The Experience Miracles Podcast

Q&A: Can Chiropractic Help a Child Fully Heal Without Functional Medicine?

Nov 29, 2024

Can Chiropractic Fully Heal a Child Without Functional Medicine?

Episode 56, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: November 29, 2024 | Duration: ~35 min

Key Takeaways

  • Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care must come before any other intervention because the Nervous System controls every other body system, gut, immune, endocrine, and motor. Treating Subluxation and Sympathetic Dominance at the foundational level is the only way to reach the deepest root cause of chronic illness.
  • The “sickness flowchart” has three layers: symptoms and diagnoses at the surface, multiple body systems in the middle, and the Central and Autonomic Nervous System at the root. Functional medicine addresses layer two. Only Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care reaches layer one.
  • A four-year-old with level 3 autism, nonverbal, with sensory meltdowns and stimming, made dramatic developmental progress within 90–100 days using chiropractic care alone, before any functional medicine was introduced.
  • When Dr. Tony Ebel began practice, 80% of his patients were medicated. Today, over 80% arrive already working with biomedical and functional medicine providers, yet many still haven’t healed, because the foundational nervous system dysfunction remains unaddressed.
  • Treatment sequencing is critical. Starting detoxification or aggressive functional medicine protocols before stabilizing the nervous system can sometimes make symptoms worse. Dr. Tony Ebel recommends a minimum of three to six months of foundational neurologically-focused care before layering in other interventions.

Can Chiropractic Help a Child Heal Without Functional Medicine?

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care can help many children significantly heal without functional medicine, but the honest answer is: it depends. According to Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, the more important question isn’t whether chiropractic or functional medicine is used. It’s which one comes first. The Nervous System governs every other body system, and until its dysfunction is addressed at the foundational level, no other intervention reaches the deepest root of the problem.

Dr. Tony Ebel’s three-step sickness flowchart explains why. Symptoms and diagnoses sit at the outermost layer (step three). Multiple body systems, gut, immune, endocrine, motor, sit in the middle (step two). The Central and Autonomic Nervous System sits at the foundational root (step one). Functional medicine excels at step two. Conventional medicine addresses only step three. Only Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care reaches step one, where Subluxation and Sympathetic Dominance lock a child’s nervous system into chronic fight-or-flight, suppressing gut function, immune regulation, and development.

For parents navigating both approaches, Dr. Tony Ebel’s recommendation is direct: begin with three to six months of foundational neurologically-focused chiropractic care before adding functional medicine, supplements, or detox protocols. In many cases, including a four-year-old with level 3 autism who made dramatic developmental progress in 90–100 days, chiropractic alone is enough to create the neurological stability from which full healing can unfold. When more is needed, a regulated nervous system gives every subsequent intervention a far better foundation to work from.

Why This Question Comes Up, and Why the Answer Isn’t Simple [00:00 – 00:07]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Parents, here we go again. It’s the Ask Dr. Tony episode. This is the Experience Miracles podcast, and I’m your host, Dr. Tony Ebel, an expert in pediatrics, neurodevelopmental disorders, and drug-free, nervous system-focused healthcare.

Here’s the question that came in today, one we get all the time. I spent all last weekend in Orlando at an incredible healing conference for kids and families, the Documenting Hope conference with Beth Lambert and the whole team. And the question is: Can chiropractic help a child fully heal without the use of functional medicine?

I need to set the table with three interconnected points before I get into the answer.

First: this question deserves the full answer. All weekend at this incredible conference, and when I speak at conferences like Autism One and California Jam, I consistently see a very important foundational conversation missing. A presentation is missing. The top functional medicine doctors in the world, the integrated practitioners who truly understand how healing happens, agree with the answer I’m about to give you. But it’s not yet common knowledge in our healing communities. It needs to be.

Second: please listen to this whole episode. If I answered this in two words, my honest, scientifically and clinically informed answer would be: it depends. That answer needs context.

Third: “it depends” because every practitioner you want on your team needs to be obsessed with an individualized, personalized approach to care. Nobody dives into case histories the way we do at PX Docs. Nobody looks deeper into root cause than neurologically focused chiropractors. We actually look deeper than functional medicine, and that statement will make sense if you give me time to walk through the science.

What “Chiropractic” and “Fully Heal” Actually Mean [00:05 – 00:12]

When answering this question, the word chiropractic matters enormously. It can’t be regular chiropractic. It can’t be standard spinal chiropractic. If we’re talking about full optimal recovery and outcomes, we have to address the Nervous System first and foundationally.

To address the Central and Autonomic Nervous System at its deepest layer of dysfunction and dysregulation, and to adjust with enough clinical excellence, care planning, and detailed clinical protocols, that has to be a nervous system-focused pediatric and family chiropractor. That has to be a PX doctor. So I’d reword the question: Can Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic, PX doctors, help a child fully heal?

“You have to address the nervous system first and foundationally. That is my thesis statement answer to this question.”

Now, the word “fully.” Fully is different for every single child. The greatest chance for full healing comes from multiple practitioners working in a coordinated, sequential fashion. That means understanding which practitioners and which approaches need to go first, because healing doesn’t happen when everything tries to fit into one space at one time.

To get full healing, we often need a full complement of different practitioners and interventions. But it’s also critical to order them in the right batting order and hierarchy.

The word “heal” needs clarity too. Chiropractic doesn’t do the healing. Dietary changes don’t do the healing. Supplementation doesn’t do the healing. Detoxification doesn’t do the healing. Medication never does the healing. Your child’s body, brain, and nervous system are designed and fully capable of healing. To what level? To what degree? That’s individual to each child, their history, their age, and the level of dysfunction in their body.

I expected full healing for my son Oliver when the doctors told us he had a 20% chance of living to age one and a 99.9% chance of having autism, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and severe brain-based disabilities for his entire life. I met that with 100% expectation that he would fully heal. And he did.

From Medications to Supplements: What’s Still Missing [00:12 – 00:16]

When I began practice, 80% of my patients were medicated. Today, over 80% of the families coming to us have already spent months, if not years, working with biomedical and functional medicine providers.

My last two patients each had to attach a PDF listing all the supplements, homeopathic remedies, and functional medicine interventions they were giving their child. One PDF was three and a half pages long. Another was two pages long.

When I looked at the reason column on our intake paperwork, the column that asks what each intervention is designed to do, every entry said one word: “support.” This one supports the gut. This one supports the microbiome. This one supports the nervous system. This one supports the endocrine system. This one supports the immune system.

I recognized it immediately. It wasn’t that there was a medication for each symptom anymore, there was a supplement for each system. And I want to be clear: that is so much better than Strattera, Ritalin, Vyvanse, Depakote, Topamax, Phenobarbital, Keppra. I’d much rather see natural interventions on that list.

“There’s still something missing. What you already know in your gut, mom and dad, that there’s something foundationally missing.”

But are we now chasing systems with supplements and homeopathics and herbs, the same way we once chased symptoms with medications? That’s the question we need to answer. And to answer it, I want to teach you the sickness flowchart.

The Three-Step Sickness Flowchart [00:16 – 00:21]

There’s a three-step flowchart that creates chronic illness. Let’s go through it in reverse, starting from the outermost layer.

Step three: symptoms and conditions. When you put enough symptoms together into a box, they get a diagnosis. This is the business of conventional medicine, listing symptoms, giving a condition a name, and prescribing medication. It’s their area of expertise.

Step two: the systems. What do we know about autism? It’s a multi-systems challenge. What do we know about all chronic illness? It’s a multi-systems problem. The middle box asks: Is the gut and microbiome working well? Probably not. Is the endocrine system, thyroid, pituitary, adrenals, working optimally? Probably not. Is immune function and inflammatory regulation working well? Probably not. Is the gross motor system, fine motor system, sensory motor system working well? Probably not.

What functional medicine brilliantly does is look past symptoms and say: those conditions are related to dysfunction within specific systems. That’s a microbiome problem. That’s a gut health problem. That’s an immune system problem. That’s a major advancement over chasing symptoms with medication.

I went deep down the biomedical road for years. I did labs, stool tests, and hair analysis out of our office. I’ve looked at hundreds, if not thousands of these panels, and taken hundreds of hours of training. I know enough to be valuable to this conversation.

Here’s what those labs show: blood work, stool tests, hair analysis, these are chemistry tests. They are not evaluating neurological function. You can’t examine the Nervous System through chemistry, because the nervous system uses chemistry, neurotransmitters, endocrine signals, zinc, magnesium, serotonin, dopamine. The nervous system operates primarily through the neuromotor and neurosensory systems. That’s how it communicates with the organs, and then uses chemistry as its messenger.

Labs find physiological symptoms of nervous system dysfunction, secondary expressions of the underlying problem. They don’t find the problem itself.

Step one: the Central and Autonomic Nervous System. This is the foundational root of chronic illness. It doesn’t show up on labs. And it’s where only Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care can go.

The Nervous System Controls Everything: Dr. Bruce Lipton’s Framework [00:21 – 00:24]

I’ve never done a presentation to parents or other providers without showing this quote from Dr. Bruce Lipton, pioneer of epigenetics, formerly at Stanford and Wisconsin Medical School, who left conventional medicine when his own lab research led him to chiropractic.

“The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment and coordinate the behavior of all other cells.”

The function of the Nervous System is to coordinate the function of all other cells. Put like-designed cells together, that’s the gut and microbiome. Another set of cells is the immune system. Another is the motor system. Another is the endocrine system.

So what system controls the function, coordination, and integration of every other system in the body?

The nervous system.

This is why the deepest layer of root cause in chronic illness, the foundation of the sickness flowchart, is always the Central and Autonomic Nervous System. This is where functional medicine cannot reach. This is where conventional medicine cannot reach. This is where only neurologically focused chiropractic care goes.

Roots, Trunk, and Soil: The Healing Tree Analogy [00:23 – 00:27]

Think about what a tree’s roots look like, they spread out with thousands of nerve-ending-looking receptor tips reaching into the soil. Those roots are sensory receptors.

You may have heard the tree analogy before: if the soil is toxic, the tree suffers. How many of you have already cleaned toxins out of your child’s life, gone fully organic, fermented foods, Whole Foods, only whole-food supplements, and the nervous system healing still hasn’t happened? The soil has been cleaned. The tree still isn’t thriving.

That’s because the soil is the environment, the external factors. The soil isn’t the root of the problem.

The roots are the nervous system. The roots are the sensory, autonomic, and Vagus Nerve systems. The roots then extend into the trunk. The trunk is the gut. The trunk is the immune system.

When people say the real root cause of autism is in the gut, we’re getting close, but not there yet. The gut is governed, modulated, and coordinated first by the nervous system. Then it communicates back. Is it a two-way street? Yes. But the direction from nervous system to gut function is more foundational than the direction from gut to nervous system.

“The roots are the nervous system. The roots are the sensory, autonomic, and vagus nerve. The roots go into the trunk. The trunk is the gut. The trunk is the immune system.”

The majority of our patients are foundationally subluxated. Their nervous system is locked into Sympathetic Dominance, fight-or-flight, which then shuts down the gut and causes immune system dysregulation. When we work on the gut and the immune system through supplements and detox, we’re getting closer to root cause than medication ever did. But for so many children, we’re still not getting all the way down to the root.

Sequencing, Case Study, and the Relay Race [00:26 – 00:31]

There are two possible outcomes when families approach care.

Outcome one: Many children heal fully with chiropractic alone.

As perfect timing would have it, there’s a child, a four-year-old, who was completely locked into level 3 autism. Nonverbal, sensory meltdowns, stimming. We were the first place this family started. When they came in, they wanted to immediately layer in functional medicine, detox protocols, supplements, homeopathics, and additional therapies. Every parent wants to throw everything at their nonverbal child who is struggling and developmentally delayed. I understand that completely.

Because we’ve studied this question ourselves for 17 years, and nobody has had a clinic doing all of this, both in-house and in tandem with other providers, we told this family what we tell every family: let’s give the foundational nervous system dysfunction the time it needs to heal all by itself, and see how far we can get.

It took 90 to 100 days. By their fourth month of care, his nervous system was calmer and regulated. Development was catching up. Speech was exploding. These changes were happening, and the only thing we’d done was chiropractic. According to his current trajectory, we are very confident and hopeful that this child will fully heal with chiropractic alone.

Outcome two: Many children reach neurological stability through chiropractic, and then need additional support.

After 90 days, three months, or six months of care on its own, we reach what we call neurological stability. We can measure this on our INSiGHT Scans. Sleep improves. Bowel function improves. Sensory and motor systems improve. But we know from the child’s case history that there was an injury, a reaction, a toxic exposure, and more needs to be done. At that point, we integrate. We refer. We add physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, and functional medicine. And we work in tandem with the absolute experts in our community.

“It’s a relay race. But there has to be a lead-off runner. There has to be a foundational table set first, because not everybody can have the baton at the same time.”

And here’s the overtime tip I’d be remiss not to share: sometimes when we go in the wrong order, when a lot of detoxification, brain-based work, and functional medicine interventions come out guns blazing before anyone has adjusted the child and addressed their foundational neurological dysfunction, it can make things worse. That’s a clinical truth.

Nothing matters more than the batting order. Start with the foundation first. Less is more in the beginning. It takes at least three to six months of foundational neurologically-focused care, all by itself, before layering in other interventions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can chiropractic care alone help a child with autism fully heal?

Yes, in many cases it can, but it depends on the child. Dr. Tony Ebel has documented children with level 3 autism making dramatic developmental progress within 90–100 days of Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care alone, before any functional medicine was introduced. For other children, chiropractic establishes neurological stability as a foundation, and additional interventions are layered in afterward for full healing.

What’s the difference between regular chiropractic and neurologically-focused chiropractic?

Regular or standard spinal chiropractic addresses structural alignment. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, the kind practiced by PX doctors, targets the Central and Autonomic Nervous System at its deepest layer of dysfunction. This includes addressing Subluxation, Sympathetic Dominance, and Vagus Nerve dysfunction using advanced assessment tools like INSiGHT Scans and specific neuro-tonal adjustment protocols. It’s a fundamentally different clinical approach with deeper root-cause focus.

Why does treatment order matter so much for children with chronic illness?

Because healing doesn’t happen when everything is tried at once. Dr. Tony Ebel’s sickness flowchart shows three layers: symptoms on the surface, multiple body systems in the middle, and the Nervous System at the root. If functional medicine or detox protocols are started before the nervous system is stabilized, the treatments can’t fully work, and in some cases can make things worse. The nervous system must be addressed first because it governs the function of every other system in the body.

Should I start with functional medicine or chiropractic for my child?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care should always come first. Functional medicine is excellent at addressing multi-systems dysfunction, gut, immune, endocrine, but those systems are governed by the nervous system. Starting with at least three to six months of foundational chiropractic care before adding functional medicine gives the nervous system the stability it needs for all subsequent interventions to be more effective.

How do I know when my child is ready to add functional medicine or other therapies?

PX doctors use INSiGHT Scans to measure nervous system regulation and track neurological stability over time. When sleep improves, bowel function stabilizes, sensory processing calms, and motor development progresses, the nervous system has reached a launch point. At that stage, Dr. Tony Ebel works in tandem with functional medicine providers, occupational therapists, speech therapists, and other practitioners to complete the healing process.

How do I find a neurologically-focused chiropractor near me?

The PX Docs Directory lists trained and certified neurologically-focused pediatric chiropractors across the country. You can search by location at the link below.

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