The Experience Miracles Podcast

3 Reasons Why The Conventional Pediatrician has Failed Your Family

Jun 9, 2024

3 Reasons Conventional Pediatricians Fail Children with Chronic Health Challenges

Episode 21 — Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP — Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: May 21, 2024 | Duration: 58 min

Key Takeaways

  • Conventional pediatric care is built on symptom management — primarily through medication and surgery — rather than finding the root cause of a child’s health challenges. This isn’t accidental; it’s the direct result of the Flexner Report of 1910, which shifted medical training away from root-cause thinking and toward pharmaceutical-based intervention.
  • The Perfect Storm — a cascade of antibiotic overuse, repeated corticosteroids, and unaddressed nervous system stress in the first 1–3 years of life — dramatically increases the likelihood that a child who starts with colic and ear infections will eventually be diagnosed with autism, ADHD, anxiety, or sensory processing disorder.
  • Roughly 90% of pediatric ear infections are viral, meaning the antibiotics commonly prescribed for them not only fail to treat the actual cause but increase the child’s long-term risk of autoimmune conditions like allergies and asthma.
  • Conventional pediatricians track developmental milestones using wall charts and basic questionnaires. Specialists in early intervention — pediatric PTs, OTs, speech therapists, and pediatric chiropractors — consistently report that by the time a pediatrician makes a referral, the neurological trouble has already been brewing for months or years.
  • Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care is the only approach that directly addresses subluxation and nervous system dysregulation at the root level — the same dysregulation that underlies most chronic pediatric health conditions.

Why Are So Many Children Stuck in the Conventional Medical System?

Millions of families with chronically ill children share a nearly identical story: repeated doctor visits, escalating medications, referrals to specialists, and still no answers. According to Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, this is not a coincidence. The conventional pediatric medical system was not designed to find and fix the root causes of chronic illness — it was designed to manage symptoms.

The Flexner Report of 1910, commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and backed by Rockefeller funding, fundamentally restructured medical school training in the United States. Before 1910, physicians were trained to look for causes. After 1910, pharmaceutical and surgical intervention became the official standard, and any approach outside that model — nutrition, chiropractic, lifestyle medicine — was systematically labeled “alternative” and marginalized from mainstream practice.

The consequences for children are severe and compounding. A child who starts with colic and ear infections in infancy, treated repeatedly with antibiotics and corticosteroids, enters the Perfect Storm: a vicious cycle in which unaddressed nervous system stress drives escalating chronic illness. By age 3 or 4, that same child is often struggling with sensory challenges, speech delays, and missed developmental milestones — heading toward an autism, ADHD, or anxiety diagnosis. The system that was supposed to help them got them there.

There is a better path. It starts with understanding exactly why the conventional system fails — and what to look for in a doctor who won’t.

Why This Conversation Is No Longer Controversial [00:00:01 – 00:12:22]

Dr. Tony Ebel: If I had made this episode 15 years ago, the majority of people finding it would have called it shocking, controversial — a conspiracy theory. That has shifted significantly in the last 10 to 15 years. When you saw the title of this episode, it probably resonated with you massively, because you have experienced some major letdown — and there’s nothing else to call it other than absolute failure from the conventional medical system, which for our kids is really one word: the pediatrician.

When the pediatrician can’t find answers and doesn’t even really look for root causes, they send you on down to every other medical specialist. But the results are the same. We become disappointed, disenchanted, frustrated, exhausted — all of it — with the conventional medical system. In today’s world, the majority of parents actually agree with these truths and have experienced these three things themselves. The people who still think this is controversial? They’re in the minority.

Now, maybe you’re halfway between those two viewpoints. Maybe you know there’s a lot of life-saving, good intervention in the pediatrician’s office and in hospitals. If so, you’re right. I watched conventional medicine — surgeons, neurologists, all sorts of medical specialists — save my son’s life. But then I lived in the thick of what they struggle with too. They had no plan on how to get him healthy again. Once they put the fire out, they had no clue how to actually restore health to his brain, his nervous system, his body.

This conversation is not a conspiracy theory. It should have no controversy tied to it at all. It needs to get out to the world.

Before we get into the hard truths, let me share what I call Dr. Tony’s three favorite “conspiracy theories” — a fun segment we run at my clinic, PWC Chiropractic outside Chicago, during our Monday clinical rounds meetings.

The first is that young people need to wear Carhartt to go sip oat milk lattes at a coffee shop. Carhartt was designed for farming, hunting, outdoor physical work — not for lavender matcha lattes. But here we are.

The second is the suburban family who buys a glued-together chicken coop, puts it in the backyard, gets four chickens, and posts “hashtag farm life” on Instagram. I say this as someone who grew up on a real farm — 800 head of cattle, 800 acres, corn, soybeans, hogs, steel-toed boots, chores with my dad at 5:30 AM in northwest Iowa. Now I live on 20 acres with donkeys, goats, and 35 chickens with my suburban wife. Is it a real farm? It might just be a conspiracy.

And then conspiracy number three, which takes us right into today’s actual topic: “Chiropractors aren’t real doctors.” That one still shows up on Facebook every time one of our pieces of content goes off — inevitably, here comes Karen or Rick with the comment. That’s my personal favorite conspiracy theory number three.

And by personal favorite, I mean one of the ones that ticks me off the most. Right alongside “don’t worry, they’ll grow out of it” and “it’s just genetic.”

Those dismissals take us directly into the three reasons why your conventional pediatrician has failed your family.

Reason 1: Conventional Pediatricians Don’t Address Root Causes [00:12:22 – 00:20:20]

What the conventional pediatrician focuses on — by far and away — is symptom management: stuffing symptoms down, covering them up with drugs and surgery rather than finding and addressing the root causes.

If a “real doctor” is one who is arrogant, who doesn’t listen to the moms and dads asking legitimate, research-based questions, who can’t give actual informed consent because they won’t take the time to answer your questions in a way that makes sense to you — if that’s what being a real doctor is, then I am not a real doctor. And I am grateful every day for it.

Conventional pediatric care almost always emphasizes managing symptoms through medication and intervention rather than addressing the underlying root causes of both acute and chronic conditions. Two examples make this painfully clear.

Fever and ear infections. When a child is 6–10 months old, their first teeth are coming in, they’re being exposed to seasonal changes, bacteria, viruses — all completely normal. The immune system is designed to encounter these challenges and get stronger by overcoming them without medication. But in the conventional pediatric model, as soon as a pediatrician looks in the ear and sees any redness, the response is Tylenol to suppress the fever and an antibiotic for what is, in the vast majority of cases, a viral ear infection.

“The more times your little one is put on antibiotics, the more times they’re put on inhalers, the more times that stress, that sickness, and that Perfect Storm is driven into their system — the more that increases the likelihood, almost guarantees, that your child is no longer a five-day or ten-day customer. Now they become chronically ill and dependent upon the medical system.”

Roughly 90% of pediatric ear infections are viral. Antibiotics do nothing to treat a viral infection. And what they do over time is suppress the body’s natural immune response and increase the likelihood of autoimmune conditions — allergies, asthma — down the road. Those kids then get corticosteroids and inhalers. That cycle — Tylenol, antibiotics, steroids — repeated in the first 1, 2, 3 years of life, is exactly what we call the Perfect Storm in its early stages.

By the time that kiddo is 2, 3, or 4 years old, they’re not just sick with their immune, respiratory, and digestive systems. Their nervous system, their neurodevelopment, and their brain development are off track. Now they’re struggling with sensory challenges, speech delays, missed motor milestones — and heading toward an autism, ADHD, or anxiety sensory processing diagnosis.

How the Flexner Report Turned Medicine into a Business [00:20:20 – 00:36:21]

This isn’t just about individual pediatricians making bad choices. There is a system behind it — and it goes all the way back to 1910.

The Flexner Report was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation and written by Abraham Flexner. Its stated goal was to standardize medical education in the United States and Canada, which sounds reasonable. What actually happened was something very different.

The Rockefeller Foundation got involved and started funding this report and the massive shift that would follow in medical school training curricula. What resulted was a complete philosophical overhaul — away from root-cause medicine and toward what’s called an allopathic focus: pharmaceutical and surgical interventions over holistic and preventative care.

Before 1910, medical doctors were more like us — the root-cause kind of doctors. It was common sense. When the family dog gets sick, nobody says “I bet it’s genetic, what medication should we give them?” The first instinct is: what did they eat? What did they get exposed to? What messed their system up? That’s root-cause thinking. It’s woven into human DNA.

After 1910, the entire R&D budget of hospitals and the medical system — funded heavily by pharmaceutical companies — shifted to biomedical research. Medical practice was transformed over 100 years ago to be commercialized, capitalized. Profit became more important than patient results.

The logic is brutal when you follow it through. If a doctor actually addresses the root cause, they might get the patient better. A recovered patient isn’t a repeat customer. The medical system works better as a business when patients stay in it — when a child with colic and ear infections becomes a lifetime consumer of antibiotics, corticosteroids, ADHD medications. Change the word “patient” to “customer” and the business model becomes obvious.

“They absolutely shifted the philosophy with which doctors practiced medicine. Medical practice was transformed to be commercialized. Profit became more important than patient care and patient results. The truth is, if you were to address the root cause, you might accidentally get results and get the patient better.”

The Flexner Report also effectively pushed every other approach out of the mainstream — natural health, nutrition, chiropractic, lifestyle medicine — and labeled them “alternative” and “unscientific.” The chiropractic profession has actually won legal battles against the American Medical Association for exactly this kind of organized suppression. These weren’t fringe lawsuits; courts found that organized medicine engaged in illegal conspiracy to destroy chiropractic as a profession.

The second layer of this problem — what Dr. Tony calls Reason 1B — is that even pediatricians who genuinely want to help are trapped inside a system of efficiency that doesn’t allow them to practice the medicine they went to school to practice. They don’t get to actually spend time with patients, take detailed case histories, or make decisions in the best interest of the child. They make decisions in the best interest of the flowchart and the spreadsheet they’ve been trained to follow.

These are good people. You don’t go into pediatric medicine for bad. The problem isn’t the person — it’s the system that has consumed them.

“They are the fire department. They are not the restoration and home building experts.”

Conventional medicine excels at crisis intervention — saving lives in acute, life-threatening situations. That is not the same thing as restoring a child to health. Those are different jobs, and the same system cannot do both.

Reason 2: Pediatricians Have Almost No Real Training in Neurology or Neurodevelopment [00:36:21 – 00:44:08]

This is the one parents sometimes push back on. “They’re pediatricians — surely they understand milestones and development?”

They do — but only at a very rudimentary, obvious, pathological level. What a conventional pediatrician can do is find what’s already clearly wrong. There’s a poster on the wall, a questionnaire you fill out in the waiting room paperwork, and maybe a few tests to move the child around the room. They check the box: made it, or didn’t.

That is not a neurodevelopmental assessment. That is a screen for severe, obvious problems that have already progressed to the point where they’re impossible to miss.

Any actual expert in neurodevelopment — a pediatric PT, OT, speech therapist, or pediatric chiropractor — will tell you the same thing: by the time the conventional pediatrician makes a referral, that child’s neurological trouble has already been brewing for a long time. The referral comes at the 11th-hour-and-three-quarters mark.

The most frustrated people in the healthcare system, ranked:

Number one: Parents — especially moms — who continue to be dismissed, not listened to, and given treatments they feel forced into rather than informed about and empowered to choose.

Number two: Early intervention specialists — PTs, OTs, speech therapists, developmental therapists — who are deeply frustrated by how long it takes the conventional system to identify neurosensory and neurodevelopmental challenges that are already obvious, only to receive referrals late and be expected to address root causes they weren’t given the tools to address.

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care addresses what none of those other providers can: subluxation and dysregulation of the nervous system itself. That is the actual root. Gut health, primitive reflexes, tongue ties, gluten-free diets — all important. But our kids’ nervous systems are stressed all the way back to pregnancy, labor, and delivery. Until you address that, you’re working around the root, not at it.

I will not stop until pediatric chiropractic is the first choice, the first stop, the first call — instead of the last resort that most families find it to be. The goal is for this to stop feeling like “how did I not know about this before?” and start being the first thing every family does.

Reason 3: Conventional Pediatricians Refuse to Collaborate [00:44:08 – 00:49:01]

The third reason is the one that’s hardest to swallow, because it’s not a training failure or a system problem — it’s a choice.

Conventional pediatricians refuse to collaborate with other providers. They refuse to step outside the silo of conventional genetic theory and germ theory, and they refuse to work alongside the practitioners who are actually getting results: chiropractors, functional medicine practitioners, PTs, OTs, speech therapists, integrative pediatricians.

Their standard response to any natural approach is “I haven’t seen the research.” But where is the research behind antibiotics for viral ear infections? Where is the research behind the chemical imbalance theory for ADHD, anxiety, and depression? That argument doesn’t hold up, and they know it. It’s a deflection that has been trained into them school after school, generation after generation.

“The worst kind of doctor you could ever want for your child is a dictator doctor. The doctor you want for your child is a copilot, a coordinator, a partner.”

The shift that is underway — and it is underway — is from “evidence-based medicine” to “evidence-informed healthcare.” Evidence-informed healthcare has three prongs, and one of them is patient preference. The parent’s voice, the parent’s instincts, the parent’s wishes about how their child is cared for — these are supposed to be part of the equation. Most conventional pediatricians have never told their patients that.

To be clear: we need conventional medicine. We need pediatricians. We need them to put out fires and save lives — and they are extraordinary at that. The goal isn’t to eliminate them; it’s to stop letting them be the default first and only option for everything. When a child is chronically ill, when they are struggling with neurodevelopment, when the medications keep piling up and the root cause is still untouched — that system is not the right tool for that job.

4 Questions to Evaluate Every Doctor on Your Child’s Team [00:49:01 – 00:58:31]

You are the conductor. Every doctor on your child’s team either gets on board or gets off the train. Here are the four questions to ask — of any provider, conventional or otherwise:

  1. Do they truly listen to me?

Not politely wait for you to finish so they can write a prescription. Actually listen, take your concerns seriously, and respond in a way that makes sense to you. The standard at Dr. Tony’s clinic is: “We believe moms here. We listen to moms here.” That should not be a differentiator — it should be the bare minimum. But it is a differentiator, and you should look for it.

  1. Are they looking for the real root cause?

Or are they kicking the can down the road — to genetics, to other specialists, to another medication? A doctor who defaults to “it’s genetic” or “let’s try a different prescription” every time you come in with no improvement is not looking for the root cause. Find one who is.

  1. Do they understand the neurology?

Do they understand the role of subluxation, sympathetic dominance, dysautonomia, vagus nerve dysfunction, and the Perfect Storm on a child’s nervous system and overall health? If your doctor has never heard these terms — or dismisses them — they do not understand what is actually causing your child’s chronic conditions. The root goes back to pregnancy, labor, and delivery. The nervous system is where this starts.

  1. Will they collaborate?

Are they willing to work in partnership with you as a parent and with the other natural, root-cause-focused providers on your child’s team? If not — if they refuse to engage with anyone outside their own system — they are not the right doctor for a child who needs actual healing.

Dr. Tony’s standard is four for four. Every doctor on his own kids’ team has to meet all four criteria. That is the bar.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why don’t conventional pediatricians look for the root cause of my child’s chronic health problems?

The conventional medical system was fundamentally restructured by the Flexner Report of 1910, which shifted medical school training away from root-cause medicine and toward pharmaceutical and surgical intervention. This wasn’t just an educational decision — it was backed by Rockefeller Foundation money and pharmaceutical industry influence. The result is a system built around symptom management, not healing. Pediatricians operating within this system are largely following the flowchart they were trained on, not making independent clinical judgments.

Are ear infections really treated unnecessarily with antibiotics?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, roughly 90% of pediatric ear infections are viral — meaning antibiotics have no effect on the actual infection. Prescribing antibiotics for a viral infection doesn’t treat it; it suppresses the body’s natural immune response and increases the long-term risk of autoimmune conditions like allergies and asthma. Repeated antibiotic courses in the first few years of life are one of the key drivers of the Perfect Storm — the cascade of compounding health issues that leads many children toward chronic conditions.

Can a pediatrician really miss signs of neurodevelopmental problems in my child?

Yes — and consistently. Conventional pediatricians track developmental milestones using wall charts, waiting room questionnaires, and basic movement screens. This approach only identifies problems that are already severe and obvious. Early intervention specialists — PTs, OTs, speech therapists, and pediatric chiropractors — routinely report that by the time a pediatrician makes a referral, the neurological trouble has been building for months. The system is not designed for early identification of nervous system dysfunction.

What questions should I ask to find out if a doctor is actually right for my child?

Dr. Tony Ebel recommends four non-negotiables: Does the doctor truly listen to you and take your concerns seriously? Are they actively looking for root causes — or defaulting to medications and genetics? Do they understand the role of subluxation, sympathetic dominance, vagus nerve dysfunction, and the Perfect Storm in children’s health? And are they willing to collaborate with other natural, drug-free providers on your child’s team? If a doctor doesn’t meet all four, they’re not the right lead for a child who needs real healing.

What is Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care and how is it different?

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care directly addresses subluxation — dysfunction in the spine that disrupts nervous system signaling — and the broader state of nervous system dysregulation that underlies most chronic pediatric health conditions. Unlike PT, OT, speech therapy, functional medicine, or nutrition, only chiropractic care addresses this neurological root level directly. Other natural approaches are valuable, but without correcting subluxation and sympathetic dominance, they are addressing branches rather than the root.

How do I find a Neurologically-Focused Chiropractor near me?

Visit the PX Docs Directory and enter your city or zip code. These are trained, vetted practitioners who specialize in neurologically-focused pediatric and family chiropractic care. If there isn’t a provider in your area yet, reach out to PX Docs directly through their website or Instagram (@pxdocs) and they’ll help you find the closest option or connect you with telehealth support.

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