As a parent of a child with chronic health challenges, you know the rollercoaster of hope and disappointment all too well. You’ve tried countless therapies, eliminated foods from your child’s diet, followed advice from multiple specialists—yet your child’s symptoms persist.
Then you discover Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care and begin seeing promising changes on your child’s INSiGHT scans. The doctor shows you colorful images with less red and more green areas, and the “neuro metrics” and scores are all moving in the right direction, indicating that your child’s nervous system is starting to calm, regulate, and get back into balance. There’s just one problem: you haven’t noticed significant changes in your child’s major symptoms or condition just yet.
According to the CDC, an estimated 40% of children today suffer from at least one chronic health condition. For these families, understanding the healing process is crucial.
This apparent disconnect between improving scans and persistent symptoms is actually a positive sign and an expected part of the healing journey. It’s evidence that healing begins from the inside out, at the level of the nervous system, before visible symptoms change.
What Is “Better”?
Before we break down the exact neuroscience of what’s going on with this very common clinical situation, let’s first address it at a foundational level of understanding. Unfortunately, almost all of us have grown accustomed to understanding everything with our health through a conventional medical philosophy or paradigm.
In the traditional medical world we’re deemed “healthy” when we’re symptom-free, and “sick” when we’re not. That means when we look at the effectiveness or results with various forms of treatment and care, we’ve all been mistakenly taught to think that “better” means symptom-free instead of “better” meaning – optimum function and resiliency are being restored.
This is really where root cause, natural, nervous system focused healing like chiropractic differ vastly from conventional medicine, and honestly need a whole new set of definitions to really make sense of things.
In true holistic, root-cause healing, restoring proper function in the body is the main goal. Symptoms are often the last thing to appear when something’s wrong—and because of that, they’re usually the last thing to go away when real healing starts to happen.
What Are INSiGHT Scans?
INSiGHT Scanning Technology offers an objective window into nervous system function. Unlike traditional medical tests that look for disease or structural problems, these scans measure how well your child’s nervous system is functioning and adapting to stress, providing a view “beneath the surface” of what’s happening neurologically.
This technology consists of three primary components:
- Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Analysis – Measures the balance between the Sympathetic Nervous System (“fight-or-flight”) and Parasympathetic Nervous System (“rest, regulate, and digest”) branches of the Autonomic Nervous System.
- Surface Electromyography (sEMG) – Assesses the electrical activity of muscles along the spine, helping to identify areas of tension and altered neuromuscular function or proprioception.
- Thermal Scanning – Uses infrared sensors to measure temperature differences along the spine, which can indicate areas of dysautonomia.
What makes these scans valuable is their ability to detect subtle changes in neurological function long before those changes manifest as symptom improvements. The nervous system influences everything from digestion and immune function to behavior and emotional regulation.
When neurological patterns begin to shift toward better function, the INSiGHT scans capture these changes before they translate to noticeable symptom improvements.
The Nervous System Heals Before Symptoms Resolve
In conventional medicine, we’re taught to focus on symptoms—if they’re gone, you’re “better.” But this approach misses a crucial truth: symptoms are always the last thing to show up when health deteriorates and therefore often last thing to resolve when health improves.
Think of INSiGHT scans like a weather radar detecting clear skies forming on the horizon, even if the storm hasn’t fully passed overhead yet. The scans detect improvements in neurological function before those changes fully translate to symptom relief.
What exactly are the scans measuring beneath the surface? They’re tracking Autonomic Nervous System patterns, neuro-spinal tone, and sensory-motor regulation—foundational aspects of neurological health that control every function in your child’s body. These patterns begin to shift toward better balance weeks or even months before symptoms noticeably improve. For example:
- A child’s vagus nerve function might improve (visible on HRV scans), but their digestive symptoms need more time to fully resolve.
- Muscle tension patterns and neuromotor tone along the spine may normalize (shown on sEMG scans), but the child’s sensory processing takes longer to visibly change.
When scans show improvement but symptoms persist, it’s not that the care isn’t working—it’s that you’re witnessing the natural, inside-out progression of true healing.
Your Child’s Body Needs Time to Reorganize
When your child’s nervous system begins to regulate and heal, it must reorganize patterns that have been in place for months or years. This is similar to reprogramming a computer—even after you’ve updated the software (nervous system), the computer needs time to implement those changes across all its functions.
Neuroplasticity—the brain’s ability to form new neural connections—is key to this reorganization process. While the nervous system might begin making these new connections immediately (which the scans detect), the body needs time to “learn” how to express that regulation in everyday life.
Consider a child with sensory processing challenges. Their INSiGHT scans might show improved nervous system regulation after several weeks of care, but their behavioral responses to sensory stimuli don’t change right away. The brain and body need time to:
- Strengthen new, healthier neural pathways
- Weaken old, dysfunctional patterns
- Integrate these changes into daily function
- Build consistency across different environments
This reorganization process happens in layers. Often, fundamental functions improve first—perhaps your child starts sleeping better or has improved digestion, which are known as neurological “soft signs” of healing. More complex functions like emotional regulation and sensory processing may take longer to show visible changes, even though the underlying neurological improvements are already underway.
The “Perfect Storm” and Subluxation’s Role
To understand why healing takes time, it’s important to recognize what initially caused the neurological dysfunction. At PX Docs, we refer to the “Perfect Storm”—a combination of factors that disrupt a child’s neurological function:
- Prenatal stress and maternal health challenges have been shown to impact the developing brain and neurobehavior of the fetus.
- Birth trauma and interventions can cause physical stress to an infant’s delicate brainstem and upper neck.
- Early childhood stressors such as frequent illnesses, antibiotic use, and environmental toxins disrupt neurological function.
- Developmental challenges lead to missed milestones that impact neurological organization.
These factors contribute to subluxation—areas of neurospinal dysfunction that interfere with proper communication between the brain and body, leading to dysautonomia and vagus nerve dysfunction.
The longer these patterns have been present, the longer it takes for the body to reorganize and heal. When we begin addressing subluxation through Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, we’re creating new, healthier neurological pathways. The INSiGHT scans detect these changes early, though symptom improvements take longer as the body heals tissues and establishes new patterns.
Symptom Flares During Healing
Sometimes, while INSiGHT scans show improvement, a child temporarily exhibits more intense symptoms. These temporary regressions occur as the nervous system undergoes recalibration. When subluxation is addressed, the body often goes through a period of releasing stored stress and tension—similar to a computer rebooting after a software update.
During this recalibration, children might experience:
- Increased emotional sensitivity or meltdowns
- Changes in sleep patterns
- Shifts in appetite or digestion
- Temporary increases in stimming behaviors
These flares are actually signs of progress, not setbacks. The nervous system is integrating changes and establishing new patterns. The INSiGHT scans provide objective confirmation that healing is moving in the right direction, even when it doesn’t look like it on the surface.
This pattern of “two steps forward, one step back” is common in true neurological healing and very different from the quick but artificial symptom suppression that medications often provide. To learn more about this neurological detox and what’s really going on, check out this article and podcast.
Resiliency vs. Symptom Relief
While symptoms naturally capture our attention as parents, focusing solely on symptom relief can lead to incomplete healing. INSiGHT scans measure something even more important: neurological resilience and adaptability.
Symptoms fluctuate naturally, influenced by countless factors from diet and sleep to stress and environmental stimuli. Because of this variability, symptoms alone aren’t the most reliable measure of healing progress.
What matters more for long-term health is the nervous system’s ability to adapt to stress and maintain balance. The INSiGHT scans track key indicators of this resilience:
- Parasympathetic tone: The ability to activate “rest, regulate, and digest” functions
- Heart rate variability: A crucial metric of stress adaptability
- Neuroplasticity: The brain’s ability to form new, healthier patterns
- Autonomic balance: The proper interplay between sympathetic and parasympathetic systems
A child with good neurological resilience might still occasionally experience symptoms, but they’ll recover more quickly and maintain better overall function during challenges. This is the true measure of health—not the complete absence of symptoms, but the ability to adapt to life’s inevitable stresses.
Medications Mask While Chiropractic Restores
Understanding the difference between the traditional medical approach and Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care helps explain why scans improve before symptoms do.
Medications suppress symptoms quickly by chemically altering bodily functions. In simple terms, Medications often “shut down the fire alarm” so you don’t hear the warning, while chiropractic works to find and remove the cause of the fire itself.
This critical distinction plays out in how healing progresses:
| Medication Approach | Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Approach |
|---|---|
| Targets symptoms directly | Addresses the root cause: nervous system dysregulation |
| Works from outside-in | Works from inside-out |
| Often provides quick symptomatic relief | Builds foundational health over time |
| May mask underlying dysfunction | Restores proper neurological communication |
When we help a child heal at the foundational level through chiropractic adjustments, the symptom relief that follows is more sustainable and complete than any short-term pharmaceutical fix could provide. However, this deeper healing follows a different timeline, with improvements showing up first on INSiGHT scans before manifesting as symptom changes.
Trusting Your Child’s Healing Journey
INSiGHT scans provide a window into what’s happening beneath the surface of your child’s health. When the scans improve while symptoms persist, healing is happening in the correct sequence: beginning with the nervous system and gradually extending to all the systems it controls.
For parents who have spent years searching for answers, the Neurologically-Focused approach offers a path to genuine healing rather than just managing symptoms. While it requires more patience than quick fixes, the results are worth the wait. We encourage you to visit the PX Docs directory to find a practitioner near you.
Trust the process. Trust the scan improvements. And most importantly, trust your child’s innate capacity to heal when given the right support!
The nervous system is remarkably adaptable, especially in children, and with consistent care, symptom improvements will follow the neurological changes that the scans are already showing.
Your child is not broken, and healing is possible! Keep going, keep asking questions, and never stop believing in the incredible potential that lives inside your child—and in you as their greatest advocate on this healing journey! healing journey.
