Birth Trauma and NICU Recovery
Episode 3 — Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP — Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Guest: Kristina Ebel — Co-founder of PX Docs & Oliver’s Mom | Published: January 16, 2024 | Duration: ~33 min
Key Takeaways
- When Oliver Ebel was born on Memorial Day 2009, he came out completely blue and lifeless after an extremely fast delivery that caused a brainstem and cervical spine injury. Dr. Tony Ebel performed Oliver’s first chiropractic adjustment within minutes of birth — while the umbilical cord was still attached — and Oliver took his first breath.
- Oliver was given only a 20% chance of living past age one, and if he survived, a 99% chance of cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and autism, according to the Harvard-trained neurologists who reviewed his brain scans.
- While in the NICU, Oliver received chiropractic adjustments multiple times per day alongside life-saving medical interventions — including 5.5 days on ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) heart-lung bypass surgery. He was expected to need ECMO for 10–12 days.
- Oliver left the hospital at 6 weeks with a completely clear EEG, a clear MRI showing full resolution of brain damage, and off all medications. Early intervention therapists who reviewed his paperwork did not believe the baby they met was Oliver.
- Oliver is now 14 years old, runs a 5.5-minute mile, runs 4–5 miles daily, and is a straight-A student. His parents believe the singular difference between his outcome and the outcomes of other NICU babies was chiropractic care from day one.
Can a Baby With Severe Birth Trauma and Brain Damage Fully Recover?
Birth trauma — physical injury to a newborn’s brainstem and upper cervical spine during delivery — can disrupt the nervous system so severely that the body struggles to regulate its most basic functions: heart rate, lung pressure, oxygen levels, and brain activity. When that injury is compounded by hypoxic brain damage (oxygen deprivation), the medical prognosis is typically grim.
Oliver Ebel’s story is one of the most documented cases of what Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care can do when applied immediately after birth trauma. Born in 2009 after a lightning-fast delivery that caused a brainstem and cervical injury, Oliver entered the world blue and lifeless. His father, Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, performed an emergency chiropractic adjustment before the medical team could intervene — and Oliver took his first breath. What followed was six weeks in the NICU, surgeries, life support, and a prognosis that no parent should have to hear. What came after that is why Dr. Ebel built the PX Docs network.
The key principle this episode illustrates is what Dr. Tony calls the proper order of healing: medicine addresses the life-threatening emergency, and Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care restores the nervous system’s ability to heal from the inside out. Oliver needed both — and he got both. His outcome is the reason this podcast exists.
Setting the Stage: A Pregnancy Full of Preparation [00:00 – 07:30]
Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: Oliver’s pregnancy came after the birth of their first daughter, Addison, whose delivery had been ideal — no interventions, no complications, what Dr. Tony describes as the “opposite of the Perfect Storm.” The expectation going into Oliver’s birth was simple: round two, easy.
Kristina prepared obsessively. The birth plan ran multiple pages. There was a midwife, a doula, and a full support team in place. As Dr. Tony puts it: “We were as prepared as could be with zero preparation for what actually happened.”
Kristina Ebel: Throughout the entire pregnancy, she prepared in every way possible. The NICU was never something she pictured. A helicopter life-flight was never something she pictured. And she points out — you’ll never meet a mom going through that situation who says she saw it coming.
The Traumatic Birth: Blue, Lifeless, and the First Adjustment [07:30 – 12:00]
Kristina Ebel: When Oliver was first born, he came out completely blue. At first, they thought he just needed to take his first breath. “We never thought it would cascade into what it did.”
Dr. Tony Ebel: His birth was over in an instant. Oliver was delivered so fast — shot out like a rocket on Memorial Day 2009 — that the medical team wasn’t ready. He landed on the bed, head and neck flexed forward. Dr. Tony watched it happen in real time: a brainstem and cervical spine injury, the exact birth injury he had spent two years studying.
Oliver was not just blue. He was lifeless. No sound. No movement. No breathing.
“I literally watched him land on the bed, head and neck flexed — brainstem, cervical injury, everything I had studied. He wasn’t breathing. Full blue, full cyanotic. And I made his first adjustment to just make something start. And it did.” — Dr. Tony Ebel
With the umbilical cord still attached, Dr. Tony performed Oliver’s first chiropractic adjustment. Oliver kicked out a small amount of fluid and took his first breath — tiny and weak, but there.
Kristina Ebel: “He sounded like he was drowning when he initially took that first breath. You could tell he just wasn’t really getting air.”
That first breath was the beginning of a six-week fight.
Into the NICU: ECMO, Whole-Body Cooling, and Daily Adjustments [12:00 – 18:00]
Dr. Tony Ebel: Oliver was transferred by ambulance from the first hospital to Lutheran General in Chicago — one of the most equipped level-three NICUs in the region — on his third day of life. He was the sickest baby in both hospitals.
His diagnosis included persistent pulmonary hypertension (PPHN), meaning his lungs couldn’t properly oxygenate his blood after birth. To prevent further brain damage, the medical team used a then-experimental protocol: whole-body cooling. For the first two days of his life, Oliver’s body temperature was kept cold — a medically induced state designed to reduce brain swelling, but one that carried significant complications.
Because his heart and lungs still weren’t functioning on their own, doctors scheduled him for ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) — a heart-lung bypass surgery that pumps blood out of the body, oxygenates it externally, and pumps it back in. The team prepared Dr. Tony and Kristina for two full weeks on the machine.
On the ambulance ride to Lutheran General, Oliver had to be warmed up before surgery. As his body temperature rose, something unexpected happened.
“He got so much better, so fast, they almost didn’t do ECMO — because his body started to respond and his own healing mechanisms started to kick in.” — Dr. Tony Ebel
The team ultimately decided to proceed with ECMO given how much Oliver had already been through. He was on it for five and a half days — less than half of what they had prepared his parents for.
Every single day in the NICU, Oliver received chiropractic adjustments — multiple times per day. Dr. Tony was adjusting him while Kristina was nursing. The two tracks ran in parallel: the medical team managing his heart and lung survival, and chiropractic care working to restore his nervous system’s ability to regulate and heal.
The Prognosis: 20% Survival, 99% Chance of Disability [18:00 – 21:30]
Dr. Tony Ebel: The heart and lung challenges were serious — but they weren’t what kept Dr. Tony up at night. Medicine had answers for those. Brain damage was the bigger concern.
Oliver’s EEGs and MRIs both showed severe brain damage with burst suppression — a pattern on the EEG that indicates the brain is in extreme distress, cycling between bursts of activity and flat silence. Reading the research on burst suppression at Oliver’s level, with physical birth trauma as the cause, Dr. Tony found one number: 20% chance of living past age one.
Kristina Ebel: If he made it past one, the neurologists — Harvard-trained, considered among the best in the country — were clear: a 99% chance of cerebral palsy, epilepsy, and autism. They only said 99% because saying 100% would have sounded too harsh. That’s what they meant.
“Medicine will save his life. Chiropractic will restore it. Get to work every day.” — Dr. Tony Ebel, describing the message he needed from his mentors
Rather than accept that prognosis as a ceiling, Dr. Tony sought second opinions from epileptologists and neurologists he had already built working relationships with. The question he asked them: if we get the stress off his nervous system and activate his Vagus Nerve, what’s the chiropractic prognosis?
The answer came from Dr. Mike Cody and others in his network: if teenagers with traumatic births and epilepsy are healing in the clinic 19 years later, why would a nine-day-old — with the most neuroplasticity he’ll ever have — not be capable of the greatest healing they’d ever seen?
That became the plan.
Going Home: Clear EEGs, Clear MRI, Off All Medications [21:30 – 24:00]
Dr. Tony Ebel: Oliver was born on Memorial Day. He came home on the 4th of July weekend — six weeks later. When he left the NICU, his final EEG was completely clear. All burst suppression was gone. All seizure activity was gone. His MRI showed complete resolution of the brain damage that had been visible on earlier scans.
He came home off all medications. His digestion came back online without pharmaceutical support.
Kristina Ebel: When the early intervention team arrived at the house weeks later, they had reviewed Oliver’s NICU paperwork before the visit. When they met him, they didn’t believe it was the same baby. They asked multiple clarifying questions because the child in front of them didn’t match the child described in the records.
What had changed? Chiropractic adjustments every day. Kristina wearing him and nursing him. And, as Kristina puts it, “fully believing in what his life was going to look like instead of believing what they told us his life was going to look like.”
“The only difference we had in Oliver’s story was chiropractic. His EEG was worse than a lot of those babies in the pods. And his health right now is 100%.” — Kristina Ebel
His remaining challenge in his first two to three years of life was croup — a consequence of his difficult start with his lungs. Dr. Tony and Kristina chose to manage it with adjustments rather than antibiotics and steroids, believing that suppressing his immune and respiratory systems further would have set Oliver on a path toward chronic asthma and allergies.
It didn’t. He outgrew it.
Oliver Today — and What His Story Demands of This Mission [24:00 – 32:32]
Dr. Tony Ebel: Oliver recently turned 14 years old. He runs a five-and-a-half-minute mile. He runs four or five miles every day. He’s five-foot-ten, a straight-A student, and the kind, humble kid who has three younger sisters and gets along with all of them.
His mother, Kristina, is a marathon runner and endurance athlete — and Oliver inherited that capacity. He now wins cross-country races. The same cardiovascular system that couldn’t sustain oxygenation at birth.
Kristina Ebel: A friend told her in the hospital — “Thank God, look who his dad is.” At the time, she was upset by the comment. Now she understands it completely. Oliver’s story is their true north, and the true north of pediatric chiropractic.
She still asks herself sometimes: can it really be chiropractic? Then another family walks in, or another miracle unfolds in front of her, and the answer keeps being yes.
The deepest lesson she took from Oliver’s journey: mothers know more than they think they know. The hardest thing for parents is trusting that — trusting that someone with bigger credentials and more technical vocabulary doesn’t automatically know what’s better for your child than you do. Kristina believes God placed her as Oliver’s mother to protect him and fight for him. That belief, she says, is what carried her through.
Dr. Tony Ebel: What Oliver’s story permanently instilled in him is trust in the process of how healing happens. The nervous system is the boss. It controls and coordinates everything — respiratory, cardiac, gut, immune, brain. You cannot get any of those systems back online until you get the nervous system online first. That’s what Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care does. It fixes, restores, and repairs the one thing that sets up everything else.
When he and Kristina get tired — and the work of building the PX Docs network and training hundreds of pediatric chiropractors is exhausting — they look at Oliver. And they go again.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can chiropractic care help a baby who had a traumatic birth?
According to Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, birth trauma — specifically injury to the brainstem and upper cervical spine — is one of the most direct causes of nervous system dysfunction in infants. When a traumatic delivery compresses or strains those structures, the baby’s body loses the ability to regulate basic functions. Chiropractic adjustments aimed at removing that interference can help the nervous system begin to restore normal signaling and function, even in newborns.
What is ECMO and why did Oliver need it?
ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) is a form of heart-lung bypass surgery used when a newborn’s heart and lungs cannot sustain oxygenation on their own. Oliver needed it because his persistent pulmonary hypertension (PPHN) — a consequence of his traumatic delivery — prevented his lungs from working independently. He was on ECMO for 5.5 days, less than half the 10–12 days his medical team had prepared his parents for.
What is burst suppression on an EEG, and how serious is it?
Burst suppression is an EEG pattern indicating severe brain dysfunction — the brain cycles between bursts of electrical activity and periods of near-silence. In Oliver’s case, caused by a combination of physical birth trauma and hypoxic brain injury (oxygen deprivation at delivery), his burst suppression level gave him a 20% chance of surviving past age one, according to the neurologists who reviewed his scans.
How did chiropractic care help Oliver’s brain damage heal?
Dr. Tony Ebel’s clinical understanding is that subluxation — nervous system interference caused by the cervical and brainstem injury at birth — was preventing Oliver’s brain from accessing its own healing capacity. By performing chiropractic adjustments multiple times daily throughout the NICU stay, Dr. Tony worked to restore nervous system signaling. This, combined with activating the Vagus Nerve, gave Oliver’s nervous system the conditions it needed to heal. His final EEG was completely clear, and his MRI showed full resolution of the brain damage seen on earlier scans.
What does “Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care” mean for a NICU baby?
Unlike general chiropractic, Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care specifically targets the relationship between the spine, brainstem, and nervous system. For a NICU infant, adjustments are extremely gentle — adapted to the size and fragility of a newborn. The goal is not structural alignment but nervous system restoration: removing interference so the brain and body can communicate and heal as they were designed to.
How do I find a pediatric chiropractor trained in neurologically-focused care for my child?
The PX Docs directory lists pediatric chiropractors across the country who are specifically trained in Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care for children, including those with birth trauma, NICU histories, and complex neurological conditions. You can search by location at PX Docs Directory.
Resources & Related Content
- Birth Trauma — PX Docs resource on how birth interventions affect the developing nervous system
- The Perfect Storm — Dr. Tony’s framework for understanding why so many children develop chronic conditions
- Vagus Nerve Dysfunction in Children — How the vagus nerve connects birth trauma to long-term health challenges
- Watch Oliver’s Story: The Green Chair Video — The original video interview with Dr. Tony and Kristina
- Find a PX Docs Office Near You — PX Docs Directory
- Next Episode: The Lasting Effects of Birth Trauma & Intervention in our Kids – PX Docs