The Experience Miracles Podcast

Detox Doesn’t Work If the Body Isn’t Ready: Here’s What to Do First

Jun 10, 2025

Why Detox Fails Without Opening the Body’s Flow Systems First

Episode 111 — Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP — Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: June 10, 2024 | Duration: ~57 min Guest: Mary Coyle — Expert in Homotoxicology & Bioregulatory Therapeutics | Founder, Real Child Center (realchildcenter.com)

Key Takeaways

  • Supplements, binders, and chelators fail to produce lasting results when the body’s primary elimination pathways—liver, colon, kidneys, skin, and lungs—are blocked and unable to move toxins out.
  • Homotoxicology and bioregulatory therapeutics work at four progressively deeper levels: external environment, what goes on/in the body, organ drainage, and cellular/mitochondrial function. Healing must follow this sequence or it stalls.
  • Many children with autism are stuck in anaerobic respiration, producing only 2 ATP per glucose molecule instead of the 36–38 produced with proper oxygen. This energy deficit drives carb cravings, yeast overgrowth, and developmental stalling.
  • Homeopathic remedies act as cellular catalysts—they signal the body to activate its own detox mechanisms rather than doing the job for the body. This makes the process self-limiting and safe: the body only releases what it is capable of releasing at any given time.
  • Signs that a child is healing at the deepest cellular level include increased appetite for protein, new food acceptance, hair and nail growth, the ability to generate a fever, and diaphragmatic breathing replacing shallow neck-and-shoulder breathing.

Why Do Detox Approaches Fail? The Missing Step Most Practitioners Skip

When a child has a toxic load problem—heavy metals, xenobiotics, bacterial overgrowth—the instinct is to add binders, chelators, and supplements to pull those toxins out. These interventions have their place, but they repeatedly fail to produce lasting change for one reason: the body’s flow systems are blocked. The primary elimination pathways (liver to colon, kidneys, skin, and lungs) must be open and functioning before any detox intervention can do its job. When those pathways are congested, toxins cannot exit. The body compensates by routing them through secondary pathways—the ears, sinuses, throat, and skin—producing the chronic ear infections, strep, lymph swelling, and rashes that parents know too well.

This episode brings together Dr. Tony Ebel and Mary Coyle, a homeopath and expert in homotoxicology and bioregulatory therapeutics, to explain the deeper framework that most natural health practitioners never reach. Mary’s approach—developed over 30+ years working with children with autism and chronic illness—operates at four levels simultaneously, working from the outside environment inward to the cell and mitochondria. The key insight is sequencing: healing must happen in the right order, at the right layer, or the body will plateau and regress no matter how many interventions are added.

For parents who have spent tens of thousands of dollars on protocols that produce temporary results or none at all, this episode identifies the missing piece: activating the body’s own bioregulatory systems so that detox, regulation, and healing happen from the inside out—the way the body was designed to work.

Why Supplements and Binders Aren’t Enough: The Flow System Problem [00:00 – 00:10]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: So if a parent’s talking to me and they say, “Oh, I want to detox and get all these chemicals and heavy metals out,” the first question is: how often are they pooping? The supplements—and even often, I’m just going to say it—the binders, the chelators, they’re just loading. Parents, you’re doing the right thing, by the way. You’re doing the right thing. There’s just something deeper. That’s what Mary and I are here to say. There’s something beneath the surface that needs to get activated. These flow systems, the nervous system, these bioregulatory systems have to get turned on first to make that stuff do its job.

Mary Coyle: I’ll explain this through the lens of working with my son. He’s 33 years old, but he was diagnosed on the spectrum when he was two. I was in the chemical industry at the time, and I was really concerned about what I was exposed to and how that was going to affect the baby. I was on a lot of construction sites, and nobody had answers back in the nineties—”everything’s EPA approved, don’t worry too much about it.”

When he was born, even as an infant, he was really constipated and colicky. We were doing all the mainstream pediatrician interventions. He’d have an ear infection at two months, get the antibiotics, come back two months later—another ear infection. That happened from about two months to two years. We switched from breast milk to regular milk, and he started getting a rash, losing his words, very uncomfortable, slow to crawl, slow to walk.

This is a total load issue. Transgenerational toxins passed down in utero, and his flow system was completely blocked. His primary pathways of elimination—the liver through the colon through stool, the kidneys through urine, the skin through sweat, the lungs through respiration—when too much garbage goes in and not enough goes out, the body tries to find a creative way to exit those toxins.

When the primary pathways are blocked, the body uses secondary pathways—anything neck-up. That’s where the ear infections come in. That’s the swollen lymph glands and the strep throat. That’s the rash. He was trying to find an orifice to get rid of these toxins.

“When primary elimination pathways are blocked, the body uses secondary pathways—anything neck-up. That’s where the ear infections, the swollen glands, and the strep throat come in.” — Mary Coyle

Dr. Tony Ebel: The way I teach it to my patients—even if my suburban patients don’t quite follow the farming analogy—is: if it can’t go south, it goes north. If it can’t come out that way, it’s coming out nasal and ear. That’s just the way the body works.

And what I love here too is the gut-motor connection. The gut is a muscle. It’s a motor system. It needs to move things along to move things along. What we were seeing with your son is that he was creating compensatory elimination pathways the same way children with nervous system dysfunction create compensatory muscle patterns. The primary system wasn’t working, so the body found another route.

Going Deeper Than “Expensive Urine”: Bioenergetics and the Spark [00:14 – 00:20]

Mary Coyle: At one point, I was giving my son a ton of supplements and he probably had the most expensive urine in town. I felt like I was trying to be Darwin in my kitchen—always low on C, add more C; high on zinc, pull the zinc. I couldn’t do it that way.

I took the word autism and put it aside, picked up a toxicology book, and realized that sleep issues, memory problems, and behavioral problems were tied to toxin overload. That’s how I found my way to homeopathy and bioregulatory medicine.

Think of it like a car: you turn on the ignition and there’s a spark—that spark gets the engine going, which gets the gas moving, which gets the wheels turning. I didn’t have the spark. No matter how many supplements I added, I was just pouring gas into an engine that couldn’t fire.

Bioenergetic healing works as the trigger that stimulates the biochemistry, which then stimulates the structure, so the body ultimately functions better. It’s like getting the grease off the wall so that food breaks down better, chiropractic treatments work better, and speech therapy works better. It creates the conditions for everything else to actually work.

Dr. Tony Ebel: And that one-plus-one-equals-eleven effect is what we’re seeing when we combine neurologically-focused chiropractic care with this approach. The nervous system connects to the biochemistry. Both sides of that coin have to be working, or you have trouble. When you have dysregulation on both sides simultaneously, you’re carrying double the load.

In our case histories—I’d say in 80 to 90% of our cases—families already know about the toxic overload. They know there were too many toxins during pregnancy, during labor and delivery, from antibiotics and MiraLax and everything else. They’re on the hunt to get toxins out. But they’re doing it at the surface level. We’re loading the body with detox tools that can’t work because the pipes are blocked.

The Four Levels of Healing: Working From the Outside In [00:21 – 00:26]

Mary Coyle: We’re looking at four levels now, not just three. And we have to think about all of them.

Level 1 — Outside environment. If I detox someone until the cows come home but they’re living with mold in the house, I’m taking sand out of the boat while sand is being poured back in. The same goes for EMFs from a nearby electrical grid or pesticides from a neighboring golf course. You cannot bypass the outside environment.

Level 2 — What goes on or in the body. Are there phthalates in the skincare products? What kind of sunscreen is being used? What’s happening with the oral cavity? Cavitations and jaw bacteria constantly toxify the body 24/7, and the Vagus Nerve cannot stand tooth issues—it’s directly connected to the sensory nerves of those roots and the jaw.

Level 3 — Organ drainage. This is where drainage remedies come in. Low-potency herbals—diluted and shaken—carry an energetic quality that increases circulation and metabolism in the liver and kidneys. The goal is visible output: robust bowel movements and frequent urination. Primary pathways running well.

Level 4 — Cellular and mitochondrial function. The cell is the most important thing, as Dr. Reckeweg, who created homotoxicology, always maintained. A clean cell divides to make clean tissue, which makes clean organs, which makes functional systems. But you can’t just go in and clean the cell. The flow system has to be open first.

Dr. Tony Ebel: And even the question about when to introduce things like hyperbaric oxygen chambers or infrared saunas—your answer is always: only when the body can actually use it. Only when they’re sweating, when the elimination pathways are open. Otherwise you’re adding oxygen or heat into a blocked system. The sequencing is the whole game.

The nerves that control the liver, the kidneys, the excretion and elimination and digestion also control respiration. When you watch a child who’s been stuck in Sympathetic Dominance—breathing through their traps, their clavicle, their neck—and you see that respiration start to drop down into the diaphragm, that’s the nervous system healing. Those are next-door neighbors in the neurological architecture.

“A clean cell divides to make tissue, which makes organs, which makes systems. But you can’t just go in and clean the cell—the flow system has to be open first.” — Mary Coyle

Mitochondrial Dysfunction in Autism and What Cellular Recovery Looks Like [00:26 – 00:31]

Mary Coyle: An article from The Economist in 2010 noted that autistic children often don’t produce or have enough oxygen in their system. This is the mitochondrial layer.

When the body’s working well, one glucose molecule turns into 36 to 38 ATP through aerobic respiration. You need oxygen to do that. When the body isn’t working well, it goes into anaerobic respiration—only 2 ATP are produced, with fermentation as a byproduct. So what’s showing up clinically? Yeast, ethanol, bacteria—because that’s the byproduct of anaerobic respiration.

These children are carb-seeking because their brains are starved for energy. A quarter of our energy goes to the brain. They want something that converts to energy fast, because protein and healthy fat require aerobic capacity to process. When you start to restore aerobic function, you see them reach for the chicken. For the fish. For protein. That is a clinical sign.

Here’s what I look for as signs of cellular recovery:

  • Increased appetite for protein, not just carbohydrates
  • Hair and nail growth—the body has enough energy to invest in non-essential tissue
  • Fever capacity—many of these children cannot generate a fever. When they develop one, it’s a sign their immune system is coming online
  • Sweating ability
  • Regular, robust bowel movements
  • Improved sleep
  • Diaphragmatic breathing instead of shallow neck-and-shoulder breathing
  • Pupils that are no longer constantly dilated—when a child is running on exhausted cortisol, the pupils stay wide. When the adrenals start to recover, those pupils come back down

Dr. Tony Ebel: The pupils. I point this out to parents all the time. Sometimes it’s weeks into care and you can see the shift. That kid is no longer running on the exhausted stress response. And the respiration piece—the diaphragm controls so much of what we care about clinically. The nerves that run digestion, elimination, and immune function are neighbors to the nerves that run breathing. Activate one, you activate the others.

Case Study: Evan’s Recovery and the First Fever [00:32 – 00:35]

Dr. Tony Ebel: I want to triple-tap on this through a story. My very first 3-year-old with a level three autism diagnosis—severe, nonverbal, regressive, no words, constant motor planning failures, hitting his head. When we dug into the case history, he had been pooping once a week, and that was with a truckload of prunes and probiotics.

He had literally never had a fever in his life.

These are the things I pull out of the case history. After the first week of adjusting and activating his Vagus Nerve—on day four—he spiked a 104.8-degree fever. He was three years old.

And I went, “Yes. Celebrate. Throw a party.” Because he had an infant’s immune system and fever system. We need to go back there to get it working inside-out. We didn’t adjust him. He checked clear three days in a row, and that fever ran three to three and a half days. As soon as the fever broke, he went into diarrhea for four days—four days of nonstop detoxification.

Add those up: four days of fever, four days of diarrhea. For a week, I watched this child literally detox. I had studied the science, but I needed that case to play out in that very specific neurophysiological sequence—get the elimination systems on first, and healing follows from there.

God’s blessing that Evan was my first case like that. Because after that, we had the map.

“He had never had a fever in his life. On day four of activating his Vagus Nerve, he spiked a 104.8-degree fever. Four days of fever, four days of diarrhea—a full week of the body doing what it was finally able to do.” — Dr. Tony Ebel

Mary Coyle: And I think that case really illustrates the levels of toxicity. Some children respond to a simple diet change—gluten-free, casein-free—and they come out of it. Those kids had a shallower toxic burden.

The children I work with are generally the ones where everything has been tried and nothing is working. The toxins have crossed through the lipid membrane and hooked onto the mitochondria and the DNA. Think of a boat filling with sand—the body starts at 100%, drops to 90%, 80%, 70%. Once the energy is low enough, microbial overgrowth fills the gap. Yeast, bacteria, parasites. When we have more microbes in our body than cells, and when energy is at 50 or 60%, you’re going to have 40 or 50% microbial overgrowth.

For those children, we have to open everything up and put the catalysts in. Not do the job for the body—catalyze the body to do it itself.

The Catalyst Philosophy: Strengthening the Tree vs. Spraying the Fungus [00:36 – 00:47]

Mary Coyle: Dr. Greg Ellis, a PhD in physiology I worked with 30 years ago, used this story to explain the difference between suppressive treatment and catalytic healing. Imagine a tree with fungus growing on it. You spray it with fungicide and two weeks later it grows back. So you spray again. A month later it’s back and now you need two fungicides. Then three. And every time you spray the tree, you’re making it weaker.

“Mary,” he said, “when are you going to stop spraying the tree and make the tree strong enough to deal with its own fungus?”

That story changed everything for me. The same logic applies to yeast protocols, antifungal medications, targeted supplements. If we don’t address the dysfunction that allowed overgrowth in the first place, we’ll be back in three months doing it again. And the child never fully heals.

Homeopathic remedies work differently. They’re signals—frequencies from a 10X to a 200X dilution in one bottle—that stimulate the body at the cellular level. A mitochondrial catalyst, for instance, carries Krebs cycle intermediaries that stimulate aerobic respiration. When the cell gets a little bit of health back, its 3 million years of evolutionary intelligence takes over: “What’s this yeast doing here? What’s this bacteria doing here? Get it out.”

It’s self-limiting too. The body only releases what it’s capable of releasing. If I’m targeting heavy metals and the body can only move 3%, that’s all that comes out. You can’t overdose a homeopathic. Dr. Ellis used to say: if you drink the whole bottle, you’ll just release whatever your body is capable of releasing.

Dr. Tony Ebel: That’s the most chiropractic thing I’ve ever heard a non-chiropractor say. We always ask the next question—if that’s X, why? What’s below that? Eventually you get to the deepest layer of dysfunction. And then you don’t do the job for the body. You serve as a catalyst and a spark. The adjustment doesn’t fix the problem. It activates the system that was designed to fix itself.

The rat and the dump analogy fits here too. Restaurant tosses food every night, rats move in, owner puts out poison. Two weeks later, the rats are back and the poison is their appetizer—they’ve adapted. You can’t just target the rats. You have to stop throwing out the food.

Why Manmade Toxins Hit Hardest: The Evolutionary Mismatch [00:48 – 00:50]

Mary Coyle: Our bodies simply weren’t evolutionarily designed to know what to do with xenobiotics—the manmade toxins. The body’s goal is to protect the bloodstream, which circulates through all the major organs. So it tucks those foreign compounds away—into warts, hemorrhoids, fat tissue, cysts. It has extraordinary mechanisms for protecting itself.

But when we layer in transgenerational toxins, in-utero exposures, infant antibiotics, GMOs, repeated pharmaceutical interventions—those tucking-away systems get overwhelmed. The immune system is suppressed. Microbes become opportunistic. And the child’s body doesn’t have the energy reserve to mobilize those stored toxins even when the pathway is opened.

The total load theory captures this: it’s not any single toxin that breaks the system. It’s the cumulative weight of all of them, across generations, that takes the body from 100% down to 60%, 50%, and lower.

Dr. Tony Ebel: This is why, when I’m taking a full case history and I go deep enough, I find again and again that the path to healing isn’t about chasing the strep or the yeast or the heavy metal. Those are the symptoms of the deeper dysfunction. The moment you ask “why is the yeast there?”—and then ask why again, and again—you get to nervous system dysregulation. You get to blocked flow. You get to the foundation.

“Manmade toxins—xenobiotics—are the center of the onion. When the immune system is suppressed by them, microbial overgrowth is just a consequence. Make the immune system work again and the microbes become manageable.” — Mary Coyle

Emotional and Behavioral Reactions During Detox: The Pinocchio Effect [00:50 – 00:57]

Mary Coyle: When I start a child on the bioenergetic catalysts, I always warn parents that big emotions are going to come up. There will be tears. There will be behaviors that look like regression.

Here’s what’s actually happening. These children aren’t connected to their bodies. They feel something, but they don’t know how to access it or express it. When the catalysts start to work, the hormones start to come in. Mirror neurons turn on. If you’re smiling, don’t be surprised if your child smiles back. If you’re upset, don’t be surprised if they have a puzzled look on their face. They’re starting to connect.

We also hold trauma and stored memory in our cells. With verbal children who start the homeopathic process, they’ll sometimes begin talking about something that happened years ago and burst into tears. “I miss the dog.” The dog died three years ago. “I don’t like Mrs. Schultz.” She was their kindergarten teacher two years back. They’re feeling it. They’re processing it. These little pieces, like Pinocchio, are all coming together—and they’re becoming whole children.

Dr. Tony Ebel: The Pinocchio reference is perfect. I had never framed it that way, but yes—that’s exactly what it is. And the alternative to those emotional and behavioral bumps in the road is staying stuck. No change. The only time clinically we’re stumped—scratching our heads, wondering what we’re missing—is when nothing changes. That means we haven’t gotten to the layer yet.

Once you’re in the process and the reactions are happening, you’re on the road. Something is happening. The body is now aware that the toxins are there. That the trauma was there. That the birth trauma happened. It’s aware, and it’s working through it.

And the coolest thing is that once you get to the deepest layer in the right sequence, recovery speeds up fast. What looks slow at first becomes fast once you hit the deep work. Healing takes time—that’s the sixth principle of chiropractic. But the speed of recovery through the middle phases, when you’re working at the right layer in the right order, is genuinely remarkable.

Mary’s website is www.realchildcenter.com and she can be reached at wellnessny@realchildcenter.com.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do detox supplements and binders often fail to produce lasting results in children with autism?

Supplements, binders, and chelators can only work when the body’s primary elimination pathways are open. When the liver, colon, kidneys, skin, and lungs are blocked or sluggish, there is nowhere for mobilized toxins to exit. The body compensates by routing toxins through secondary pathways—the ears, sinuses, and skin—producing chronic ear infections, strep, and rashes. Dr. Tony Ebel and Mary Coyle both emphasize that opening the flow system must come before any detox intervention.

What is homotoxicology and how is it different from standard detox?

Homotoxicology, developed by Dr. Reckeweg, is a branch of bioregulatory medicine that works at the cellular level using homeopathic remedies as catalysts. Unlike standard detox approaches that try to pull toxins out of the body, homotoxicology uses low-potency herbal and homeopathic signals to stimulate the body’s own elimination mechanisms—organ drainage, extracellular matrix clearing, and mitochondrial activation. It’s self-limiting: the body only releases what it is capable of releasing at any given time, which makes it safe even in young children.

How do I know if my child is healing at a deep level and not just on the surface?

According to Mary Coyle, the clinical signs of deep cellular healing include: increased appetite for protein (not just carbohydrates), hair and nail growth, the ability to generate a fever, improved sweating, regular and robust bowel movements, improved sleep, diaphragmatic breathing (breathing into the belly rather than the neck and shoulders), and pupils that are no longer chronically dilated. These signs indicate that mitochondrial function and energy production are improving from the inside out.

Why do emotions and behaviors sometimes get worse during healing?

As toxins are mobilized and hormones start to normalize, children who previously weren’t connected to their emotions begin to feel and express them—sometimes intensely. Stored trauma surfaces. Developmental stages that were skipped come back around. Mary Coyle calls this the Pinocchio Effect: the pieces of a whole child are coming back together. While this looks like regression, it’s a sign that neurological connectivity is being restored. Practitioners play a critical role in preparing parents for this phase so they don’t abandon the process during what is actually progress.

What causes the carbohydrate cravings and yeast overgrowth common in autism?

When the body is functioning below its capacity, it shifts from aerobic respiration (which produces 36–38 ATP per glucose molecule) to anaerobic respiration (which produces only 2 ATP with fermentation as a byproduct). The brain consumes a quarter of the body’s energy, so a child running on anaerobic metabolism is chronically energy-starved and craves carbohydrates because they convert to energy fastest. Yeast, bacteria, and ethanol are natural byproducts of fermentation, which is why microbial overgrowth is so prevalent. Restoring mitochondrial function and aerobic capacity—not just targeting the yeast directly—is the path through.

How do I find a PX Docs office that understands neurologically-focused care for my child?

The PX Docs Directory lists certified practitioners trained in Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care across the country. These practitioners use INSiGHT scanning technology to assess nervous system function and apply the same layered, sequenced healing philosophy discussed in this episode.

Resources & Related Content

Find A PX Doc

Welcome to PX Docs. The place to find Hope. Answers. Hope. for you and your family.