren't going to move as well. That's where the trouble starts. It starts with, and when you have fixation, you decrease proprioception, movement into the cerebellum. And that is stressful. It's called the gate theory. You decrease proprioception. And the way we're designed is the body gets stressed about that. We are designed to move. Movement is life. And so when you have that subluxation, the good input goes down, the nociception, the noise, the stress goes up. That's bad for an adult, their shoulder and their brain stem. It just stresses the whole nervous system. Now imagine the more advanced way of looking at it within pediatrics. Movement is life for all of us. But movement, motor milestones dictate brain development in kids. If they don't go through those motor milestones. And it's not just walking, and it's not. It starts with head and neck control. It honestly starts with nursing. It's the first milestone, being connected, being able to move my neck, use my jaw, get the digestion. The gut is really a muscle. It's movement. So when subluxation is there, it shows up in babies with these very clear signs that the nervous system storm is brewing. But again, the pediatrician says, ah, some kids, they just. They don't latch well. You know, here's your formula. Some kids, they. They don't sleep well. They'll grow out of it. Turn the TV up. Oh, some kids, the eustachia tubes are just more horizontal, like it's a bad IKEA coffee table that was installed wrong. That's not how God works. God designed our kids to be healthy from the beginning. And so these conditions that the pediatrician dismisses and says, don't worry, they'll grow out of it. Now, when that kid's 2 or 3, it's not only affected their gut, their immune system, their inflammation, their sensory motor planning is a mess. That's harder for parents to see, Josh, because I can ask them, hey, how's your kid sleep? How's your kid poop? How do they eat? But when you look at motor milestones, what's brilliant about the way God designed the brain? It's going to find its way upright. Meaning kids will put in all of these compensations on top of those subluxations and neurological dysfunctions. That's where the brain gets confused. It's already stressed. That's what we call stage one of sympathetic dominance. Stage two, when nervous system dysfunction progresses, it goes into confusion, developmental delays, sensory processing issues, and it shows up in their motor planning. And I did not used to see this until teenagers, brother man. But after you've been stressed out from birth, confused and off track developmentally, you get tired, you get depleted, and we have exhaustion. And that's where regression and chronic illness sets in because the body can't even, it can't even fight anymore.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, when you have these chronic stress hormones, cortisol, adrenaline, being released constantly, you're draining your mitochondria as you're draining your adrenal glands, it leads to exhaustion. I want to mention a couple other things about chiropractic care. And then I want to talk about pediatrics specifically for just a moment. You know, when it comes to chiropractic, I think that this is like any type of profession. You know, there are some amazing medical doctors and then there are some that are really just, you know, I think about, you know, friends of mine, like Dr. Mark Hyman or Gabrielle Lightning. These are good doctors, really good doctors and MDs. And then there's a lot of bad ones out there. I think the same thing in chiropractic. I think there's some amazing root cause chiropractors who are taking care of the whole person in the right way. I think there are some that act like, well, it's everything from, well, they don't even believe in. And there's others who think that it cures everything. They give it a bad name. And so all that being said, I think that it's important to understand what chiropractic can and can't do. Chiropractic is incredible for regulating the nervous system and not only getting rid of chronic pain. When you look at the clinical studies, it's incredible. For childhood digestion and colic, it's effective at supporting scoliosis. One of the most powerful studies ever done on chiropractic is showing that it lowers blood pressure by turning on the parasympathetic nerve system. It's been used by the top professional athletes, everyone from Dom Brady to Jerry Rice to the best soccer players, the best athletes in the world for sports performance. It's effective for so many things. When you look at the clinical studies,
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and in the last five years, they've done so many studies about immune markers, the ones that we want to go down and not be so inflammatory, they go down after adjustment, the stuff that helps the body detox. You can kick on detoxification, methylation, and elimination. With a chiropractic adjustment, you can activate the prefrontal cortex, which is where better decision, right? So there's all of this development that's happening in chiropractic, which is honestly mind blowing that something so simple that happens pretty quickly can be so powerful. And if you look at both moms, dads, and kids, if you look at the chronic illness, all of our patients have multiple. Right. They're not writing one thing on the intake form. It's a multitude of things.
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And one other important thing here is that when you look at adults versus children, oftentimes those adjustments are different. There's a lot of different techniques, but there's the same goal of let's calm and balance out the nerve system in the way that it's functioning. Now, I do have that question is when most people think about chiropractic adjustments for adults, there is a rapid motion. There's sometimes an audible noise. How is adjusting a child different than adjusting an adult?
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It couldn't be more different. So if you've scrolled TikTok and YouTube and you're like, that's chiropractic adjustments. And I'm gonna bring my baby in there, just stop that scroll and go over to our page and check them out there. So it's honestly the easiest way to say it. It's like checking an avocado for ripeness, right? So I can honestly. And I'll bring this up here. And we'd probably go into it a little bit different later, but my son's story, Oliver. So I had literally just put together all of this work about birth trauma. So I'm a super nerd, right? So I get into practice. Well, actually, I just probably. To get to that answer, I almost kind of want to go through Oliver's story, because he was in the NICU for six weeks. I adjusted him twice a day. And a medical doctor could have literally walked by me, Josh, While I was adjusting him and not even known that I was doing it. Because they probably think like everybody else thinks. An adjustment looks like this. So. So here's the depth of this, and it weaves into everything we're talking about, including this. So I had. I got in practice in 2007 and had no idea of being pediatrics and autism and epilepsy specialist. But two weeks before I graduated, my oldest baby girl, Addison, was born. And that was the opposite of the perfect storm. Meaning it was amazing, right? It was just, you know, Chelsea, Christina, these are the most rock star humans on earth. Natural birthday latching, nursing. And we're dudes, and we think we know things, and then our baby girls are bored, and then we. Everything. Like, I was gonna be a sports injury guy, right? All that stuff, everything I cared about about sports injuries and baseball pitchers ceased to exist in that moment that Addison was born. And I went full force into studying everything I could about pediatrics. That's where I started to figure out, oh, kids aren't just sick cause of genetics, and they're not just sick cause of toxins. That's where we figured out the birth trauma. So 2008, I put together my first lecture, and I literally give it to medical doctors, epileptologists, neurologists. I mean, the first time I gave the perfect storm talk couldn't have been a tougher room. But when you break down what birth trauma does, you just can't deny it, no matter who you are. That gets us to Oliver and the question about the adjustments. God.
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So what happened to your son Oliver?
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So the God knew. Exactly. I always say it this way, jokingly, brother. Cause it's a little easier than to go back to the worst time of life. But I think God knew that I had a pretty healthy dose of adhd and that I might veer into some other specialty three years later. And he wanted me to do this work for life. So in 2000, Memorial Day, 2009, Oliver was born about five and a half weeks early. And that's part of it. But the real thing was our midwife had Christina really wait a long time before she kind of gave her the green light to push. And the midwife and the whole medical team, they had no Expectation that Oliver would come out on the second push. So I know it sounds crazy to verbally say this on a podcast, but Christina delivered him on all fours, and on the second push, he shot out like a rocket. And about a year prior, I had just put together the research and the clinical protocols around birth trauma brainstem injuries. And I watched my son, like, at head height, I watch my son go, not be caught. I know how nuts that sounds to say not be caught. Delivered on all fours, head and neck flexed onto the bed. And obviously, because he didn't have his head come out and crown and get what we would call the way God designed it, you know, mom's first adjustment, where it gets the fluid out, and it isn't just about removing the fluid. It's about kickstarting breathing on your own neurological function and all that. Oliver missed all of that, so he missed that kickstart to his nervous system and his circulatory system. And then he had the physical injury from the birth chart trauma. Fast forward that to. He becomes a medical miracle. Right? So. But not yet. The first thing I did is literally cord attached, turned Christina around, put him on all fours. This is like all my training without any thinking, right? But this is why we do this. And I put him on all fours, umbilical cord still attached, so he could be still getting that, you know, oxygen and everything from Christina. And I made his first adjustment, but that still looked like the amount of force you could chuck an avocado.
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Well, and one reason I want to mention for everybody, the reason why adjusting a child is so different than an adult is their bones are really more like cartilage. I mean, everything moves. It's so spongy. I mean, you hardly have to do it.
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Barely anything.
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Yeah, it's very, very different than our solid bones.
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And it was so. And thankfully, I had the training and the understanding. So I know it's a long answer to that kind of simple question, but Oliver really represents how powerful it is with being so gentle, because as soon as I made that upper thoracic adjust, now we know neurology, right? We know how the nervous system works. So I knew that I needed to go to his upper thoracics, because that's where the respiratory system is. I actually needed to kick that in and get that going. Then we went to the upper cervical and worked on that. He became a medical miracle. I have the greatest respect and reverence. There was a helicopter ride from one hospital to another. He had heart lung bypass called ecmo, extracorporeal membrane Oxygenation. They told us Oliver, if he lived, they said he had a 20% chance.
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Wow. Really? So, okay, so you had to take a medical helicopter flight to the hospital. That's how serious.
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We went from an ambulance to one, and they said, oh, he's going to be okay. It's persistent pulmonary hypertension, which is what he had with his lungs, right? Because you don't get that start, so you have that fluid in your lungs. Your heart and lungs aren't going on your own. So they thought, hey, we'll give him some oxygen and he'll be okay. He crashed fully in that first hospital, full code blue crash. So they did what they did. They took him to a helicopter, to one hospital. Whole body, cooling, oxygenation. He still didn't make it through that. So they transferred him to Lutheran General in Chicago, and they literally did heart lung bypass. I mean, I watched medical miracles. I mean, God gave us that too, right? Machines and surgeons. They put a catheter in his jugular and it's crowded. They saved him. But the story with Oliver carries on because they said after all this, and I. I saw his eeg, I saw his mri, I know how bad his brain damage was. Like, I'm a doctor, right? We studied this stuff, so I'm not pretending it wasn't there. But I knew the whole time that God had put all this other stuff before our path so that they could save his life and we could restore it. So we adjusted him two to three times a day, and they said he had a 20% chance of living to age 1. And if he did, a 99% chance of epilepsy, autism, cerebral palsy. And they only said 99, brother, because it would have sounded quite harsh to say 100 out loud. So all the things that I had built my clinic specializing in, here I was sitting across from Stanford and Harvard trained neurologists telling me, my son's guaranteed to have that outcome. And he didn't. Medicine saved him. And then they were done. They wanted him on this medication. Phenobarbital, Keppra, blood pressure medication, liver medication. I remember asking him, like, does he really need this liver medication? Couldn't we just get the liver working better on its own? And then were like, one guy goes, well, do you really want to wait for that? And I was like, okay, that's a different part of it. But so I adjusted him two to three times a day. And it literally is just laying of hands. And where did I focus? His parasympathetic system, his brain stem, his digestion, his sacrum.
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So I knew we have this nerve for everybody else that runs from around your brain stem, that very upper part of your neck where it meets the skull. And that nerve runs down and feeds all of your organs for your heart to beat, your lungs to breathe, your stomach to digest food. That vagus nerve is so important. And so you were going to this vagus nerve and just continually stimulating that parasympathetic nerve.
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It goes back to our first five minutes. If you want to break that cycle of sympathetic dominance, which honestly, not just our babies and our kids with autism and seizures are in, everybody's in sympathetic dominance. So the vagus nerve is the key access point. And the vagus nerve responds to deep breathing and it responds to different things. But you know what it really responds to?
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Touch adjustments. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a great point. You know, when we think about today, a lot of the research around parasympathetics, the thing to your point in the deep breathing, in the box breathing for adults, humming, gargling, you know, we have these things like neuropod people do today. I mean, there are some really great things, but the chiropractic adjustment goes deeper, impacts this parasympathetic nervous system, especially in both adult, but also especially in children. So this is one of the core ways that you break this vicious cycle. Now I want to ask you this. What are the biggest signs and symptoms that a child has? A dysregulated nervous system?
A
That's a million dollar question. Because once your kiddo. So we got to tie this all together. Once the pediatrician has said, alcohol, colic and indigestion and the constipation and the eczema and the allergies and all that sort of, you know, they get chronic ear infections and they get antibiotics, destroy their gut. They get steroids, which creates, you know, immune system dysregulation. And so parents think, oh, that's no longer a problem. The gut issues, the sleep issues. Well, I shouldn't say that. Parents know they've just been talked out of it. And so they get a diagnosis of autism or adhd. And that looks like, hey, we should focus on. We can find nervous system dysregulation through behavior issues or focus issues, right? Or anxiety issues. You can find it through those soft signs. If a kiddo can't fall asleep and stay asleep, that's nervous system dysregulation. If they can't go to the bathroom without the fanciest magnesium supplements and enemas and Miralax that's neurogenic constipation. If they you have the most pristine diet, you have detoxed your kiddo, you have moved out into the country, and you homeschool, and your kiddo's immune system can't get stronger. That's nervous system dysregulation. Because when in sympathetic dominance, the body's pro inflammatory. And so what we meet now is families who have done so many things, but the signs of nervous system dysregulation are sleep issues, gut issues, respiratory and immune system issues, and then the sensory, the behavior, the emotion. And so what's cool about mapping that out is when you get a kiddo better with behavior issues or you look to get them better, you can't track that. First you have to track are they sleeping better, are they pooping better, are they moving better, are they breathing better? That vagus nerve, it'll get so trapped in the upper cervicals and the cervical thoracic that kid can't deep breathe no matter how many sticker charts you promise them. Yeah, they literally mechanically kind of can't access that breath right after these adjustments. You see kiddos take deep breaths right after these adjustments. Teenagers love this. I got my start in teenagers and young adults. I would tell them all the time, they come from all over the world. Right. For epilepsy. And I'll be like, you know what you're gonna do today? You're gonna take a nap, and you're gonna have to go to the bathroom. And the teens are like, this is the weirdest conversation any doctor's ever had. But that's how they heal.
B
Yeah. And it's worse today than ever before. You mentioned birth trauma and then child. You know, a lot of kids today have, of course, these antibiotics, which affects the second brain. So that's going to cause nervous system dysregulation. And there's a number of things. One question I have for you is when you think about this chiropractic adjustment for these kids being one of those five. Let's talk about one of five things. But if you think about the top five things in ranking order, like if you are taking care of of your own kids or other families, what are those top five things in ranking order that parents should be doing to optimize their children's health?
A
Got it. This is such an important question because it literally is the sequencing and the layering that goes in. So once you get the nervous system moving in the right direction. So we do start there nervous system repair regulation. Right. That's Number one. And I don't say that because it's our initials. It's just how God made us. The nervous system is the boss, right? So if you don't turn that back online, 2, 3, 4 and 5 are going to be helpful to, but they're gonna be limited in their help. Number two is movement based therapies. Pt, OT and speech therapy. The body, the brain is designed to move. If you don't reorganize the sensory motor map, and this is the hard one, nobody thinks it's number two because nobody can see it. A kiddo with autism, when they're stimming and they're clumsy and they're tired all the time, their brain, their cerebellum, which actually runs more of the rest of the brain than we think, the cerebellum is literally leaving them into that sympathetic stone. So after we start to get these kiddos better neurologically, a lot of times parents will say, we did pt, we did ot, we did speech, and we didn't see any improvements in motor planning. That's because the nervous system was in the way. So number two is movement. And it doesn't have to be. I probably shouldn't even said p T O T speech first. Go outside, go to the park, get him moving, get him swimming. You know what the best sports are for that are things like martial arts, gymnastics, taekwondo.
B
It was funny. Chelsea and I were literally just talking about this and I think the list was to your point for kids with ADHD and sensory issues was. I do think it was martial arts swimming. Swimming was very high. Gymnastics and the fourth might have been something like soccer, but those were the ones that were the most because it
A
uses the whole body. You're going right to left. You have to reorganize the brain after you regulate the brain because they missed out on this. So the more movement, the more jungle gyms. Again, you don't have to put in a sensory gym in your basement. Just go get a movement number three. This one I would argue, I feel like it's 3A and 3B. I would go to 3B first, which is because they're so awful you have to take toxins out. You just gotta switch to clean and Clean what? Clean everything. Kids and chemicals don't mix. I say it on our podcast all the time. Kids and chemicals don't mix. You don't want them inhaled, ingested or injected. That's just the way it is. So 3B is cleaning up nutrition in the diet. 3A is adding the omega 3. When you were on our podcast. You went right in it. We got to get those mega 3s in there. We got to get the clean macronutrients in there and the protein. Because even if the nervous system is healing and reorganizing, it's got to have the nourishment to do that. And then, honestly, number four is also probably a place not a lot of parents would think, but they'll have a lot of challenges with dental health.
B
Wow.
A
When you have a kiddo who has been under a sympathetic storm, they're also airway. They're mouth breathers.
B
Yeah, that's right.
A
And they've had antibiotics and their body's been pro inflamed. And so I am not a holistic biological dentist. Brother. Man. This is the one area where I'm like, glad I went to chiropractic school, you know, because I look in there. Even for your kids, I'm like, I'm gonna need an expert. But if you have a non stop infection happening in there, then that's going to be.
B
Yeah, it's a great point. Yeah.
A
And five is kind of an offshoot of that. A lot of times you can find this in the case history. And I separate it from 3 and toxins. A lot of these kiddos have secondary and tertiary infections.
B
That's right.
A
A lot of these kiddos need to go see our buddy Dr. Motley or somebody like that. So what I've done with our work is I've built a clinical protocol that does a lot of number one, and we even created adjustments that are more reorganizational, along with activating the parasympathetics. And then we hand it off to a team. And what we do with our patients is we partner with them. I feel like the medical system is always trying to be the dictatorship instead of a partnership.
B
That's right.
A
Yeah. And so we give personalized care for each kid. And that may be. Hey, number three for you. Is this provider over here. So we're going to make that referral and collaborate. And each kid has a little bit of a different playbook that they go through, but it tends to follow those five paces.
B
I mean, it makes total sense to me. I think about almost every condition that I deal with. Again, so many of them are due to being in sympathetic state. Breaking that sympathetic state. And this is where we talk about something like pandas earlier or autism. There's something that's continually causing issues. You know, with autism, the way that I would typically look at it is I would find that there would tend to Be issues related to leaky gut.
A
Yes.
B
Right. And so they were eating foods like gluten and casein. Those were leaking through, but it tended. It typically started with either birth trauma or antibiotics taken when they were very, very young. I believe was another contributor. There are studies on aspirin, of course, the mother's healthy. Epigenetics. You talked about how in the father's health, all of that can contribute to your point, what you call the perfect storm. And then we need to break this dysregulation. But in autism, I would really focus on getting them on what I would call a, you know, just sort of a perfect diet that was based on what I do with Chinese medicine. It's a lot of, you know, cooked vegetables. And meat was predominantly certain, you know, fruits like baked pears. And getting them on that diet doing things to repair the gut microbiome, the zinc and that type of thing. But, you know, and then there's other things with killing chronic infections, you know, that's another thing. To your point, mold, seeing more and more tissues with mold issues. Yeah.
A
And the body, again, if it's in sympathetic dominance, it's gonna hard time, you know, getting those out of there. But when you layer this, the answer is e, all the above. Right. That's where the best thing comes from. But there's a very specific sequence to it. This probably needs to be said in this. And I think it's the same for healing adults. Right. We have a pediatric and family practice. We take these Perfect Storm kids and get them. But guess who was in the perfect storm with them? The moms and the dads. And so they're dysregulated, they're dysautonomic, their adrenals, their cortisol, their immune systems. What is really an important thing to say is healing has to happen in a sequence. For these kiddos, they are more plastic, meaning they have more moldability and heal ability than before. But they're pretty overwhelmed and they're pretty exhausted. So even if we do all the right things, we have to layer them in kind of one at a time, even, like, adding supplements. And I learned this, Josh, because when I first figured everything out, it's me with my raging bull energy. I'm like, I'm gonna build the biggest clinic. I was integrated before it was cool, you know what I mean? And everything under one roof. And what I did is I added everything into a kid's care plan right away. And that's how simple this is. We still are probably going to need all these Things over time to get this kid better. But I think a lot of parents will really. This will really land for them. And probably some adults trying to heal their own story, too. If you're trying to do everything all at once, you might be canceling each other out because the body is so exhausted and dysregulated, it can't even take all of these good things and assimilate them and organize them.
B
I'm so glad you're saying this, because I do think there's an element. I see this in our practice, the Longevity Clinic in Nashville, and then my virtual practice, the Health Institute. A lot of times, people want to kind of come in and do everything at once, and you got to do things in stages. And stage number one thing that I teach is you have to recharge the batteries. Most people, because of the high cortisol, the sympathetic state, your batteries are at nothing. And then you're saying, I need you to build this, repair this, cleanse this, fix everything at once. And it's like, no, we gotta recharge the batteries first. I see people hurt. I'll give you an example of this. I see people all the time want to do parasite cleanses and mold cleanses and all these things suddenly, like. And go all in, and the body is too weak. Fight Lyme disease. Most of their battery is so low. It's like, you gotta build up and rechar these batteries, and you do it with diet and lifestyle and holistic treatments as you're talking about, like, chiropractic adjustments or doing the deep breathing and these things to get completely out of sympathetic state. And I can't tell you how many patients I have that generally the single reason why they're not healing right now is they're stuck in sympathetic.
A
It'll hold. Literally when we say everything. I think this is probably why some people who maybe are big fans of this sort of work, they probably just dismiss what we're talking about offhand, because it's like, how can one thing help everything? Right? That's probably chiropractic's biggest fricking challenge, is just that statement, because some of us literally do talk about this nervous system approach sympathetic dominance. And then if you tie everything to that, everything is tied to that. And so. But it's not saying, oh, it's gonna happen from one adjustment overnight. It's the resetting, repairing of the nervous system so that then when you add on these other healing interventions. And I had to learn that myself, right. The hard way with clinic, right? Because when I first Started. What's so cool with my journey is I only knew the chiropractic interventions and those things. And then you go.
B
I went.
A
Got every certification under the sun, you know, and I started Lay it on. And it was about three to five years in the clinic. And I'm like, our clinical results are getting worse. It's hard for me to even say nowadays, you know, it breaks my heart because I just didn't know what I didn't know. And we started to plateau. And actually, I want to take this deeper because with kids with autism, seizures and pandas, that's really probably my specialty. Like our intensive program, kids don't necessarily come from South Africa for an ear infection. Right. We have our PX Talks network. They can go anywhere for that, but they will come to us. Knowing Oliver's story, knowing my specialty, with really tough stuff, seizures, you know, all those sort of things.
B
Yeah.
A
There's three outcomes you can get with any intervention, brother man. You can get them better. Not so wide range of better. You could have no change. You know, they could just stay plateaued or stuck. You can make things worse. What I actually started to see is I. When we would take a kiddo with pans or epilepsy or really tough autism, and their case history and their labs would tell us, we gotta get these toxins out, we gotta get these parasites out. But if you do it before the nervous system can handle it, the seizures go through the roof, the motor ticks go through the roof, the pandas flares go through the roof. And so I had to learn that the hard way. Where we now say, okay, I know you may not wanna hear this mom and dad, but we're gonna take 90 to 100 days and we're gonna work on the foundation only. We're gonna work on the nervous system. Sleeping, eating, getting the good foods in, getting good digestion going. We have to have digestive motility. Let's say the detox kit works. We gotta get it out of there. You know what I mean? So there's a lot of that, that I think cross sections in the work that we do. And it's kind of hiding right there in plain sight. This sympathetic dominance nervous system story.
B
Yeah, it's so good. You know, one thing, I saw you on a call recently with for my and Make America Healthy Again.
A
They made me go to Washington D.C. and put a suit coat on. Dude, speaking of sympathetic dominance and high anxiety, you take an Iowa farm kid, put him in Washington D.C. in a suit coat.
B
So how was your experience there? I Mean, what do you think of some of the initiatives RFK is up to?
A
Yeah, well, everybody listening Again, we're coming from an Iowa farm kid who likes to take care of patients, love on his family, and mow his lawn. So this is, by far, Brother man, my first foray into any of this sort of stuff. So I. I want to give you the layers. I don't want to give it too long of an answer, but I spent all of last year praying about it. Okay. I met Secretary Kennedy many years ago, Cal J. Remember, he spoke there with us all those years. And so he's always been an advocate for stuff that we are, that we know to be very important, that the world needed to know about. And so I've actually been praying for him in the Children's Health Defense for. For probably the better part of a decade. They're in my prayers. They're in. You know, I've supported that organization. Have I actively been involved? No. And then God hit me with it last year, kind of. I don't know how God works for me. I'm a bit of a sarcastic sort of guy. So I think God, you know, communicates back to me in my style. And he's like, well, you can't complain about it if you're not gonna do anything about it. Cause I was watching Maha, and awesomely, everybody was talking about toxins and antibiotics and vaccinations and all this sort of stuff. Stuff nobody was talking about the nervous system, you know, nobody was talking about just what we chatted about for the last half hour. Yeah. And so I sat on these calls, going all the way through last year, brother, and I was like, I can't be frustrated and I can't whine about this to my team and my profession if I'm not willing to go do something. So I spent a lot of time over Christmas and the New Year just praying and praying and praying and journaling. And out of nowhere, AKA through God's, you know, just direction, a bunch of phone calls started to come, and they said, hey, we gotta tackle autism, and we need to work on pandas, and we need to work on these sort of things. And some of these other biomedical experts have come to take their kids to PX docs. Oh, wow. Yeah. And I made referrals and connected with them, and they started to see changes. So, long story short, I decided to show up and do what I do. Help talk, share the story. So share Oliver's story. Teach the science. And it got recognition. And so I've been on a Couple of the zooms talking about autism, birth trauma, and honestly, just shifting healthcare. Where the stats are there, the reality is there. If parents only have a conventionally trained pediatrician to trust with their health questions and the health outcomes of their kids. Here we are. Where are we gonna go from there?
B
Your kids are gonna stay sick.
A
They're gonna stay sick.
B
That's the reality. That's the reality.
A
We don't have to. And I actually think this too. I think, like, I watched Oliver be a medical miracle. This is me on my so. But we're asking them to do things they have no training, no experience, and didn't sign up to do. They're emergency doctors.
B
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so funny because I think about. And this is changing generationally, you know, I think about, like my grandmother. So my grandmother at points was on. I mean, at one point I remember my mom saying, she's on 18 different medications. I mean, it was crazy. Just counting the pills three times a day, just. It was kind of overwhelming. And my grandma, she was just so sick and drugged up all the time. And I remember seeing that and just thinking, that is no way to live. And she was constantly stuck in this medical system. And then my family grew up in this medical model, and my mom's so sick. And then I started realizing over time that medical doctors are trained for emergency medicine. That's really what they're trained to do. They're trained for sick care, how to save your life in an emergency. They are not trained for healthcare. They've never reversed hypothyroidism. They've never reversed autism or heart disease, any of these things. They've only basically treated. And it's not to say that there aren't cancer diagnoses that aren't reversed, but also looking at the long term studies on mortality rates and lifespan, most of the time it's actually not increasing lifespan. You know, it's actually the opposite. Yeah, it can often be the opposite versus a doctor. And listen, I don't care if it's an MD or a DC or a DO or what it is or an np, but somebody that can go and actually do root cause medicine. And that's more, you know, and whether that be with nutrition or movement or chiropractic care, but these are the people you want in your corner who are going to help you. And I know you and I both had nutrition training in our studies as being, you know, as DCs, whereas MDs get zero and the body moves.
A
We have nutrition training, we have fitness Training. We have lifestyle training. Like, we are so empowering. You know, you could argue what's more powerful for our patients, the adjustment or the education. But you know, I always call it. We grew up in the same era. I call it the Deion Sanders and the Bo Jackson answer. Remember when that one. Pizza. Okay, Pizza Hut commercial. Great pun there. But remember when Jerry Jones was like, dion, you want to play football or baseball? He goes, both. Do you want to make 5 million or 10 million? Both. So this isn't a pediatrician versus a chiropractor story. It's both. You've got to save them for emergency. But should you start there?
B
Yeah. The other reality I do want to say here, in sort of defending all of these sort of professionals that are very good, is this, that you know what, like, we learn the very basics of nutrition in school, but you have to learn so much more. I mean, listen, every MD or DO or DC or np, you really learn this on your own via self study. And the best way to find somebody great is talk to people that have seen great results under their care. Ask around, direct referrals. I can also say there's a great group of docs at PX Docs. So if you are looking for a good practitioner that practices like Dr. Tony Ebel here, you can go to pxdocs.com, so those are great practitioners. There's other good practitioners out there, and I know other great groups, places like Max Living and remarkable practice in some of these docs as well. So there are some really amazing doctors out there. But to do what you're doing, this is the PXDOC school.
A
Well, you nailed it. I think the other thing we always tell parents to look for in a doctor, it doesn't matter. The initial, doesn't matter what. Here's the rubric we give them. Look for someone who literally the moment you have them start talking about what they do, you can't get them to show. Shut up. That's like, I love when I hear you and Jordan teach about nutrition. Right? The moment you guys start going and so you just, you almost can't stop because it's just literally you're calling in your expertise, which is a dead ringer for the second thing. You're gonna be better at what you do tomorrow. I know you. You have built these clinics, you have built this following because you're not resting on not only what you learned in school. You're gonna figure something out new next week, you know, to get better results. You're relentless.
B
One Thing I also want to mention that I appreciate about you and the way you practice is it's not a cookie cutter approach. And this is how you know, you found a good doctor or practitioner is a lot of times I see this, somebody will come into a functional medicine doctor and they will literally put every patient on keto, every person on carnivore, every person on anti inflammatory. And here's the reality is every person needs something customized for them based on what they're dealing with.
A
Same with autism, dude.
B
It's the same there. Absolutely, absolutely.
A
Yeah, that's key. And so if you find that doctor who just is so well experienced, more so than educated, and that's where you find it through the patients, if they're getting results, they know what they're doing. And then I think the other key is you want a doctor who is obsessively personalized for the way you're going to take care of your kiddo. And a partnership, if you have a good doctor, they're going to work together with the other providers on your team. That I find parents get frustrated with because they'll have these great individual doctors. But if they don't play ball with like we talked about earlier, those sequences, those things need to happen. So what we've trained our PX docs on Israel to do personalized neurologically focused care. But also know when to collaborate and take it serious. You know, find the other experts. Don't try and be a jack of all trades. Cause I don't think that's good doctoring either, right? To try and do 17 things with excellence. But find the other providers in your community or virtually that can take these. I have two kiddos in the last month here, dude, who have come down here and seen Dr. Motley. My job was to get their nervous system ready to be in what we call the ready state and the regulated state. So that when he went after those secondary infections and the mold, the body could handle it because they were both seizure cases. So if I had sent those two kids into a practitioner like that too soon, one, it probably wouldn't have worked as well, and two, it would have come with a lot of blowback.
B
Walk me through the process of what it typically looks like. Somebody comes into your practice, what are some of the different things sort of in order that you typically favorite questions and maybe give me example of somebody who you did this with that had had autism and then their diagnosis was completely different later or seizures or something like that.
A
Oh, got it. Okay. Well, these two kiddos are over here from the UK right now. It's awesome because, you know, the 250th anniversary of this country's coming up, so it's fun. We had this sensory kiddo. He was so social. He wouldn't come into the office and he wouldn't speak. And just now, now he's running around the office. He had this like, USA flag. He's a little British kid, right? And he's running around the office with the USA flag. And I got him to yell freedom. It's the greatest moment of my career because it's a nonverbal kid who's now in love with freedom. And so those two cases are perf. So number one thing that we do is we start with a really in depth case history. It's the DC thing. Doctor of Cause obsessed. We start asking questions about fertility and perinatal and birth trauma. And right there, parents know we're different, right? Because we're not asking, like, hey, tell me about the diagnosis and the daily struggles. That's on the paperwork. They're going to give me that. So we're going to dig in deep. And I need to know how early the perfect storm started because unfortunately, that's what we call a depth finder. That starts to tell us already what we're up against. Against. Second, we run technology. We are the most advanced clinic within chiropractic. We run hrv, heart rate variability. You can do that with an ear clip on an infant. Okay. And HRV is a measure of dysregulation, sympathetic dominance, or lack of vagal tone. When the variability goes down, it's because you're sympathetic dominant and the vagus nerve is not online. HRV is huge for, like a global stress test, and you can do it on everybody and then thermal. So you're finding those patterns of neuroinflammation within the different visceral systems and how subluxation's messing with those. And then emg. EMG is my bread and butter because I'm a neurosensory. EMG is the close cousin to eeg, right? EEG is of the cortex. But I've even told neurologists this. The nervous system doesn't stop at the foramen magnum. It goes all the way down through the spinal cord. So EMG is for that. So we do a deep dive case history. We do the insight scans and we look deep for pattern analysis. I can find the quantity of a kiddo's nervous system dysfunction. I can find its location. I could do an exam on an infant Brother man and I could tell you whether they were delivered with C section forceps or vacuum, and whether the doctor was right or left handed. Then we do a very, very personalized care plan. The biggest thing that chiropractors will miss with nervous system dysfunction in kids protocol on adjusting. Yes, care planning. We just have to update our recommendations to. Unfortunately, the perfect storm that families are living in with toxic soup on top of it. What I used to get results with two to three times a week is now often two times a day or daily adjustments. And so that's why it's important for our clinics to have a lot of the availability, right? Because the tricky thing with chiropractic is you can't put it in a box and take it home, you know, at dinner. So the higher frequency initially is required to break that cycle we've been talking about.
B
You know, it can make sense. Chelsea and I were talking about this recently with. Our daughter's been doing swimming every day. And throughout the entire year, the level of improvement is more like once or twice a week, doing five days a week versus the one or two days a week. In one month. She's gotten better than she did in 12 months, five or six months overall, because it's just a daily thing. And being able to train her, those patterns and those skills, very similar way. These nervous system patterns, you gotta get
A
into reset and then stick. So what's different also is we wanna get it better, but we don't want to. Kids are still gonna grow, they're still gonna have stress, they're still gonna have things that they face. So the other thing we do is we have that higher initial frequency with the personalized care plan, the personalized adjustments. And then we have longer duration to our plans because we gotta outpace the stress. We gotta outpace the growth spurts. We gotta. I have three daughters. Turns out sometimes in junior high and high school, girls, girls aren't that nice to each other. You know, all this stuff is just coming around, right? And you gotta see that stress coming and not take this, like, woe is me, life's awful. Just take an adaptability reserve capacity component to it. That's what we do with our patients. And then we layer in every kind of empowerment and education and partnership you could possibly get. We know when they're ready to detox and we make that referral or we add the supplements. You know, we just recently started working with Kingdom Health Sciences. We're loving that, right? To be able to do some good things there. Cellular health. What you guys, it's how it works.
B
Yeah. Share with me one more story of somebody and how I forgot about that
A
because I'm so obsessed with our clinical process, I just nerd out about it. So these two kids come over there and they had done everything so awesomely in the uk, it's worse than here. So the conventional system says it's genetic. There's nothing you can do about it. Just accept it. These moms here, there and everywhere don't. But these two families had already cleaned up the whole diet, added a ton of supplements. I think the one kiddo I'm thinking of, he came in and he was on 38 different herbal homeopathic, cookie cutter like you were talking about before. And not only did it not work, when they tried to detox him, his pandas flares and his spectrum issues got significantly worse. They also had gone to and done a couple other intensives that have to do with what would be called functional neurology. Right. Brain hemisphericity, lasers, that sort of stuff that done too soon can upset the apple cart too. So what we did with these kiddos is we found that as they went to move, the finding we found with them in our exam is that it was their motor planning. Was their gut a mess? Were they inflamed? Yes. But their motor motility, both gross motor with the skeletal system and the bigger muscles, and then their digestive motility was completely stalled out. So what I did is we focused the first 30, 60, 90 days just on reorganizing their neuromotor system. And it's hard to talk about on a podcast, but if you were to see these kids, they were literally, they looked like teenagers. They were slumped forward, their shoulders are rotated, their head is tilted, and every step they took, they had to put in so much effort just to deal with gravity. That's the most exhausting thing the brain could ever go through. And everybody else missed it. So all I say, all we focused on, the major thing we focused on during their intensive, which is like this three week program we do in our clinic. I just wanted to get their nervous system out of that exhaustion and confusion so that it's easier to reset and repair from there. And within two days, this first kiddo started sleeping through the night. Never had two to four hours, so slept like 14 hours. The mom's like, I gotta cancel my morning appointment. They're still sleeping. We're celebrating, right? Like, don't worry. See, this afternoon, that's what we need to get the healing back on. Never poop. Probably Once a week with all the, you know, throwing everything at it. Kid is young, just this family, they got kicked out of their Airbnb because they destroyed the plumbing, because detoxing so literally removed so many toxins and things. And then as soon as he started sleeping, pooping, we worked on respiration and breath. Literally, brother man, the movement turned right back online. The way God designed it. There was no more the asymmetry, there was no more the rotational, confusing, stressing, movement. This kid just calmed, just moved, just regulated. You get sleeping, pooping, breathing, immune system back online and the motor system, speech, all the mechanics of communication for most of those kiddos, it's in there. It's just project management. The brain's not going to turn on socialization, speech and communication until it feels safe and ready and until it's checked all the other boxes. So as soon as you see these healing go through these stages, you don't know when the speech and communication and socialization is coming, but when it does, it's a celebration.
B
It's powerful. By the way, one thing I want to mention about sometimes when you put kids on too many herbs, these herbs are dried, okay? So typically herbs have water before that. So they're dry herbs and many of them are bitter, which dries out the body. So you can do a little bit of herbs, but you got to be careful because she can make constipation worse, worse if it's not done properly. So a lot of times I see this where docs are like, I'm just going to throw everything at it at once versus no, it's a process. And you do steps and there's a very specific way to do it, which is what I love about what you've done is you've created such an amazing system of getting to the root cause and then doing the right steps in the right order to help kids who have these fired up, sympathetic nerve systems get into that parasympathetic state so they can heal. And so I want to say thanks so much for all the amazing work you're doing. Dr. Tony. I want to mention Dr. Toney has an incredible practice. Hey, he's trained 750 doctors in his network. You can go to PX, PXdocs docs pxdocs.com. check out Dr. Tony. Check out these amazing doctors that are helping so many kids around the entire world. Also want to say thank you to all of you for listening in this podcast. By the way, don't forget to subscribe. It's the number one thing you do to support the show and think about who's that one person? Do you know somebody who has a child who is struggling with one of these issues? Hey, text them this episode. It may radically improve their family's life and their child's life. So thanks so much for doing that and thanks so much for tuning in. Here to the Dr. Josh Ack show, where I'm on YouTube, Apple, Spotify. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcast so you don't miss a thing. Thanks again here to Dr. Tony Ebel. I can't wait to see you on the next episode.
Episode: Why Are Kids So Sick Today? The 5 Things Every Parent Needs To Know | Dr. Tony Ebel
Date: July 2, 2026
Host: Dr. Josh Axe
Guest: Dr. Tony Ebel (Founder of PX Docs, Pediatric Chiropractor)
This episode explores the alarming rise in chronic pediatric health challenges such as autism, ADHD, anxiety, autoimmune diseases, and sensory processing disorders. Dr. Josh Axe sits down with Dr. Tony Ebel, a leading pediatric chiropractor, to dive deep into why these trends are accelerating, the missing root causes overlooked by conventional and even functional medicine, and a precise, sequenced approach to healing. Dr. Ebel blends personal testimony, science, and clinical pearls, advocating for a paradigm shift that puts nervous system health and resilience at the center of pediatric care.
“He had a 20% chance of living to age 1. And if he did, a 99% chance of epilepsy, autism, cerebral palsy... Yet he didn’t.” – Dr. Ebel (02:12, 27:57)
Chronic infections, including mold, can stall progress if the above aren’t addressed first.
Layering and sequencing matter: Overwhelmed bodies can’t handle “all at once” interventions; must build resilience in stages.
“Within two days, this first kiddo started sleeping through the night...” — Dr. Ebel (57:50)
The discussion is warm, hopeful, and deeply passionate, blending rigorous science with spiritual undertones ("it's just how God made us"), and practical wisdom born from lived experience. Dr. Ebel’s narratives are vivid and sometimes raw; Dr. Axe helps anchor clinical points for accessibility.
[Listen to the full episode for depth, moving stories, and practical strategies to help your child thrive.]