The Experience Miracles Podcast

Microbiome, Mitochondria, Methylation… and the M Word Everyone’s Missing

Oct 6, 2026

The Fourth M: Low Muscle Tone, Dyspraxia & Your Child’s Healing

Episode 231 | Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: October 6, 2026 | Duration: 1hr 10 min

Key Takeaways

  • Dr. Tony Ebel describes movement, the neurosensory motor system, as the “fourth M” that parents often overlook while focusing on the microbiome, mitochondria, and methylation. He places it first because gut, immune, and detox function all depend on movement and motility.
  • The neurosensory motor system governs eight functions: muscle tone, postural stability, reflex development, sensory integration, motor planning, developmental sequencing, strength, and mobility and flexibility. Most therapy focuses on the last two.
  • Dr. Tony describes retained primitive reflexes as part of the problem, not the source. He points to subluxation in the neurospinal system as the interference that feeds the motor system bad input.
  • In his approach, tone comes first: low tone (hypotonicity) in the core and transition zones is addressed before excess tone (hypertonicity) near the brainstem, using gravity-based Neuro-Tonal Adjustments.
  • Joseph, age 11, had seen six specialists, taken seven daily medications, and had five surgeries. In his family’s experience, he went from needing support to walk into the office to asking to run on a treadmill within about two weeks of intensive care.

What Is the Fourth M in Children’s Health?

The fourth M is movement, and more specifically the neurosensory motor system. Dr. Tony Ebel, pediatric chiropractor and founder of PX Docs, describes it as more foundational to a child’s development and healing than the three Ms many parents research most: the microbiome, mitochondria, and methylation. The motor system is designed to develop first, and it supports gut function, immune function, detoxification, and later cognition, behavior, and emotional regulation.

Every moment, the neurosensory motor system asks: Where am I in space? Is this safe and stable? How much tone do my muscles need to respond to gravity? Dr. Tony calls this gravitational security. When subluxation in the neurospinal system interferes with that communication, he explains, the brain may become stressed, disorganized, and exhausted. This may help explain why children who struggle with movement often avoid it, and why exhaustion can spill into emotional and behavioral dysregulation.

For parents, the approach is a sequence. Dr. Tony recommends restoring tone first through Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, then encouraging free movement and play, then layering in therapy, nutrition, and detox support, which he says tend to work better once motility and movement are back online.

Who Is Joseph? An 11-Year-Old’s Case History

Dr. Tony Ebel: If you feel like you’ve literally tried everything and nothing is working, just take this episode and go back to the basics. Go back to the foundation of neurosensory motor function, the fourth M, movement, and you’ll be blown away by how important it is, how impactful it is, and how intricate it is.

It may look like your child’s fine. Hey, they can walk, they sit up. But how well? How smooth? How coordinated? How sequential? There’s so much neurological data to this one conversation that if it’s not doing well, it is the major instigator of all sorts of trouble.

Welcome to the Experience Miracles Podcast, where parents find real hope, real answers, and drug-free help to overcome their child’s chronic health challenges. I am your host, Dr. Tony Ebel, pediatric chiropractor, father of four, and neuro expert. Every week, I’ll bring you real-life experience and powerful clinical insights to help you get to the root cause of your child’s struggles and unlock lasting healing. It’s time to expect and experience miracles. Let’s get started.

Okay, everyone, this one’s going to change everything for your family, and I really think it can change everything for how we’re taking care of these kids who are struggling with chronic health conditions, especially neurodevelopmental challenges like autism.

I want to kick this off by reading a summary of one of our best dudes ever, Joseph. You’re going to hear everything in this and think, “There’s no way an 11-year-old could have that many things in their case history and that many struggles.” But here it is.

By the time Joseph was 11 years old, his mom had seen six specialists, he was on seven daily medications, and he had been through five surgeries. He had been tested for 28 different food sensitivities, and he was carrying diagnoses that read like a textbook: autism, sensory processing disorder, seizure disorder, anxiety, reflux, constipation, sleep challenges, dyspraxia, and low muscle tone.

We’re going to dive deep into those last two, because this is a conversation about the neurosensory motor system that we need to stay on with this podcast. We need to go deep, and then get you, your families, and your kiddos the interventions that actually change the brain from the inside out, or as you’ll learn today, from the bottom up, back forward. We’re going to get real nerdy, real neurological, real brain-based science on this one, but we’re starting with this miracle story.

That’s the first half of his summary. Then it continues. When his mom, Amy, was asked on the intake form, “When did your child’s issues first begin?” she wrote one word: Birth.

Today, I want to tell you Joseph’s story, and I want to teach it to you through the lens of what we’re going to call the fourth M, the missing M. Joseph’s story is something we need to explain about child development, brain-based development, and therefore neurological healing, restoration, and reorganization that I believe, honestly, the entire natural health world has overlooked. In this neurologically-focused chiropractic functional world we live in, this is where we live, and we’re going to continue to be loud about this conversation, this science, and this intervention. We’re going to get louder about it, and not because the other three Ms are not important.

What Are the Three Ms, and What Are They Missing?

Dr. Tony Ebel: So let’s go there for a couple of minutes. I know for sure that if you are a mom or dad whose child has Joseph’s list (autism, seizures, autoimmune conditions, and even the gut stuff like constipation), you have likely gone to the nth degree learning about these three Ms.

If a podcast comes out, if a blog article comes out, if an Instagram reel scrolls by your feed while you are doom scrolling… just kidding. Researching slash doom scrolling, because it’s kind of the same with the way the world is nowadays. So no judgment at all. This is where you find hope, answers, and help. If it’s Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, or podcasts, and that’s where you find the help your child needs, this doctor says Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity, scroll away. Don’t fry your nervous system while you’re doing it, but you see the point.

So anytime you see something about the microbiome, mitochondria, and methylation (so MTHFR), you’re probably all over it. You’ve probably gone to conferences and read books, and you’ve probably done a ton of things to attack those three Ms. And I say attack, meaning you’re all about doing whatever intervention, whatever supplementation, whatever diet restriction you need to help your child’s microbiome repair, rebuild, and get restored. I love those words: repair, restore, rebuild. We use them when it comes to the neurofunctional, brain-based care that we do.

Mitochondria are the energy of the cell, and then all the cells together, the energy of the entire body. Obviously, if they have ideal, optimal energy, we’re in a much better place. So maybe you’ve gone after CoQ10, methylene blue, red light therapies. And then methylation. Holy rabbit hole. Methylated Bs, prenatal vitamins, tongue ties, MTHFR.

So let’s leave those three rabbit holes closed for this episode. Let’s say exactly what we need to say: holy heck, they’re important. You want to know those three Ms with depth and clarity. They’re very essential to The Perfect Storm chronic illness epidemic conversation in kids. If we’re talking autism, we’ve got to know what we’re doing with those three Ms. If we’re talking autoimmune conditions, PANS/PANDAS, we’ve got to get into the microbiome and the mitochondria. We’ve got to know how your child’s methylation, elimination, and detoxification systems are working.

But there’s one system in the body that is even more important than that, and it works literally hand in hand with another key system. So really there are two key systems that are even more important than those three Ms: the nervous system and the motor system.

In a way, they function separately. There’s the central autonomic nervous system. It has its own tone. We can measure it, track it, and care for it directly and effectively on its own. And then there’s the sensory motor system, which is also very, very involved in this conversation. Today we’re going to weave the two together, and we’re going to focus on the motor system.

I just need to say right out of the gate, for the sake of saving a few syllables (because I’m already wordy), when I say motor system, we’re not really unhitching it from the nervous system. It serves as the foundation of infant, toddler, and childhood brain and nervous system development.

Let’s stay with that sequence. The neuromotor system matters most to brain-based nervous system development in kids. The reason we go there first, foundationally, obsessively, is that the development of your child’s nervous system and brain (the brain’s the boss) is first essential to their gut function, their immune function, and their endocrine function. Then later on down the road comes cognition, especially at age seven when the prefrontal cortex turns on and school kicks in. Cognition, academic performance, social-emotional development, speech and communication, emotional and behavioral maturation and regulation. They’re all brain-based conversations.

So everything you’d think of as brain-based (cognition, focus, behavior, emotional regulation), and everything you maybe wouldn’t (digestive motility, elimination, methylation, endocrine and hormonal function), the things you’d say are body-based, biological… Everything’s brain-based.

Why Do Kids Who Need Movement Most Avoid It?

Dr. Tony Ebel: We’re going to separate things to make the conversation clear about this fourth M: how important the neuromotor input into the brain is, and how it’s the absolute most overlooked thing in helping kiddos like Joseph.

And here’s the crazy, funky asterisk we’ve got to throw on there: the older they get, the more that fourth M gets dismissed.

When they’re birth to three, we know the motor milestones. You can all remember that chart: hold their head up, roll over, sit up, crawl, walk. When we’re young parents with brand-new kiddos, we’re tracking these like a hawk. We’re going to the pediatrician all the time for well-baby visits. They’re looking at the chart, they’re having us fill out the paperwork, and we’re either excited because our kiddo’s on track, or we start to get concerned because they’re off track. If they’re off track, we get referred to early intervention, PT, OT, and it’s all about the motor system. That’s their lane.

But you can’t focus on strength alone with motor function and say, “I just need to get my kid stronger in their core so they can sit up. I just need to get XYZ muscle groups stronger so they can do XYZ motor planning.” There’s so much more to motor function for infants, toddlers, preschoolers, kindergartners, and grade schoolers.

And motor function does not stop being the most important of these four Ms, even when we hit Joseph’s age of 11. It’s the number one thing we need to tap into to get our teenage patients better, and it’s the number one thing everybody’s skipping over because we’re so understandably obsessed with the microbiome, methylation, and mitochondrial function.

So we’ve got to go back beneath the surface to the core (pun intended) and to the foundation, and get that system working better first before we get all obsessed with labs, genetic testing, chemistry, physiology, supplementation, nutritional intervention, and food sensitivities. Those matter massively. Even toxins, heavy metals, strep, and bacterial overgrowth are going to enter the chat in this episode, because we need movement and motility to get toxins out of the body. Literally, just flat plumbing is part of this fourth M as well.

So you’re going to learn something today that is more important than these other three Ms when it comes to growth and development, and therefore when it comes to healing and getting your child where you want them to be. Not in absence of the others, but in a hierarchy conversation about what really matters most. If we go through those other three Ms and forget about this fourth one, the improvements we can make with the microbiome, mitochondrial function, and methylation become massively limited if the neurosensory motor system is off track.

In my world of natural health, drug-free, functional experts, I think we’re leading this generation of parents down the right roads by being obsessed with chemistry, physiology, and labs. But we’re forgetting the main road we all need to stay on to get our kids better, because this motor, sensory, neuro-organization conversation is everything.

Okay, I said we weren’t going to complicate it, so let me state it. The fourth M is movement. And there’s so much more to it than “get your kid out, turn the screens off, get them outside.” When I was a kid, we got home from school, got on our bikes, and rode around the neighborhood. When the streetlights turned on, we came home for dinner. Some of that is here, without a doubt. We’re just literally not getting our kids outside enough.

I live on a farm with 20 acres and trails and chickens and all that, and I’ve got to constantly encourage my kiddos: “Hey, I know you love to read on your Kindle. I know you love to chat with your friends and hang out, but let’s get outside, even in the winter. Let’s bundle up. Let’s go sledding.” Thankfully, we do a lot of that. But when you learn how important this fourth M is to overall neurological health, and therefore overall biological health, you think, “I don’t know that I could get too much of this.” More is better, net-net. Getting outside and getting your kid involved in activities is a phenomenal thing.

But a case like Joseph’s tells us it’s easy to hear about and think about, and not always so easy to do when our child is struggling with autism, dyspraxia, and neurodevelopmental disorders. Because here’s the system that crashes out the most: the neurosensory motor system.

For a lot of kids, their physical body becomes immediately exhausting and dysregulating. Moving is so difficult for them. It’s so asymmetrical, so discombobulated, so disconnected, and so difficult that it becomes absolutely exhausting. That exhaustion completely exhausts them, and now they become emotional. They become dysregulated with their behavior. They can’t focus or concentrate in school.

It sounds like, why would the brain ever let this happen? But my goodness gracious, it’s exactly what happens. Kids who struggle the most with movement and need it the most tend to avoid it the most, because it’s so exhausting and so dysregulating. There’s almost a spillover effect over time where they just stop doing it.

“Kids who struggle the most with movement and need it the most tend to avoid it the most.”

That was Joseph. It was so difficult and so exhausting for him to move that he just moved away from it, and all he wanted to do was listen to music, be on a device, and watch YouTube. I know a lot of you listening right now are thinking, “Holy heck, they’re talking about my life.”

So we’re not going to leave this fourth M at a 30,000-foot view. We’re going to break down in granular detail exactly what neurosensory movement is, its pieces and parts. There’s actually a sequence to effective, efficient, brain-healing, brain-organizing movement. When you see exactly how it functions at its best, you’ll know where to start to get your child stronger, craving movement, and off the iPad once again.

So this isn’t even an iPad tech conversation. And this certainly isn’t a “parents just need to do a better job parenting” conversation. Goodness gracious. You’re trying to parent and lead a kiddo through life whose brain and nervous system is completely subluxated. That means sympathetic dominant, stuck in stress mode. The second phase is dysregulated, disorganized, and discoordinated. That’s 100% of this conversation: dyspraxia and those sorts of things. Stage one and stage two of this neurological dysfunction Perfect Storm progression lead to stage three: exhaustion. They are literally depleted, and you can hardly get them to move.

So we have to go deeper into the neurosensory motor system so you know where to start to rehabituate it, reactivate it, and reorganize it, so your child can use it instead of avoid it. If that lands, this conversation will change everything for you.

And I’ll sneak this in there. Maybe many of you feel exactly that way right now. All the stress of helping your child heal through their chronic challenges: the appointments, the crazy schedule, the late nights up searching for answers. Then you’ve got work, your other kiddos, all the responsibilities. Maybe your motor system and nervous system are dysregulated and exhausted too.

Many of you are physically exhausted. You want to go to the gym, go for a walk, get back in shape, run a 5K, do whatever you used to love to do, but you have no energy. If you even think about going out to exercise, that exhausts you even more. That’s a conundrum, isn’t it? Because God literally made us to move.

I’ll summarize it with a simple statement. Hopefully you’ve heard it before, because it’s one of the most important basic tenets of wellbeing we could have to help our kids heal or to be healthy ourselves: Movement is life. Nerding out with that a little bit means the nervous system, neurosensory motor function, is life. Both of those are true.

If yours is exhausted because your kiddo’s exhausted, you know this conversation. You think, “If I could just work out more, I’d have more energy.” But in the beginning, that’s the hardest thing ever. All you want to do is watch Netflix and chill, because your neurosensory motor system is dysregulated, subluxated, and exhausted as well, so it’s not that easy to tap into.

A bunch of you, because I know how much you nerd out, may think that lack of physical energy has to do with chemistry. “I have so many depleted methylation pathways, I’ve got MTHFR, I have so many toxins that they shut down my mitochondria.” If you just ate better, avoided toxins, did these supplements or this detox program, or got in the infrared sauna more often, you would somehow have energy. I bet a lot of you have tried that for yourself, and you’re still freaking exhausted.

So this fourth M is freaking everything. That’s two freakings in ten seconds, just to let you know how important this is.

What Does the Neurosensory Motor System Actually Do?

Dr. Tony Ebel: So what does the neuromotor system really do for us and for our kids?

Number one, it controls muscle tone. You’ve probably heard about low muscle tone from your PT, OT, or speech therapist. You’re going to understand tone at a deeper neurological level today than ever before.

Number two, posture and postural stability. Fall in love with how basic this is. Yes, we’re talking about your child’s posture, and the word stability is everything.

Number three, reflex development, so primitive reflexes and retained reflexes. They’re going to enter the chat. Are they the problem themselves? No. They’re a symptom, a tethered barnacle. I don’t know that I’ve ever used a barnacle analogy on this podcast before. They’re a part of the problem, but they’re not the source of the problem. They come in the box with it. So we’ll get rid of them by working on the things we’re talking about today, not by doing a bunch of focused exercises on them.

Number four, sensory integration. Ooh, there’s a buzzword. Does your child struggle with sensory issues? Have you struggled for years to know what the heck that even means? Just like tone, we’re going to give you a much fuller understanding of sensory integration by the time we’re done.

Number five, motor planning. Motor planning is a very intricate, detailed neurological function. Because it’s the number one energy-expending function of the body, when you can’t do it, the mitochondria become depleted, and you can’t use that mitochondrial energy for detoxification, elimination, and gut function. So the motor system is this hidden-in-plain-sight ball hog.

All it takes is a set of eyes for two, three, or 30 seconds. That’s hard to do on a podcast. But when we show this to parents, when we look at a child like Joseph, oh my goodness. Please go to the show notes and click on the reel. It’s a short-form video, under three minutes, where you can watch Joseph’s pre and post motor changes. You can see him walk into the office built into an exhausted C. He couldn’t even pick his shoulders and head up, because his nervous system dysregulation, his motor planning, and his postural instability were some of the worst I’ve ever seen. His muscle tone, one of the worst I’ve ever seen. His sensory integration and motor planning, one of the worst I’d ever seen.

And it changed in a matter of two to three weeks. They could hardly get him to walk from the car to the office on his own without support, as an 11-year-old who should have all the energy in the world. They’re 11. They should be moving at all times and have energy for days. Joseph had none. By the second week, he’s going to the hotel gym and asking his mom if he can run on the treadmill and lift weights. That’s how fast this can change when you know where to start and how to spark it.

And it’s not a therapy conversation. How many of you have been doing therapy? Joseph’s family stopped doing physical therapy because they had done it for years, and it actually made him more ticked off and more exhausted, because all they were trying to do was build his strength. And we’re not even there yet.

Number six on my list is developmental sequencing. The motor system needs to develop before the other Ms. Developmentally, in a sequential conversation, they don’t matter as much to the brain as motor planning. God designed our babies, infants, toddlers, and kids to go through development in a very specific sequence and playbook. When this one system, which is supposed to develop first and fully before the prefrontal cortex, the parietal cortex, and even the microbiome and immune system, gets off track, it’s a big freaking deal.

Those six things make up the neurosensory motor system. Then come seven and eight: strength and overall support, and then mobility and flexibility.

So if you’ve been working on your child’s strength, flexibility, and mobility in therapy, who’s been working on the first six? I love it when a really advanced PT, OT, or speech clinic is talking about motor tone, postural stability, reflexes, sensory function, motor planning, and developmental sequencing. Even if your movement-based therapy team or functional neurology team is crushing it with this conversation, and you’re nodding along going, “I actually know about this stuff, and we’re working on it,” we still have to ask the question: Is it working?

Because there’s one thing that comes right into this conversation and wreaks havoc on this fourth M and neurosensory motor function, and that’s subluxation. PTs, OTs, and speech therapists, the best in the world, don’t know how to find and fix subluxation. That’s not a limitation of their intervention. It’s just the specialty of the chiropractic profession.

Functional neurology is often a movement-based integration therapy center on steroids, with lasers and devices and other things. But if they don’t adjust, they’re skipping the most important step in getting these kids better, because subluxation of the neurospinal system feeds those eight functions bad information, bad input, and bad integration more than anything else.

Subluxation means misalignment, fixation, and neurological interference within the central conduit between the brain and the muscle system. That’s the spine, the spinal cord, the neurospinal system. We put it together in that phrase so you know it’s one intricate system. The spine is not just muscles, ligaments, and bones. The spine is a neurological air traffic control unit.

“The spine is not just muscles, ligaments, and bones. The spine is a neurological air traffic control unit.”

The entire neurospinal system is essential, and for this conversation, especially the brainstem and the upper cervical spine. For neurosensory motor tone, stability, reflex development, sensory integration, motor planning and sequencing, and strength and flexibility, nothing matters more to the whole body’s ability to move than the function of the spine. It’s the central processing conduit, the brain-body connection to all the muscles: big ones, little ones, stabilizers, phasic muscles, movement muscles, digestive muscles inside the GI tract, and lymphatic tissues that move and detox the body. You name it. That neurospinal system is the most important thing to this fourth M.

Bottom Up, Back Forward: Gravitational Security, Gut Motility, and Detox

Dr. Tony Ebel: Here’s what this neurosensory movement system is doing 24/7/365 that you need to know about. If it’s not working well, to use my Iowa farmer language, you’ve got to fix that first.

The number one thing it does is constantly go through a sequence of questions: Where am I in space? Is this safe and stable? How much tone do I need to send to which muscles, muscle groups, and parts of the body to properly respond? To really teach this, you have to go even nerdier, but let’s stay here. Where am I? Is this safe? Am I stable? How much tone do I need to distribute to respond to gravity?

This is called gravitational security. It involves the vestibular and visual-oculomotor systems, but really it’s neurospinal, and the most important part of this is the brainstem. If a child’s neuromotor system has gravitational security and stability, the brain can focus on everything else: cognition, social-emotional maturation, speech and communication, verbalization, digestive function, immune system detoxification. It has efficiency of energy, because it’s gravitationally safe, secure, and stable.

If the brain doesn’t have that, if this neuromotor system is subluxated and dysfunctional, then every time it goes through those questions, the brain freaks out. It stresses out. It gets confused. It gets disorganized. Its processing centers get delayed, and it gets distracted. Every word in that sequence is true about subluxation and what it does to the brain, specifically in the neurosensory motor conversation.

So now the brain stays busy. We call it busy brain syndrome. Most kiddos struggling with this fourth M are either Raging Bull, moving too fast, or, in the most important conversation here, Drunken Bull, the disconnected bull.

We’re watching kiddos who are struggling with level two or level three autism. We run labs and say, “Man, their gut, their methylation, their mitochondria are a mess.” But then we just use our eyes and do a movement-based neurological assessment, and we say, “Look at how much they struggle in space. Look at how much they struggle with gravity.”

I often bring this up on a phone consult, which is hard because we’re just talking verbally, like this podcast, and you’re trying to picture it in your mind. It’s often the first time anyone has brought it up. It’s weird, because you’ve got PT, OT, and speech therapy, but most of them don’t talk about it this way. So we ask parents to look at it, think about it, and observe it. We’ll ask them to send us a video of their child moving at the playground, running around the house, or going up and down the stairs, and it’s a hot mess express.

The neurosensory motor input going into the brain is more foundational to healing and development than the gut-brain connection. That input comes through the dorsal horn of the spinal cord, into the brainstem, into the cerebellum. We call that bottom up. All the muscles feed into the neurospinal system, into the sensory dorsal horn, and into what are called CNS tracts, some of which control motor planning. So “bottom” means the whole body, feeding through the spinal cord and brainstem into the back of the brain: the cerebellum.

The cerebellum is only about 20% of the physical anatomical space of the brain, but it has more neurons and more connections than even the prefrontal cortex or the parietal cortex. When you study brain anatomy, you’d think those are the important parts of the brain, but they’re just doing what the rest of the body is telling them to do. So: bottom up, back forward.

This neurosensory motor input is more important than the bloodstream input, the gut-brain connection. And it’s even more important than the neuroimmune inflammatory input.

Can the brain be missing nutrients, and do we need to repair and restore the gut? Heck yes. Those labs, those Gut Zoomers, are essential to get your kid better. Can the brain be struggling with inflammation due to toxins that were inhaled, ingested, or injected into your kiddo? Yes. Those toxins, viruses, strep, bacterial overgrowth, and everything else have got to get out eventually, because they create a constant cascade of inflammation and immune system dysregulation. Does the brain get stressed and inflamed and ticked off about that? Yes.

But in order for the brain to do something about either of those two things (restore and rebuild gut function, and restore and rebuild immune system regulation through detoxification and elimination), the body needs to move fully and effectively. Do you know what that’s called? Pooping, coughing, sneezing, and sometimes even rashes and skin challenges that get the toxins out of the body.

You’re putting a nutrient-dense diet and supportive supplementation into your child, awesomely and incredibly, and probably spending significant financial resources to make that happen. Sometimes we can tell those ideal nutrients are going in, but they’re not doing the job we want. They’re not giving you the benefit you’ve been looking for. That’s actually a fourth M, movement and motility, conversation.

The nervous system needs to move the gut, the microbiome, and the muscles of the digestive system effectively to get those foods, even the good ones, through the system, absorbed, and then assimilated. Assimilation is a nerdy primary chiro word that means “take the good stuff in and send it where it needs to go.” We need our movement pathways working to put nutrients into the tissues, organs, glands, and cells that need them. Movement is life, even in a digestion, nutrition, and nourishment conversation.

Movement is also life for immune system detoxification, elimination, and methylation. The body’s ability to get toxins out depends on movement. Did you know that sweating is detoxing? That exercising is detoxing? Sneezing, coughing, hacking loogies (there’s my Iowa farmer background again), and blowing snot rockets? If you’ve got a hockey player in your family, they’re happy I said that.

God designed the immune system’s detoxification and elimination pathways to depend on one thing over everything else. It’s not the microbiome, it’s not methylation, and it’s not mitochondria. It’s movement. Chemicals, toxins, bacteria, viruses, parasites, and pollen get into the body. God knew what he was doing. There are little muscles and even little hairs inside the nasal and respiratory system, all designed to constantly be moving. When the nervous system is fully connected and identifies, “Hey, that’s a pathogen, get it out,” it just moves it on out, and away it goes.

And when the nervous system, still fully connected, says, “Hey, that’s an omega-3, I could use that here in the brain. That’s magnesium, I could use that to get to sleep. Activated B vitamins? Goodness gracious almighty, give me as many of those B12 sons of guns as I can get,” it needs its movement ability to identify that, grab ahold of it, and move it to the tissue, organ, gland, or cell that needs it.

So I can take this fourth M and apply it to everything you’ve learned about getting your kiddo better, and it shows up front and center and says, “We’ve got to get this one working best to get all those working best.” It worked for Joseph. It works for our kiddos. We focus on this first, and then we sequence their healing.

Once gut motility is back online, all the supplementation, diet, and nutritional interventions to repair, restore, and rebuild the microbiome work exponentially better. All the detoxification and the herbal, homeopathic, and bioregulatory remedies and tinctures that may have been doing some good? Holy moly, do they do a lot of good when the movement system turns back on and those things can work in harmony. And then methylation, detoxification, elimination: that’s everything.

Can Birth Trauma Throw Off Motor Development?

Dr. Tony Ebel: Now, before we’re done, you might have found through this episode, “Holy heck, this is us. It’s been there the whole time.” My child’s posture is a mess. Their shoulders are constantly asymmetrical. They’re constantly cracking their neck. Maybe they even have a little motor tic or sensory motor tic somewhere. The neck, the jaw, and the eyes are the most common, because that’s the brainstem, and holding the head up in space is the most important thing to this fourth M.

They run kind of discombobulated. When they were a baby, they were motor delayed. When they were a toddler, they had a stanky leg. They skipped crawling, or they struggled and were delayed with some of these things.

Pause right now and, just as a parent, look at your kiddo and ask: How are they moving? How’s their posture? How are they handling gravity? A gymnastics coach or a track coach would probably pick up on this conversation even more, because optimal neuromotor function is essential to athletics. But you can do it just as a parent.

I know those probably seem like funky questions, because nobody asked you to ask them of your child yet. Nobody evaluated those simple, basic, foundational, I’m going to say life-changing, functions, because they were so caught up in the labs, the Gut Zoomers, the stool samples, the hair analysis, the genetic testing, the cognitive testing, the lasers, the therapies, and so on. In today’s world, the more we learn about the brain, the less we know about how the brain really works, and it relies on the basics of how God designed it. Movement is life.

So if you’ve paused the podcast, pulled up a video of them playing soccer, and you’re going, “Holy heck, Tony’s talking about what I need to be about,” you might ask yourself: Why did this get thrown off track? What sent this down this road?

Birth. Remember when I read Amy’s answer? Amy is Joseph’s rock star mom. I could tell from Joseph’s case history where it began. I also knew Amy had come into our practice after watching our videos and listening to the podcast. So I made the assumption I make with pretty much every one of our new patient parents these days: you’ve done your homework, and I think you know the answer. No doctor has sat across from you yet and let you answer it, because it is emotional to come to that one word and go, “Ugh, I knew it all along, but I didn’t know it, because nobody helped me focus on it.”

But it’s also so freaking empowering to look back, pin the tail on the donkey, and say, “That did it.” I know going backwards into your child’s case history and root causes can take you down one emotional trail. But it can also take you down the one I promise I will live on alongside you, in partnership, in every episode of this podcast and everything we do with our PX Talks platform. It’s empowering. It’s invigorating. It’s hope dealing, because you go, “Freaking A. I know what it is. I’ve known all along, or I didn’t, and now I can do something about it.”

Joseph’s neurosensory motor system was the biggest mess by a large margin when we evaluated him. Remember, Amy sent all of his labs. She’d seen all the specialists and the functional docs. I had his toxicology reports. Holy heck, a lot of toxins. I could see how many nutrients he was missing. Holy heck, a lot. This family lived the most holistic, natural, incredible lifestyle. Amy was boss level. She had it dialed in. She was just missing getting her kid adjusted.

So when I asked her, “Where do you think all this started?” she said, “Birth.”

Sometimes there’s something even ahead of that: maternal distress. Cortisol crosses the placenta. Digging a little deeper, we were able to add to Amy’s entirely correct one-word answer. Her pregnancy was stressful. It was high risk, with previous miscarriages. She was working full time, she had two preteens, she was caring for her grandfather with cancer and a father with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, and she had a stepson in addiction. That’s just one line item in Joseph’s case history about one part of his Perfect Storm background.

That’s a tremendous amount of stress on mom’s nervous system during a critical, crucial, sensitive period of development for Joseph’s nervous system. That’s a big deal, and it sets up the likelihood of a traumatic birth.

Joseph arrived after just 15 minutes of labor. Super fast birth, epidural, 38 weeks. But here’s the detail that most providers, even movement-based providers, would miss: he began lifting his head and arching his neck and back immediately after birth.

Somebody might say, “Look at this, Joseph’s going to be a track star, he’s doing these things early.” Early is often worse than late. That’s not a sign of a strong baby. If your child was the opposite of motor delayed, if they went through milestones faster or skipped stages, especially crawling, that really stresses out the brain, and it can lead to things like motor tics, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, and even seizures.

So there were early warning signs of the storm already building for Joseph. The head, neck, and spine arching. Breastfeeding difficulties that required a switch to a specialized formula. Super refluxy, so he had to sleep elevated. Constipated by six months, and literally until we met him.

What’s the gut? A muscle, a motor system. He was constipated from six months to 11 years, despite all the supplements, detoxes, and probiotics. He was on MiraLAX when we met him, and he was able to get off it right away, because it wasn’t a lack of MiraLAX causing his constipation. It was a lack of motor function.

He didn’t sit alone until 11 months, didn’t really crawl until 12 months, and didn’t walk until about 14 to 16 months. He was vocalizing at birth and talking by three months, and then it stopped entirely at 13 months. He received his autism diagnosis at 17 months.

What Amy wrote on the intake form is that although there were indicators from birth, every time she raised her concerns with the conventional pediatrician or the long list of specialists she saw before us, she was dismissed, minimized, told it was normal, and told he would grow out of it.

But what we’ve said since episode number freaking one of this podcast is that babies don’t grow out of colic. They don’t grow out of constipation, reflux, and sensory motor challenges. They grow into sensory spectrum neurodevelopmental challenges. Joseph’s story is not an exception. It’s the pattern. It’s The Perfect Storm.

“Babies don’t grow out of colic. They grow into sensory spectrum neurodevelopmental challenges.”

It’s what we teach, what we know, and what we do something about, and I’ll finish with that in a couple of minutes. It’s also what I’m writing a book about. If you’ve been following along for a long time and you’re a fan of the super nerdy neurosensory way we teach this stuff, the parent stories (I’m not talking about my son Oliver today, but he’s a miracle story just like Joseph), and maybe even the dad jokes and Iowa farmer analogies, and you’d like to see all of this wrapped into a physical printed book, it’s coming. I usually try to stay a few weeks if not a few months ahead with these episodes, so if this one comes out in the spring or summer, know that by fall or winter at the latest, the book will be available. I hope you’re excited about that, and I hope you help us spread the word.

In the meantime, if you’re not already officially following the podcast, hit the little plus and follow it. Download it, hit the share button, and leave a review. If this episode changed your life, follow @pxdocs on Instagram and follow us on Facebook. And finally, go to the website. We write some really incredible scientific articles, and we have awesome parent guides and content, including a weekly email newsletter.

I know that might sound like 2004. You’re like, “Listen, bro, I’ve got TikTok. I’m on the Gram. I’m hip.” First and foremost, moms and dads, nobody says hip anymore. You ain’t hip. I’m not hip. I don’t know that we’re at peak stay cool anymore, but we’re trying. And in our world, you’re fricking peak to me, home slice. So go to the website, sign up for the email newsletter, and get connected to everything PX Docs has. We can get alongside you, in partnership with your other incredible provider team, who just need to work together in the right sequence. We can get your Joseph better, too.

Overnight? No. Treatment? No. Cure? No. Get to the root cause and fix this fourth M so the other three Ms you’ve probably already been working on come online too? Heck fricking yes. Those of you who listen to every episode probably know I just set a record for most frickins used, because it’s this fourth fricking M I really want to get out to the world. You guys, it’s easier than we’re making it. Let’s get this taken care of.

Why Tone Comes First: Hypotonicity, Hypertonicity, and Neuro-Tonal Adjustments

Dr. Tony Ebel: Okay. The final question we need to answer goes right into the solution and the action steps. Every podcast, we weave story and science, bad dad jokes, farmer stories, and ’90s and 2000s movie references, and then it all adds up to the last part of the podcast, which is why you’ve got to listen all the way through: What do you do about it?

Maybe you already stopped listening, went downstairs where your kid’s watching TV, and said, “Get up. We’re going outside. Dr. Tony said we need to move more.” Yes, and… there’s so much more to it.

Amy knew how important movement was. She knew Joseph’s posture was a mess. She was actually concerned about scoliosis because he was struggling so much with his neurospinal system. So she was all about Joseph moving more, but she had tapped out on PT and OT, because it’s not as easy as adding more movement. It’s actually this: fix the foundation that movement is built upon. Restore the input that drives stability, activation, and motor planning and coordination. We’re going to go back to our six, seven, eight functions and turn them back on individually, in order. It’s super cool, super nerdy, and super brain- and life-changing for kiddos.

Joseph had done PT, OT, and reflex integration. Amy went to see a functional neurologist, and it was all about brain balance and hemisphericity. If she supposedly did these primitive reflex integration exercises at home, his brain would get better and he’d get out of the storm. She did all of that, for years. It didn’t work. It actually tired him more.

The more she worked on his primitive reflexes, the more his seizures and motor tics got worse. The more she did at-home neurological integration, the more his behavior and emotional dysregulation got worse.

What the heck? “Tony, if this stuff matters most, and then up pops primitive reflexes as the foundation on an Instagram story from another doctor who looks and sounds a lot like you, what am I doing wrong?” Nothing. There’s just something foundationally right we need to do first. None of those therapies or reflex integration address motor tone, coordination, and then sensory processing.

So let’s send you into action with what needs to be fixed first. Tone, then coordination. I like to call coordination symmetry, or neurosensory motor efficiency.

We focus on the neurospinal system first, because neurospinal tone sets and dictates the tone for all the muscles of the body. If you don’t fix the spine first, you’ll never get the core better. You’ll never get them out of W-sitting. You’ll never get them skipping, running, stair climbing, or jumping. The spine is the central hub. It’s air traffic control. So we fix the tone of the spine first. From there, we move into coordination, postural stability, symmetry, and efficiency. And from there, we can get to reflex integration and sensory processing.

So is it a sensory issue? Only after the foundational neurospinal subluxation. That’s step one: getting your child adjusted. Joseph didn’t need more movement. He needed more adjustments, better adjustments, what are called Neuro-Tonal Adjustments. You’ve got to fix the tone first.

“Joseph didn’t need more movement. He needed more adjustments.”

Here’s what we found on Joseph’s EMG analysis. You can click into his story and see not only his movement pre and post, but also videos of his EMG scans pre and post. Or go to the website, click on his story, and you’ll see them.

EMG measures, guess what? Motor tone and motor symmetry, or coordination and organization. Those are the two things we measure with our surface spinal EMG testing. I’ve never taught it in this much detail. The end of this podcast is going to change everything if you really want to know this stuff.

There are three potential outcomes for tone within the motor system of your child’s body, and for this conversation, specifically the spine. The first is ideal tone. That’s awesome. The muscles are active. Depending on their region, a certain amount of stabilizing, postural, gravitational energy needs to be in the muscles at all times.

I’m sitting up doing this podcast. I need the right amount of tone through my spine, which then dictates the tone in all my other muscles, to sit up and handle gravity. If I stood up, it would shift, and different muscles would have to activate with different tone. Who knows how much ideal tone needs to go into each and every muscle, cell, tissue, and muscle group? The brainstem and the cerebellum. And what do they need to dictate and coordinate that? A clear communication pathway.

So what does subluxation do? It comes into the neurospinal system and gets in the way of the ideal Wi-Fi connection between the cerebellum, the brain, and the body and all of its muscles. If it’s there, there are no exercises and no primitive reflex integration that can get rid of it. No PT, OT, or speech therapy. No brushing, no working out, no eight-minute abs, no HIIT training, no ultramarathoning. There are only fricking chiropractic adjustments that can get rid of subluxation.

So ideal tone is what we’re looking for. We have to fix tone first to fix the motor system, and we have to fix the motor system before we can fix the microbiome, methylation, and mitochondria. Getting this granular at the end of this podcast matters massively. Everything is about tone. If you only take one thing from this, this is it.

When subluxation gets into the neurospinal system and wreaks havoc on tone, it produces one of two negative outcomes, and usually both.

Some muscles, usually at the cervical spine (the top of the neurospinal system, right by the brainstem) and the sacrum (where we need our core to be functional), get too much tone. That’s called hypertonicity. Too much tone stresses out the brain.

The other outcome subluxation puts in place is hypotonicity: weakness, low muscle tone, the one you’ve learned about. Do you know why your kiddo still struggles with low muscle tone, and where we see it on our EMG? Right where you’d expect: the core. The lower thoracics, what’s called the TL junction, the lumbars, and the transition zones. And for postural stability, the CT junction: the traps and the shoulders. Both are exhausted in kiddos like Joseph. You’ll see it on his scans on the website.

So you’ll see tension in his brainstem. That’s hypertonicity, too much tone, which stresses out and confuses the brain. We can map so many challenges to it: seizures, motor tics, sleep irregularities. But the motor challenge, the inability to move, not even wanting to, being exhausted by it, comes not only from the hypertonicity but from the hypotonicity. The low tone in his transition zones and core is a big deal. That’s what causes the drunken, exhausted, dysregulated bull. So we needed to fix both.

Now, tone needs to get fixed first. Not treatment, not cure: adjustments. I use the word fix because I’m an Iowa farm kid and a Midwesterner, and I think you get it easier. Adjustments are designed to restore tone. Some adjustments go into the brainstem, and they’re super light. They’re literally called tonal adjustments, and all of our adjustments are called Neuro-Tonal Adjustments. With some of them, it’ll look like nothing is happening. We’re just releasing and reducing the hypertonicity stuck in those nerves and muscles, and that’s essential. We have to get that noise and tension out of Joseph’s brainstem, or your child’s brainstem.

But what we actually need to do first to restore tone, and this is where our techniques and clinical protocols have become more advanced and more updated with the very specific sequence a child’s brain needs to heal, is get rid of the exhaustion.

Early in my career, I would go to the upper cervical spine and look to release and clear that brainstem C1, C2 hypertonicity. But you can’t rebuild a house on the sand, just like you shouldn’t build one on the sand in the first place. You want to build it on the rock.

So over the last three to five years we’ve shifted, and Joseph is one of our first cases where we deployed these newer, more granular, sequential adjusting protocols. We go into the areas of exhaustion in your child’s neurospinal system, the CT junction and TL junction where the hypotonicity is. We still use a tonal technique, but one that packs a little more punch. And the adjustment is done with gravity. We do these adjustments with your child sitting up or even standing, even the teenagers, even Joseph at 11. We activate the gravitational energy and sensory input into those areas of exhaustion, and we recharge that motor tone first.

So what needs to be fixed with motor tone, the hypertonicity or the hypotonicity? Both. In what order? Hypo first, hyper also. Once you get going into a care plan, you’re really doing both at the same time, and it’s super magical, super scientific, and super badass.

That’s what we did with Joseph. In his first three, five, seven days of intensive care, we worked on getting rid of his exhaustion first. Then we started to release the subluxation and the hypertonicity in his brainstem.

So that’s 10 minutes all about tone. I told you you’d learn more about tone than ever before. We get real granular. We track it with EMG. We feel it and test it with our hands, because that’s what chiropractors do. We focus on the neurospinal system. We palpate and measure tone. And we know that different chiropractic techniques, with a different force, amplitude, speed, torque, line of drive, trajectory, and location (all details that really, really matter), restore tone in the right way.

The Healing Sequence: Adjustments, Movement, Then Everything Else

Dr. Tony Ebel: Once you’ve restored tone, with the hypotonic areas stronger again and the tense, noisy, distracting, stressful hypertonic areas reduced, relaxed, and clear, now you send them back into movement.

Joseph kind of didn’t even need therapy, because he was like, “I’ll just hit the gym at the Country Inn & Suites. Give me protein gains, Mom. Let’s go to Fresh Thyme and the health food store and get some creatine, ’cause I’m gonna get jacked.” Joseph was ready to go. Maybe that bro energy just showed up from my man Joseph. I’ll stop now.

So we sent him off and said, “We don’t need you to go to therapy yet. It’s too early, you’re still in the healing process, but we’ve restored tone, and we’re on the path to restoration. Now we need it to stick.” We get to tone restoration, we get to stability, and then we have the child’s body move. We send them for walks, to the park, to free play centers where they can do parkour. (Just kidding, that’s a bit of a joke.) Climbing things, going to the park, doing things that are so healthy for a toddler to do.

Go all the way back to ideal development. Once your child started moving, did they ever stop? No. I met a friend of ours yesterday at lunch, a photographer and videographer. His kiddo is 10 months old, and I know he’s well adjusted, so he’s doing well. He said, “He’s just starting to crawl and walk and do all the movement things.” I said, “That’s awesome, man.” And he said, “It’s exhausting. It’s all he wants to do.” Awesome. Because that’s how the brain gets activated and organized, and it’s also how the brain heals.

So after restoring tone, the next thing we need to do is improve coordination. How do you improve coordination, motor planning, and stability? You use it. If you don’t use it, you lose it. Joseph now had the tone, the energy, and the function to do it, so we sent him out, and away he went, rocking and rolling.

And guess what went away by that alone? His retained primitive reflexes, his motor tics, and even his seizures.

Does that mean we treated or cured his subluxations, his retained reflexes, his low muscle tone, or his dyspraxia? Does that mean we treated and cured his motor tics, his ADHD, his seizures, or, fricking A, his autism? No, it doesn’t. Did we restore and get rid of the things on the list I read at the beginning, the things that were triggering the set of symptoms that, in the diagnostic, DSM medical world we live in, land on those diagnoses? Yes. The root causes, the dysfunctions within his fourth M neuromotor system, got better. So guess what else got better? His brain. And guess what his brain did? The healing. That’s how this works.

So in closing, if this feels like going backwards to go forward, good, because you haven’t missed anything up to this point. If this feels like, “My goodness, this is too simple, too basic, it almost makes too much sense and is too easy,” one more freaking A: awesome, because it is. That’s how this works. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care and the restoration and reorganization of neurosensory motor tone, coordination, stability, symmetry, and efficiency must be done first.

I don’t want you to think of this kind of chiropractic care as one more thing on the list. It’s actually the foundation that everything else sits on. If you need to take a breather from those other things, like Amy did with Joseph, because they’re simply not working, to make room for this one foundational thing, that’s totally fine. It might only be two to three weeks that you need to hit pause.

That’s also what we did with Joseph, and I haven’t said that explicitly yet. Joseph came in not only on all those medications, but on a ton of supplements, sleep aids, detox agents, and all sorts of things, and it was overwhelming his already overwhelmed system. I’m not a medical doctor. I couldn’t do anything about his medications, and I didn’t. We talked about them in the grand scheme of things, but that was up to Amy, Joseph’s parents, and his medical doctors.

What I did say was, “Hey, stop doing those at-home reflex integration exercises,” because they were just ticking him off. They’re getting closer to the root cause, but retained primitive reflexes aren’t actually that close to the root cause. Subluxation is. Then I said, “All these supplements, I think they’re just overwhelming his system. He has no motility. He has no ability to get rid of them or toxins, or to absorb and assimilate them, so I think they’re actually just making him more tired. Just stop the supplements for now.” And she did.

We’re not saying reflex integration on its own is an awful thing, or that supplementation is terrible and every kid needs to stop. In this particular case, in this particular starting sequence of restoring and rebuilding the foundation for Joseph, we just needed to clear room. Maybe that’s what you need to do. It’ll feel like going backwards to go forward, but it’ll actually be more impactful, and your child’s nervous system will be able to take the chiropractic adjustments with more completion and more restoration of neurosensory motor function if they have room to do so.

So if you haven’t started PX Docs Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care yet, that’s your first step. If you’re already doing it and you get a gut feeling that a lot of the “ands” are piling on and perhaps getting in the way of the adjustments, maybe back off a little. Talk with your PX Doc: “Hey, are we overloading an already overloaded system?”

And the final thing is true too. If your kiddo has been getting adjusted for two years, with intensives and everything else, and now they do have neuro, motor, postural, tone, and sensory stability, now it’s time to add them back into therapy. Or it’s time to work with Mary Coyle and do some bioregulatory detoxification and homotoxicology work. It all depends on where your child is in the healing sequence: when you do this, whether you do it by itself and for how long, and when you add in other interventions. We’ll put the sequencing conversation in the show notes too.

Generally, a case heals exactly like Joseph’s. We do at least a few weeks of Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care alone. Second, we get them moving more on their own: go to the park, go swim, go play, go climb. After that, if they still need more movement integration work, we add in PT and OT, we return them to speech therapy, and they all start working better.

That’s the movement system: tone, coordination, planning, stability, sequencing, everything you learned today. This is an absolute masterclass on the fourth M and neurosensory motor function. You now know it better than 95% of chiropractors and probably 85% of movement-based therapists. That’s not a knock on anybody. We just need to go this deep.

If you’re doing all that, and you know your child has a ton of toxins, mold, vaccines, and medications in their case history, now go deep with detoxification and biomedical, functional, integrative care. It will work better because your child is moving, and they need to move to detox.

So in closing, to Amy and every mom exactly like Amy listening right now: thank you for not giving up on your Joseph. Thank you for trusting your gut when every system, every doctor, every specialist, and perhaps a lot of other podcasters, YouTubers, and Instagrammers were telling you it was nothing, or that it was something else, one of these other three Ms. Your child’s story is not over.

If you feel like you’ve literally tried everything and nothing is working, just take this episode and go back to the basics. Go back to the foundation of neurosensory motor function, the fourth M, movement, and you’ll be blown away by how important it is, how impactful it is, and how intricate it is.

It may look like your child’s fine. They can walk. They sit up. But how well? How smooth? How coordinated? How sequential? There’s so much neurological data in this one conversation that if it’s not doing well, it is the major instigator of all sorts of trouble. That means it’s the number one thing we need to get restored, repaired, and reorganized. Not kind of, sort of, a little bit. Fully, wholly, neurologically.

Because the next chapter for your child may look nothing like the months or years you’ve been working through. It may actually be simpler, more straightforward, and more foundational. And as a result, it’s probably the path to being so much more transformational.

We get to do this all day, every day with Josephs all over the world. The PX Docs Network is now all over the world. Go to the directory, plug in your city, your zip code, or your region, find one of us, and get this started. Get them adjusted, restore the foundation, get them moving, and you’ll be moving toward your miracle.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the fourth M in children’s health?

The fourth M is movement, or the neurosensory motor system. Dr. Tony Ebel describes it as more foundational than the microbiome, mitochondria, and methylation, because a child’s motor system develops first and supports gut motility, immune function, and detoxification. He explains that when the motor system is off track, interventions aimed at the other three Ms may have limited results.

Why does my child get so exhausted by movement?

Dr. Tony Ebel explains that when the neurosensory motor system is disorganized, moving can feel asymmetrical, uncoordinated, and draining for a child. That exhaustion may spill into emotional and behavioral dysregulation and trouble focusing. Over time, kids who need movement most often avoid it most. He points to subluxation, low tone in the core, and excess tone near the brainstem as part of why.

Why aren’t primitive reflex exercises helping my child?

Dr. Tony Ebel describes retained primitive reflexes as part of the problem, not the source. In Joseph’s case, years of at-home reflex integration exercises were followed by more fatigue, tics, and dysregulation. He explains that muscle tone and coordination need to be restored first, starting with subluxation in the neurospinal system, before reflex integration and sensory work can do their job.

Can constipation in kids be a motor problem?

Dr. Tony Ebel explains that the gut is a muscle and a motor system, so chronic constipation may reflect a motility problem rather than a lack of supplements, probiotics, or laxatives. Movement also supports nutrient absorption, assimilation, and the body’s detox pathways. In Joseph’s individual case, constipation had lasted from six months to 11 years, and he was able to stop MiraLAX after care began.

Can birth trauma affect my child’s motor development?

Dr. Tony Ebel connects maternal distress during pregnancy and birth trauma to later motor challenges as part of The Perfect Storm. Early warning signs he highlights include head and back arching right after birth, reflux, early constipation, and motor milestones that come late, early, or get skipped, especially crawling. He notes that hitting milestones early is not necessarily a sign of a strong baby.

How do I find a pediatric chiropractor who focuses on the nervous system?

The PX Docs Network includes practitioners trained in Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care around the world. Parents can search the PX Docs directory by city, zip code, or region to find a PX Doc near them. Dr. Tony Ebel recommends starting with care focused on restoring neurospinal tone, then adding movement, therapy, and other interventions in sequence. Find a PX Doc near you.

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