Why Are Kids So Sick Today? The 5 Things Every Parent Needs To Know | Dr. Tony Ebel

What if your child’s anxiety, ADHD, sensory issues, gut problems, sleep struggles, or chronic illness weren’t just genetic — and weren’t only caused by toxins? In this episode, Dr. Tony Ebel reveals the hidden “sympathetic stress loop” he believes keeps many children stuck in survival mode, unable to fully heal even after diet changes, supplements, detoxes, and conventional treatment. Dr. Ebel also shares the shocking personal story of his son Oliver, who doctors said had only a 20% chance of surviving to age one and a 99% chance of epilepsy, autism, or cerebral palsy if he lived. What he did next became the foundation for the protocol he now uses to help children around the world. Uncover what’s really going on in your body with advanced biomarker testing for hormones, thyroid, and metabolism— plus a 1-hour consultation with a Senior Health Advisor! → http://mybloodwork.com Thank you to our sponsors! Sunlighten Sauna: https://get.sunlighten.com/axepodcast Manukora Manuka Honey: https://manukora.com/axe Caraway Home: carawayhome.com/drjoshaxe (Use code DRJOSHAXE) for an exclusive discount Watch The Dr. Josh Axe Show every Monday & Thursday on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@drjoshaxe?sub_confirmation=1 🎧 Early Access! Our listeners enjoy every episode before anyone else! Tune in below and join our exclusive group of listeners → Spotify: https://bit.ly/DrJoshAxeSpotify Apple Podcast: https://apple.co/3JDvWcS Pre-order my NEW BOOK, Heal Your Cells → https://bit.ly/3QJBcQ5 Watch my free training on how to naturally balance your blood sugar and reverse your symptoms → http://DrAxeDiabetesClass.com Discover practical steps you can take today to start healing your thyroid naturally → http://DrAxeThyroidClass.com If you’re ready to start feeling like yourself again and balance your hormones, take my free class → http://DrAxeHormoneClass.com CONNECT WITH DR. JOSH AXE Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/drjoshaxe/ Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/DrJoshAxe/ TikTok → https://www.tiktok.com/@thedrjoshaxeshow/ X → https://x.com/drjoshaxe/ LinkedIn → https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshaxe Website → http://thehealthinstitute.com Sign up for my newsletter → https://bit.ly/4oE9Jf3 Ask Dr. Axe → http://speakpipe.com/drjoshaxe CONNECT WITH DR. TONY EBEL Instagram → https://www.instagram.com/pxdocs Facebook → https://www.facebook.com/drtonyebel/ Website → https://pxdocs.com/ 00:00 — The Hidden Cause Behind Sick Kids 01:19 — Why Autism, ADHD & Anxiety Are Rising 03:22 — Genetics, Toxins & The Missing Root Cause 06:53 — Why Supplements Alone Don’t Break The Cycle 08:20 — How Kids Get Stuck In Sympathetic Dominance 10:29 — Pediatric Chiropractic & The Power Of Touch 13:01 — What Chiropractic Really Does To The Nervous System 15:28 — Subluxation, Movement & Brain Development 18:49 — Cortisol, Mitochondria & Childhood Exhaustion 21:03 — How Pediatric Adjustments Are Different 23:34 — Dr. Ebel’s Son Oliver & The Birth Trauma Story 29:57 — Signs Your Child’s Nervous System Is Dysregulated 32:44 — The Top 5 Things Parents Should Do First 36:43 — Autism, Leaky Gut, Antibiotics & The Perfect Storm 38:01 — Why Healing Must Happen In The Right Sequence 40:36 — The Danger Of Detoxing Too Soon 43:03 — MAHA, RFK & The Future Of Children’s Health 46:02 — Sick Care vs Root-Cause Health Care 48:09 — How To Find The Right Practitioner For Your Child 51:25 — HRV, EMG & Nervous System Testing 55:51 — The UK Case Study: Sleep, Digestion & Motor Planning 59:09 — Why Too Many Herbs Can Backfire 01:00:03 — Where To Find Dr. Tony Ebel & PX Docs DISCLAIMER This content is strictly the opinion of Dr. Josh Axe and is for informational and educational purposes only. It is not intended to provide medical advice or to take the place of medical advice or treatment from a personal physician. All viewers of this content are advised to consult their doctors or qualified health professi

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Kids aren't just sick because of genetics and they're not just sick because of toxins. So there must be something earlier that triggered stress deeper within the body. The deepest place we can go within the body is the central and autonomic nervous system. These kids are physically within their neuromotor system stuck in that sympathetic loop. That's nervous system dysregulation.

• 0:18Josh Axe?

  It's about breaking the cycle of neurological stress.

• 0:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:29Josh Axe?

  How do you break the cycle?

• 0:31Speaker 00

  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.

• 0:41Josh Axe?

  What happened to your son Oliver?

• 0:42Speaker 00

  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 one. And if he did, a 99% chance epilepsy, autism, three repulsed. And they only said 99, brother, because it would have sounded quite harsh to say 100 out loud.

• 1:19Josh Axe?

  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 in 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.

• 2:01Josh Axe?

  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.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:37Josh Axe?

  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 don't 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 of 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?

• 3:22Speaker 00

  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. So the 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

• 4:03Speaker 00

  and they go down these functional medicines, 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 going to 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 parents to is way upstream in the developmental pathway.

• 4:42Speaker 00

  We just have more nervous system, stress and dysregulation through moms and their nervous systems. We're not supporting them. We're not empowering it. We're medicalizing pregnancy and fertility. 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, we call it the hidden in plain sight. It's the most exciting, but life transforming moment, right? Your beautiful kiddos, our kiddos.

• 5:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. 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.

• 6:09Speaker 00

  The rates of intervention have literally shifted in the last two to three generations. Add in, look at any one of them, they're 2X, 3X, 4X higher. And that gets into the brainstem, that wreaks havoc, that triggers the sympathetics. 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, you know, 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.

• 6:53Josh Axe?

  Yeah. 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 going to drug this. We're going to medicate this. They're just keep saying we don't know. More than 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 a 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

• 7:39Josh Axe?

  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 got to 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 this 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 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?

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, you got to go deeper. So you find it by going deeper in 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 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 all those years ago that we don't really remember, but we 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 it's the most moldable that it is.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  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 is the vagus nerve and the parasympathetic is just suppressed. See, the difference with kids and 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,

• 9:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:55Josh Axe?

  Well, think about this. A lot of these kids, to your point, birth trauma being such a big thing from the moment they've come out of the birth canal, right? Uh, 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, I just connected to autism. I 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 you if not, you just can't, they can't ever heal.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  No. 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 it's two truths at the same time. Our job is easier than ever because parents are awesomely finding all these resources. 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

• 11:11Speaker 00

  manual input to go right at the central non-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?

• 11:52Josh Axe?

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• 12:34Josh Axe?

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• 12:59Josh Axe?

  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. Okay. 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 that system in general. And to your point, you know, 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.

• 13:41Josh Axe?

  It's going to help decrease some of the inflammation, but you're still going to have pain and there's still going to be a major problem there until that shoulder is put back into the correct location. Until the 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.

• 14:24Josh Axe?

  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 going to deteriorate. It's going to stiffen. It's going to 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 several 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

• 15:05Josh Axe?

  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 just, I just wanted to put it like that because I don't think people fully understand. So feel free to share.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  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, because 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 was teaching it two ways. There's the Iowa Farm Kids simple way, subluxation, which is what we're talking about within the nervous system and the spine.

• 15:57Josh Axe?

  And a subluxation is when something is misaligned. That's what that word means.

• 16:01Speaker 00

  Three parts. So a 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 because 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, the more advanced way of looking at it within pediatrics.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  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. 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, ah, 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.

• 17:24Speaker 00

  Turn the TV up. Oh, some kids, the eustachian 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 two or three, it's not only affected their gut, their immune system, their inflammation, their sensory motor planning is a mess.

• 17:49Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 18:31Speaker 00

  But after you've been stressed out from birth, confused and off track developmentally, you get tired, you get depleted, and, and, and we have exhaustion. And that's where regression and chronic illness sets in because the body can't even, it, it, it can't even fight anymore.

• 18:47Josh Axe?

  Yeah. Yeah. Well, when you have these chronic stress hormones, cortisol, adrenaline being released constantly, you're draining your mitochondria, you're draining your adrenal glands, it leads to exhaustion. I want to mention a couple of other things about chiropractic care, and then I want to talk about pediatric specifically for just a moment. You know, when it comes to chiropractic, I think that thi- 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 Lein, well, these are, these are good doctors, really good doctors and M Ds. 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,

• 19:32Josh Axe?

  you know, it's everything from, well, it doesn't, they don't even believe it. 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 Tom Brady to Jerry Rice to, you know, the best soccer players,

• 20:16Josh Axe?

  the best athletes in the world for sports performance. It's effective for so many things when you look at the clinical studies.

• 20:23Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 21:01Josh Axe?

  And one other important thing here is, is that when you look at adults versus children, you know, 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, I do have that question is when most people think about chiropractic adjustments for adults, there is. You know, a rapid motion. There's sometimes, you know, an audible noise. How is adjusting a child different than adjusting an adult?

• 21:29Speaker 00

  It couldn't be more different. So if you've scrolled Tik Tok and YouTube and you're like, that's kind of graphic adjustments and I'm going to bring my baby in there to stop that scroll and go over to to our page and check him out there. So it's honestly the easiest way to say it. It's like checking a, you know, an avocado for ripeness. Right? So I can honestly, and I'll bring this up here. We 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 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,

• 22:14Speaker 00

  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 birth, latching, nursing, and, and we're dudes and we think we know things and then our baby girls are bored and then we, everything, like I was going to be a sports injury guy, right? All that stuff. Everything I cared about, about sports injuries and baseball

• 22:56Speaker 00

  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 because of genetics and they're not just sick because 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 top of 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-

• 23:30Josh Axe?

  Happened to your son Oliver?

• 23:32Speaker 00

  So the God knew exactly, I always say it this way jokingly, brother, because it's a little easier than to 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 waited 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,

• 24:14Speaker 00

  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 watched my son go not be caught. I know how nuts that sounds to say, not be caught, delivering 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, all that.

• 24:54Speaker 00

  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 trauma. Fast forward that to he becomes a medical miracle, right? So but not yet. The first thing I did is literally cord attached, turn 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.

• 25:33Josh Axe?

  Well, and one reason I want to mention for for everybody, the reason why adjusting a child is so different than an adult is their bones are really more more. Like a cartilage.

• 25:42Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 25:42Josh Axe?

  I mean, everything moves. It's so spongy. I mean, you hardly have to do.

• 25:46Speaker 00

  Barely anything.

• 25:47Josh Axe?

  Yeah, it's very, very different than our solid bones.

• 25:49Speaker 00

  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 adjustment, now we know neurology, right? We know how the nervous system works. So I knew that I needed to go to his upper thoracic 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, he had, they said he had a 20%.

• 26:30Josh Axe?

  Wow, really? So, okay, so you had to take.

• 26:32Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 26:33Josh Axe?

  A medical helicopter flight to the hospital.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  I.

• 26:37Josh Axe?

  That's how serious.

• 26:37Speaker 00

  We went from an ambulance to one and they said, oh, he's gonna be okay. It's persistent pulmonary hypertension, which is what he had with his lungs, right? Cause you don't get that, 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.

• 26:54Josh Axe?

  Wow.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  Full code blue crash. So they did what they do. 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, they put a catheter in his jugular and his carotid, 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, I know how bad his brain damage was. Like, I'm a doctor, right? And 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.

• 27:39Josh Axe?

  Wow.

• 27:40Speaker 00

  So we adjusted him two to three times a day and they said he had a 20% chance of living to age one. 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, they wanted him on this medication, phenobarbital, Kepra, blood pressure medication, liver medication. I remember asking him like, he, does he really need this liver medication? Couldn't we just get the liver working better on its own? And they're like, one guy goes, well, do you really want to wait for that? And I was like,

• 28:24Speaker 00

  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. So I knew.

• 28:38Josh Axe?

  And 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 system.

• 29:00Speaker 00

  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? Touch. Adjustments.

• 29:19Josh Axe?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great point. You know, when we think about today, a lot of this research around parasympathetics, the thing you're pointing, the deep breathing and the box breathing for adults, humming, gargling, you know, we have these things like neuropod, you know, that people do today. I mean, there are some really great things, but the chiropractic adjustment impacts this parasympathetic nervous system, especially in both adults, 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?

• 29:55Speaker 00

  That's a million dollar question because once your kiddo, so we got to tie this all together. Once the pediatrician is said, ah, 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 to 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.

• 30:36Josh Axe?

  Right.

• 30:37Speaker 00

  If they can't go to the bathroom without the fanciest magnesium supplement 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.

• 31:19Speaker 00

  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 him.

• 31:43Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  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, young adults. I would tell them all the time, they come from all over the world, right? For 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.

• 32:08Josh Axe?

  Yeah, 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, a characteristic 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 your own kids or other families, what are those top five things in ranking order that, that parents should be doing to optimize their children's health?

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Got it. This is such an important question because it literally is the sequencing and the learning that goes in. So, once you get the nervous system moving in the right direction, so we do start there, nervous system repair and regulation, right? That's number one. And, 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, two, three, four, and five are going to be helpful, but they're going to be limited in their help. Number two is movement-based therapies, P T, O T, 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,

• 33:24Speaker 00

  which actually runs more of the rest of the brain than we think, the cerebellum is literally leaving them into that sympathetic storm. So, after we start to get these kiddos better neurologically, a lot of times, parents will say, "We did P T, we did O T, 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 them moving, get them swimming. You know what the best sports are for that are things like martial arts, gymnastics, taekwondo.

• 33:58Josh Axe?

  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, it was martial arts, swimming, was very high gymnastics, and the fourth might have been something like soccer, but those were the ones that were the most.

• 34:14Speaker 00

  Because it 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, you know, again, you don't have to put in a sensory gym in your basement, just go get them moving. Number three, this one I would, I feel like it's three A and three B. I would go to three B first, which is because they're so awful. You have to take toxins out. You just got to switch to clean.

• 34:39Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 00

  And clean what? Clean everything.

• 34:41Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Speaker 00

  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, that's just the way it is. So three B is cleaning up, you know, nutrition in the diet. Three A is adding the omega threes. When you were on our podcast, you went right in it. We gotta get those omega threes in there. We gotta get the clean macronutrients in there and the protein. Cause even if the nervous system is healing and reorganizing, it's gotta have the nourishment to do that.

• 35:11Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 35:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 35:21Josh Axe?

  Wow.

• 35:21Speaker 00

  When you have a kiddo who has been under a sympathetic storm, they're also airway, they're mouth breathers.

• 35:27Josh Axe?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 35:28Speaker 00

  And, 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? Cause I look at their, even for our kids, I'm like, I'm gonna need an expert. But if you have a nonstop infection happening in there, then that's going to be an issue.

• 35:46Josh Axe?

  That's a great point.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  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 three and toxins. A lot of these kiddos have secondary and tertiary infections.

• 35:58Josh Axe?

  That's right.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  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, 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.

• 36:24Josh Axe?

  That's right, yeah.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  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.

• 36:42Josh Axe?

  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.

• 36:49Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 36:49Josh Axe?

  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.

• 37:04Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 37:04Josh Axe?

  Right? And so they were eating foods like gluten and casein, those were leaking through. But it typically started with either birth trauma or antibiotics taken when they were very, very young. I believe was another contributor, there's studies on aspirin. Of course, the mother's health, the epigenetics you talked about. A lot 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.

• 37:45Josh Axe?

  And getting them on that diet, doing things to repair the gut microbiome, the zinc and all, and that type of thing. But, you know, and then there's other things with killing chronic infections. You know, that's, that's another thing to your point, mold.

• 37:56Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:57Josh Axe?

  Seeing more and more issues of mold issues.

• 37:58Speaker 00

  Yeah. And the body, again, if it's in sympathetic dominance, it's going to hard time, you know, getting those out of there. But when you layer this, the answer is E, all of the above, right? That's where the best thing comes from. But there's a very specific sequence to it. This, 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 better. Guess who was in the perfect storm with them? The moms and the dads.

• 38:22Josh Axe?

  The family, yeah.

• 38:23Speaker 00

  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 healability 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, I It's me with my raging bullet in my head. I'm like, I'm gonna build the biggest clinic of it. I was in a great day 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.

• 39:04Speaker 00

  And that's how simple this is. We still are probably going to need all these things over time to get this kid better.

• 39:10Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 39:11Speaker 00

  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.

• 39:29Josh Axe?

  I'm so glad you're saying this because I do think there's an element I see, I see this, you know, in our, 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 gotta do things in stages and stage number one, you know what? 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.

• 40:09Josh Axe?

  And the body is too weak, fight Lyme disease, you know, most of those, they have, their battery is so low. It's like, you gotta build up and recharge 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.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  It's, it'll hold literally, when we say, I think this is probably why some people who maybe are, you know, 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 the 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 going to 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 with clinic, right? Because when I first started, what's so cool with my journey is I only knew the chiropractic

• 41:17Speaker 00

  interventions and those things. And then you go, I got every certification out of the sun, you know? And I started to 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 doc 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, and you know, all those sort of things. There's three outcomes you can

• 41:59Speaker 00

  get with any intervention, brother man. You can get them better, not to 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 kid with pans or epilepsy or really tough autism, and their case history and their labs would tell us, we got to get these toxins out, we got to get these parasites out. But if you do it before the nervous system can handle it, the seizures go through the roof, the motor tics 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 want to hear this mom and dad, but we're going to take 90 to 100 days, and we're going to work on the foundation only. We're going to work on the nervous system, sleeping, eating,

• 42:42Speaker 00

  getting the good foods in, getting good digestion going. We have to have digestive motility. Let's say the detox kit works. We got to 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.

• 43:01Josh Axe?

  Yeah, it's so good. You know, one thing I saw, I saw you on a call recently with for Maha and Make America Healthy again.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  They made me go to Washington DC and put a suit coat on, dude. Speaking of sympathetic dominance and high anxiety, you take an Iowa farm kid, put him in Washington DC in a suit coat.

• 43:18Josh Axe?

  So how was your experience there? I mean, what are your, what do you think of some of the initiatives RFK's up to?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  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 want to give you the layers. I don't want to give a too long an answer, but I spent all of last year praying about it. Okay, I've I've met Secretary Kennedy many years ago, Cal Jam, remember he spoke there with us all those years? 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 and the Children's Health Defense for probably the better part of a decade. They're in my prayers, they're in, you know, I've, I've, I've supported that organization. Have I actively been involved? No. And then God hit me with it last year.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  Kind of, I don't know how God works through, 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 going to do anything about it. Cause I was watching Maha and awesomely, everybody was talking about toxins and antibiotics and vaccinations and, and, and all this sort of stuff. Nobody was talking about the nervous system, you know, nobody was talking about just what we chatted about for the last half hour. 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,

• 44:55Speaker 00

  a bunch of phone calls started to come and they said, hey, we, we, 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. And, and I, you know, 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, it, it got recognition. And so I've been on a couple of the Zooms talking about. 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

• 45:39Speaker 00

  health questions and the health outcomes of their kids, here we are. Where are we gonna go from there?

• 45:44Josh Axe?

  Your kids are gonna stay sick.

• 45:45Speaker 00

  They're gonna stay sick.

• 45:46Josh Axe?

  That's the reality.

• 45:47Speaker 00

  And so we, and I actually think this too. I think like I watched Oliver be a medical miracle. This is, this is me on my soapbox, 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.

• 46:00Josh Axe?

  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. It 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's, that is no way to live. And I, 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, you know, medical doctors are trained for emergency medicine. That's really what they're trained to do. They're, they're trained for sick care, how to save your life in emergency. They are not trained

• 46:42Josh Axe?

  for healthcare. They've never reversed hypothyroidism. They've never reversed autism or heart disease, any of these things. They've only basically treated it. 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, yeah, it can often, 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

• 47:27Josh Axe?

  and I both had nutrition training in our studies as being, you know, as DCs, whereas MDs get zero.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  And a body moves. We, we have nutrition training. We have. Fitness training, we have lifestyle training, like we are so empowering. I, you know, you could argue what's more powerful for our patients? The adjustment or the education? Both, you know, I always call it, we grew up in the same area. I call it the Deion Sanders and the Bo Jackson answer. Remember when that one pizza, okay, pizza commercial, great pun there. But remember when Jerry Jones was like, Deion, you want to play football or baseball? He goes, both. Do you want to make five million or 10 million? Both. So this isn't a pediatrician versus a chiropractor story. It's both. You've got to save them per emergency, but should you start there?

• 48:07Josh Axe?

  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, is 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 M D or D O or D C or N P, 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 P X Docs. So if you are looking for a good practitioner that practices like Dr. Tony Ebel here, you can go to P X Docs dot com. So those are great practitioners. There's other good practitioners out there and I know other great groups, places like, you know,

• 48:49Josh Axe?

  Max Living and Remarkable Practice and 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 P X Docs.

• 48:57Speaker 00

  Well, you nailed it. The, I think the other thing we always tell parents to look for in a doctor, it doesn't matter the initial, it doesn't matter what I, here's, 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 shut up. That's like, I love what 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 going to figure something out new next week, you know, to get better results. You're relentless.

• 49:34Josh Axe?

  One of the things 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've 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. It's the same there. Absolutely. Absolutely.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  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. They, if you're 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 RPX docs on is to do personalized neurologically focused care, but also know when to collaborate and take it serious. You know, find the other experts.

• 50:47Speaker 00

  Don't try and be a jack of all trades because 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.

• 51:23Josh Axe?

  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 do? And maybe give me an example of somebody who you did this with that had autism and then their diagnosis was completely different later or seizures or something like that.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  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 is coming up. So it's fun. We had this sensory kiddo. He was so socially would 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 Yeah, freedom. It's the greatest moment of my, my career because it's a nonverbal kid who's now in love with freedom. And so those two cases are perfect. 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.

• 52:20Speaker 00

  That's on the paperwork. They're, 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. 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 could do it on everybody. And then thermal, so you're finding those patterns of neuroinflammation within the different visceral systems and how subluxation is messing with those.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  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 frame of 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.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  The biggest thing that chiropractors will miss with nervous system dysfunction in kids, protocol and 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 used, 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, with dinner. So the higher frequency initially is required to break that cycle we've been talking about.

• 54:17Josh Axe?

  Well, you know, it can make sense. Chelsea and I were talking about this recently with our, our daughter's been doing swim every day.

• 54:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:22Josh Axe?

  And throughout the entire year, it was 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

• 54:33Speaker 00

  12 months.

• 54:34Josh Axe?

  You know, five or six months.

• 54:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 54:36Josh Axe?

  Overall, because it's just a daily thing and being able to train her, you know, those patterns and those skills, very similar way, these nervous system patterns.

• 54:44Speaker 00

  You gotta get it to reset and then stick. So what's different also is we wanna get it better, but we don't wanna, 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, 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 spurs. We gotta, I, 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

• 55:27Speaker 00

  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 are doing. It's, it's how it works.

• 55:44Josh Axe?

  Yeah. Share with me one more story of somebody.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. Cause I've, 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, um, he came in and he was on 38 different herbal, homeopathic

• 56:16Josh Axe?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 00

  cookie cutter, like you were talking about before. And not only did it not work, when they tried to detox him, his panda's flares and, and his spectrum issues got significantly worse. They also had gone to and done a couple of 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 and the bigger muscles. And then their digestive motility was completely stalled out.

• 57:02Speaker 00

  So what I did is we focused the first thirty, sixty, ninety days just on reorganizing their neuromotor system. And 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 as we, 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.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  And within two days, this first kiddo started sleeping through the night, never had two to four hours. So slept like fourteen 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 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 of the asymmetry.

• 58:30Speaker 00

  There was no more of the rotational confusing stressing movements. 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 social relation is coming, but when it does, it's a celebration.

• 59:07Josh Axe?

  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 they 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 gotta be careful because it can make constipation 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, getting that parasympathetic state so they can heal.

• 59:50Josh Axe?

  And so I want to say thanks so much for all the amazing work you're doing, Dr. Tony. I want to mention Dr. Tony has an incredible practice. He's trained 750 doctors in his network. You can go to PX, PX docs, D O C S, PX docs.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? 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

• 1:00:34Josh Axe?

  so much for tuning in here to the Dr. Josh Ak Show where I'm on YouTube, Apple, Spotify. Make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts. 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.