Autism, ADHD & the Nervous System

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? 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 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 so and you brought it up within the question there is they get online, awesomely, and they go down these functional meds and 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, naturolistic 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. We just have more nervous system stress and disregulation through moms and their nervous systems. We're not supporting them. We're not empowering them. 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 they're not have toxins in there. No, 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 bear, 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 at Look at any one of them. They're 2x, 3x, 4x higher. And that gets into the brain stem that wreaks havoc, that triggers the sympathetics. I'll I'll nerd out as we go, but it starts that storm, Yeah, man. and that's where kids are sick. They're sick They They don't grow out of colic, they grow into constipation and and 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, from birth. Yeah, and the And this is the root cause thing you're looking at here, and I think there's a few things that you said that were 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," or just keeps saying, "We don't know." More of the holistic doctors, whether it be a functional medicine doctor or even most chiropractors or uh 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 toxic 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 a 25%, even 50% improvement, Yeah. but they don't break the cycle, right? That's the thing is this cycle keeps on going and and that's the key is you've 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 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? 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 triggers 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 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. 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 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 when You can't access something that was never built. 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? 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 I to 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. So it's It's critical. Yeah, 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, 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 systems 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 and autonomic nervous system and hit reset. That's what the power of touch truly is. If you think a hug or, you know, a 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 brain stem, in the neurospinal system from the beginning." But if you know it's there, that's one thing. How do you fix it? I want to ask you this. So, 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 cuz 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 uh 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 uh 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, it's going to help decrease some of the inflammation, but it you're still going to have pain and it 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 the 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 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 feed out to every organ, tissue, and cell of 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 just I just wanted to put it like that because I I don't think people fully understand.