The Experience Miracles Podcast

Dysautonomia in Kids: Why Your Child Has So Many Symptoms

May 5, 2026

Dysautonomia in Kids: Why Your Child Has So Many Symptoms at Once

Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP—Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Duration: 44 min

Key Takeaways

  • Dysautonomia is a state of abnormal function in the autonomic nervous system—the system that controls heart rate, breathing, digestion, immune response, and hormones. When this system goes offline, multiple body systems crash at once, which is why chronically sick kids rarely have just one isolated problem.
  • A child’s gut issues, immune dysfunction, endocrine problems, and brain-based struggles are often not separate conditions—they are downstream symptoms tethered together by one root dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system.
  • Dysautonomia tracks to a wide range of pediatric conditions including autism, ADHD, anxiety, OCD, sensory processing issues, seizures, epilepsy, PANS, PANDAS, and POTS, as well as autoimmune and gut disorders.
  • The root sequence Dr. Tony Ebel describes runs from subluxation to sympathetic dominance to vagus nerve dysfunction to dysautonomia—each term describing a deeper layer of the same nervous system problem.
  • INSiGHT Scans (infrared thermography, surface EMG, and HRV) measure and locate dysautonomia objectively rather than guessing from symptoms—the thermal scan reveals regional dysautonomia, while HRV (heart rate variability) measures whole-body dysautonomia.

What Is Dysautonomia in Children?

Dysautonomia is a state of abnormal neurological function in the autonomic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that automatically runs survival and regulatory functions like heartbeat, respiration, digestion, immune response, and hormone production. When this system cannot do its job effectively, problems appear across many systems of the body at the same time—which is why a chronically sick child usually struggles with far more than one symptom.

The reason dysautonomia matters so much for parents is that it explains why a child can have gut problems, a dysregulated immune system, inflammation, and behavioral or emotional struggles all at once. Rather than being separate, unrelated diagnoses, these symptoms are often downstream effects of one underlying dysfunction. According to Dr. Tony Ebel, this single dysfunction can be linked to gastrointestinal, immunological, endocrine, and brain-based problems simultaneously—it can go into the brain and wreak havoc, or into the body and wreak havoc.

For parents, the hopeful side of dysautonomia is that it points to a single, focused target. Instead of chasing 57 different symptoms with restrictive diets, supplements, and specialist after specialist, the goal becomes getting the child’s nervous system out of the dysautonomic pattern. When the autonomic nervous system is restored, the gut, the immune system, and brain-based function all have the chance to come back online together.

How Dysautonomia Connects Every System in the Body [00:58 – 06:52]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Your child is not broken, and perhaps they don’t actually have gut issues, immune system issues, endocrine issues, or brain-based issues singularly, separately from one another. Perhaps they’re all tethered together via dysautonomia.

I’ve been talking about dysautonomia to anyone who will listen for years and years. It’s one of those neurological, physiological health terms that doesn’t roll off the tongue easily, but goodness gracious, get familiar with this one. The conversation around dysautonomia can go in every single direction—and that’s both the good thing and the bad thing about it.

Think of a child with autism. The diagnostic features of autism according to the DSM and the conventional medical world have to do with the brain-based stuff: speech and communication, behavior, social-emotional regulation, cognition. But every parent of a child with autism, especially level two or level three, knows their child’s gut is a mess, they’re inflamed all the time, and their immune system is completely dysregulated. You’re trying to fix 57 things all at once.

It would be nice if one thing came along and said, “Hey, this one dysfunction is linked to all of those downstream and upstream problems.” That’s dysautonomia.

“Your child is not broken. Perhaps they don’t actually have gut issues, immune system issues, endocrine issues, or brain-based issues separately from one another. Perhaps they’re all tethered together via dysautonomia.”

Here’s where it goes to the good. If you focus obsessively on getting your child’s nervous system out of this dysautonomic pattern, maybe you can finally get their gut back online after all the restrictive diets and supplements. Maybe you can get their immune system stronger and out of the autoimmune storm. And then you have all the more traditional neurodevelopmental, brain-based things. Dysautonomia tracks to sensory issues, to ADHD, to anxiety, to autism, to OCD. Dysautonomia tracks to seizures and epilepsy, to PANS and PANDAS.

Connor’s Story: When Everything Crashed at Once [06:52 – 16:02]

Dr. Tony Ebel: One of the best stories to show you how dysautonomia weaves its way into multiple dysfunctions takes us back to 2017 and one of my favorite bros, Connor. Connor is the son of Dr. Beth Sape, a neuro-PT we’ve interviewed and reference all the time. We’d been working together in an interprofessional, collaborative fashion for years—we’d send patients to her for movement-based integration and hippotherapy, and she’d send patients to us.

But Connor himself had been under chiropractic care at a different office for a long time. You know how it goes—you get into the routine, that’s your chiropractor, and even if you’re not entirely enthused, you’re locked into the habit. Connor was getting adjusted on monthly maintenance, which just isn’t enough to handle the amount of stress and tension a body goes through. That chiropractor did only a tiny bit of adjusting and was more of a functional medicine expert—a lot of lab work, stool samples, muscle testing, nutritional coaching, and selling supplements.

Some of that worked. They pulled corn and gluten out of his diet and he got a little better. But if you pour kerosene into an already burning fire, you make the fire worse. The real question is: why is the fire burning in the first place? That’s the dysautonomia conversation.

Connor seemingly got sick out of nowhere in 2017. All of a sudden he had super high fevers, whole-body aches, tons of headaches, his skin was constantly breaking out in rashes, and he had fluid in his knee. Connor was a go-go-go youth baseball and football player, so at first they chalked it up to exhaustion and injury. But what Beth said about Connor was simply that he was not himself.

“Why is the fire burning in the first place? That’s the dysautonomia conversation.”

For three weeks, his parents did exactly what you’d expect. They saw an infectious disease specialist, an orthopedist, a dermatologist, and a rheumatologist—four specialists in three weeks. No one had any real answers. Then someone mentioned CMV (cytomegalovirus), and after one Google search, the family was suddenly in the land of autoimmune conditions. That was terrifying for them, because they have a lot of autoimmune conditions in their family.

What was really happening is that multiple systems within Connor’s body were crashing out at once—digestion, immune function, allergies that went from mild to severe, brand-new food intolerances. When they ran the labs, everything lit up like a Christmas tree. It wasn’t just a gut issue or just an immune issue, and he wasn’t just in pain. Everything, all at once, over a three-week period, went into the storm. That’s dysautonomia.

Dysautonomia vs. Dysregulation: Why the Word Matters [16:02 – 17:22]

Dr. Tony Ebel: When we look at this word, it’s very similar to another word you hear us use all the time: dysregulation. As a parent, honestly, don’t worry about it—you’ll be dead-on if you interchange dysregulation and dysautonomia when talking with other parents, your kids, or your providers.

But from a chronological standpoint, dysautonomia is something neurologically-focused providers like me have been working on for decades, whereas dysregulation is a newer buzz term that came to light through Instagram and social media. If you’re really looking for clinical answers and want to dive into the peer-reviewed research about what causes your child’s struggles, you want to use the word dysautonomia—it’s much more commonly researched and understood in the healthcare world.

The Air Traffic Control System: What the Autonomic Nervous System Does [17:22 – 22:09]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Let’s go to our favorite air traffic control analogy. Dysautonomia is when that main air traffic control system—which is supposed to control all the autonomic functions of the body—can’t do so effectively.

The main survival autonomic functions are simple: beat your heart, breathe your lungs, and stay alive. The autonomic nervous system will always conserve and preserve energy for survival first. There’s a closely linked term here called dysenergesis, which is abnormal energy expenditure—another way to look at dysautonomia, because running all the major systems of the body is a lot of work.

So job number one is cardiopulmonary function: heart, lungs, survival. After that come the building blocks that turn the corner toward thrival. The autonomic nervous system keeps us upright against gravity and works in harmony with the central nervous system to control muscle tone, postural stability, movement integration, and sensory processing. It is heavily involved in physical, musculoskeletal, movement-based function.

Next is digestion. GI function is completely under the control of the autonomic nervous system, and now the vagus nerve enters the chat—it’s the most important, far-reaching nerve the autonomic nervous system works with. The system handles getting food in, absorbed, and assimilated, and it’s also fully in charge of elimination, detoxification, and excretion.

“100% of gut function and 100% of immune function are foundationally tethered to the autonomic nervous system.”

This is where the gut matters. You’ve heard that 60, 70, 80% of the immune system is in the gut. Well, 100% of gut function and 100% of immune function are foundationally tethered to the autonomic nervous system. Remember Connor—he started with physical pain and fatigue, that was dysautonomia setting in on his physical body. Then came the gut issues, acid reflux, nausea, and skin rashes, which are a dead ringer for gut and immune issues.

The Three Categories of Dysautonomia Symptoms [22:09 – 24:32]

Dr. Tony Ebel: There’s one more category dysautonomia roots into, and that’s brain-based function. The autonomic nervous system isn’t just the rest-and-digest system of heart, lungs, and digestion. It’s respiration, immune function, endocrine function—hormones—and brain-based function. When the vagus nerve goes haywire and the air traffic control tower isn’t doing its job, even our emotional, behavioral, sensory, and cognitive capacities can crash out.

Let me simplify the whole list into three categories. First, cardiopulmonary survival functions—dysautonomia often first shows up as a racing heart, rapid breathing, and feeling like you can’t control your stress response. Second, the visceral category—the gut, immune, and endocrine systems; visceral means organs and glands, our insides. Third, dysautonomia shows up directly in the brain and neuro function itself: brain fatigue, difficulty focusing, anxiety, depression, and emotional-behavioral dysregulation.

Back to Beth’s words—he’s just not himself. Connor wasn’t just achy and sore, and he wasn’t just sick with fevers and inflammation. He was easily agitated, irritable, and angry. We took super-happy, everybody’s-bestie Connor and he was peeved off. That’s when mom knew something was different, and that’s when she shifted from a chiropractor doing basic adjustments and supplements to a chiropractor who digs deep into dysautonomia.

Why the Medical System Misses Dysautonomia [24:32 – 29:14]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Dysautonomia is exciting because it makes sense of so many things, especially when a child struggles with multi-system dysfunction—which most kids with chronic illness, autoimmune conditions, or autism do. Instead of chasing everything in its own little silo, you finally have something that threads it all together.

Think about how the medical system operates. Everybody has their specialty. The pediatrician is the only generalist, and they mostly specialize in height, weight, vaccines, and referring out—to a GI doc, an immunologist, an allergist, infectious disease, a rheumatologist, an endocrinologist, a neurologist, an ENT. It’s easy for parents and providers to lose the forest through the trees, because each specialist has blinders on and only looks at your child through the limited lens of their specialty.

“When your specialty is dysautonomia and the entire function of the brain, body, and nervous system, you don’t miss anything—because it’s all encompassing through this air traffic control system.”

We were the first office able to talk Connor and his parents through the fact that this all threads back to one thing. The child’s nervous system has become subluxated, dysregulated, and dysfunctional, and subluxation leads to sympathetic dominance. Sympathetic dominance increases and stresses heart rate and respiration, decreases gut function, leaves the immune system suppressed and pro-inflammatory—which is how you get those CMV markers—and makes the brain angry, wound up, anxious, and irritated.

So subluxation, sympathetic dominance, vagus nerve dysfunction, dysautonomia, and dysregulation are all synonymous terms—but there’s actually a sequence within them. If you have a child with gut issues, ask your gut specialist about dysautonomia. If your child has anxiety and depression and you’re working with a therapist or psychiatrist, they should be talking about dysautonomia. If it’s POTS, PANS, or PANDAS, seizures, or motor tics, you have to know all about dysautonomia. Each specialist looks in their own silo, but nobody digs underneath the surface to ask whether the main operating system—the air traffic control tower—went offline. We’ve got to restore the power supply and restore autonomic function.

We Don’t Guess, We Test: How INSiGHT Scans Measure Dysautonomia [29:14 – 38:13]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Do we diagnose dysautonomia just by a set of symptoms? No, not at all. As a PX Doc and a pediatric chiropractor, we don’t play the game of diagnosis and treatment, and we aren’t talking about a cure for anything. This is a functional, individualized, personalized, nervous-system-focused approach to health care, all about root cause.

We like to say we don’t guess, we test. The truth is I could pin dysautonomia on every single one of my patients—colic, chronic ear infections, a dad with fatigue and low back pain and constipation, it all maps back. But there’s something deeper: the story of subluxation, sympathetic dominance, nervous system disorganization, and neurological exhaustion. So we test with the INSiGHT Scans.

“Chemistry does what neurology tells it to do—especially the autonomic nervous system.”

The INSiGHT Scans use cutting-edge, clinical-grade technology to find, measure, quantify, and locate the patterns of dysautonomia. If you’re wearing a Whoop, an Aura Ring, an Apple Watch, or a Garmin, you’re getting close to measuring dysautonomia—those wearables are awesome, but they don’t come close to clinical grade. We run three things: infrared thermography, surface (spinal) EMG, and HRV (heart rate variability).

The thermal scans measure regional dysautonomia. They look at every single segment of the neurospinal system individually, measuring thousands of bits of infrared temperature asymmetry per segment—tens of thousands per level. This isn’t fringe; there’s extensive peer-reviewed inter-examiner reliability and clinical utilization research behind infrared thermal scanning, which has been part of chiropractic for over 100 years. Because each spinal level connects to specific organs and glands, in a case like Connor’s we look at the lower neurospinal system for gut function and the mid-to-lower thoracics for the kidneys, adrenals, liver, and detox organs.

We map dysautonomia onto what’s called a fuse box or anatomical map. When we see subluxation and regional dysautonomia in specific locations, it connects to specific end-organ tissue dysfunction and inflammation, which then maps to symptoms and conditions. We’re not using the thermal scan to diagnose an autoimmune condition or constipation—we’re looking three layers deeper than labs, because chemistry does what neurology tells it to do.

The thermal scan also gives us a whole-body picture. Looking at the full north-pole-to-south-pole pattern—brainstem to sacrum—in a summary view gives us a window into global, whole-body dysautonomia. But the best measurement of whole-body reserve capacity and adaptability is HRV (heart rate variability). We can run HRV with an ear clip or finger sleeve on an infant, an anxious teenager, or a grade-schooler who won’t sit still, because it’s all mobile Bluetooth technology now. HRV is the global, total measurement of dysautonomia.

Connor Today: What Restoring the Nervous System Looks Like [38:13 – 44:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: By the letter of the law, Connor was going through some anxiety, some ADHD, some OCD, plus all the autoimmune issues. It’s all dysautonomia.

Let me take us home with an update. Connor is in the same class as my miracle son, Oliver. As a sophomore, Connor recently drew the pitching assignment against the number one high school team in the state—that’s how locked in he is as a baseball player. But he also thrives as a little brother, a best friend, and someone who helps special-needs kids in his community. Wherever you put Connor, he thrives, because he’s healthy.

What part of his health is most relentlessly cared for? His nervous system. Connor gets adjusted twice a week, sometimes three times when he’s really busy with travel baseball. Can other kids get adjusted once a week or every other week and be just fine? Yes—that dosage and frequency is right for Connor because he goes hard. This family knows many things matter for health, from sleep and recovery to nutrition and supplementation, but their foundation, the one thing they never fall off the wagon with, is the nervous system. They even find other PX Docs offices in towns where they travel for tournaments so Connor can get adjusted.

“What if doing one thing could go after all the things they’re struggling with at once? How cool would that be?”

So here’s the one thing to take to the bank from this episode: your child is not broken. Perhaps they don’t actually have gut issues, immune system issues, endocrine issues, or brain-based issues separately from one another. Perhaps they’re all tethered together via dysautonomia. And if you can get to work on that through Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care and other nervous system repair, restoration, and regulation activities, your child can heal—not through just one or two of those things, but by going after all of them at once.

One more thing: if you’re already under care and your child hasn’t pulled out of the storm into the light just yet, stick with it. The nervous system often gets beaten up over a long period of time, and dysautonomia can set in through many layers over many years. So it often takes time, a lot of work, and a lot of adjustments after the nervous system has been restored to stability to get your child all the way better. But that’s how it works, because that’s how it was designed, and that’s the system we work with.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is dysautonomia in children?

Dysautonomia is a state of abnormal function in the autonomic nervous system, the system that automatically controls heart rate, breathing, digestion, immune response, and hormones. In kids, it shows up as multiple symptoms across many systems at once—gut problems, immune dysfunction, inflammation, and behavioral or emotional struggles—rather than as a single isolated condition.

Why does my child have so many symptoms at the same time?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, a chronically sick child usually isn’t dealing with separate, unrelated conditions. Gut, immune, endocrine, and brain-based symptoms are often downstream effects of one root problem: dysfunction in the autonomic nervous system, or dysautonomia. When this central control system goes offline, many body systems crash out together.

What conditions are linked to dysautonomia?

Dysautonomia tracks to a wide range of pediatric conditions, including autism, ADHD, anxiety, OCD, sensory processing issues, seizures, epilepsy, PANS, PANDAS, and POTS, as well as autoimmune disorders, gut problems, and chronic inflammation. Because the autonomic nervous system runs so many functions, dysfunction can appear almost anywhere in the body.

How is dysautonomia diagnosed or measured?

Rather than guessing from symptoms, PX Docs use INSiGHT Scans—infrared thermography, surface EMG, and HRV (heart rate variability)—to measure dysautonomia objectively. The thermal scan reveals regional dysautonomia by mapping temperature asymmetry at each spinal level, while HRV measures whole-body, global dysautonomia and overall nervous system adaptability.

Is dysautonomia the same thing as dysregulation?

For everyday conversation, the terms are interchangeable. Clinically, dysautonomia is the older, more researched term that neurologically-focused providers have worked with for decades, while dysregulation is a newer popular term. If you want to explore peer-reviewed research and clinical answers, dysautonomia is the more useful word to use with providers.

How can chiropractic care help a child with dysautonomia?

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care aims to address the root cause by reducing subluxation and sympathetic dominance so the autonomic nervous system can be restored, repaired, and regulated. The goal isn’t to treat each symptom separately but to get the nervous system out of the dysautonomic pattern so the gut, immune system, and brain-based function can all recover together.

How do I find a PX Docs provider for my child?

You can find a trained Neurologically-Focused Chiropractor through the PX Docs Directory. These providers run INSiGHT Scans to measure dysautonomia and build an individualized, drug-free care plan focused on restoring autonomic nervous system function.

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