The Experience Miracles Podcast

Pediatric Brain Injury: Why the Order of Healing Matters Most

Mar 3, 2026

Why Sequencing Matters Most in Neurological Healing: The Foundational First Step

Episode 187, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: March 3, 2026 | Duration: ~62 min

Key Takeaways

  • Neurological healing must follow the same sequence as neurological development: brainstem and autonomic nervous system first, then the neuromotor system, then gut and immune function, then the brain. Skipping or scrambling this sequence limits results from every other intervention a child receives.
  • A child stuck in Sympathetic Dominance, the nervous system’s fight-or-flight state, cannot absorb nutrients, detox effectively, respond to therapy, or develop normally. Chiropractic adjustments that stimulate the vagus nerve and parasympathetic system are the foundational step to exit that state.
  • Subluxation of the upper cervical spine reduces cerebrospinal fluid flow and oxygenation into the brainstem. Research using functional MRI shows that Neuro-Tonal Adjustments increase CSF flow and brain oxygenation, a mechanism that explains why so many non-structural symptoms improve with chiropractic care.
  • “More isn’t always better.” Families overwhelmed by simultaneous interventions (supplements, therapies, detox protocols) often see better results when they sequence those interventions rather than layer them all at once. Calming and reorganizing the nervous system first makes every downstream therapy more effective.
  • Dr. Tony Ebel’s son, Oliver, survived a hypoxic brainstem injury at birth, was given a 20% chance of surviving to age one, and was predicted to develop cerebral palsy, autism, and epilepsy. He now runs a 4:40 mile in high school cross country, a real-world demonstration of neuroplasticity and the healing model Dr. Tony teaches.

Why Does the Order of Interventions Matter for Neurologically Injured Children?

For children with pediatric brain injuries, complex neurological conditions, or chronic developmental challenges, the number of interventions rarely predicts outcomes, the sequence does. Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP explains that the nervous system was designed to build itself in a specific order: the brainstem and autonomic nervous system develop first, followed by the neuromotor system, then the gut and immune systems, and finally higher brain function. Healing must retrace that same path.

When a child has a hypoxic brain injury, severe birth trauma, or traumatic brain injury, the nervous system gets locked into Sympathetic Dominance, a chronic fight-or-flight state that blocks digestion, sleep, detoxification, immune function, and neuroplasticity. In that state, even well-designed therapies and supplements cannot reach their potential. The gut can’t absorb nutrients if the muscles governing digestion are spastic and poorly coordinated. The brain can’t rewire if it’s running on crisis chemistry around the clock.

This is why Dr. Tony Ebel calls neurologically-focused chiropractic care the “foundational first step.” By addressing Subluxation in the upper cervical spine, which restricts CSF flow, oxygenation, and proprioceptive input to the brainstem, chiropractic adjustments calm the sympathetic system and surge the parasympathetic system through vagus nerve stimulation. Once the nervous system begins to regulate, every other intervention in a child’s care plan, PT, OT, nutrition, neuromotor therapy, works with a system that can actually receive and respond to it.

Introduction: Why Dr. Tony Is Sharing This Conference Presentation [00:00:00 – 00:04:30]

Dr. Tony Ebel: Hey everybody. I recently had the honor of speaking at the Making Connections Conference, hosted by Team Luke Hope for Mines, with Tim Siegel and his amazing team down in Austin, Texas, an incredible organization serving families navigating pediatric brain injury and traumatic brain injuries. We were truly grateful to be a part of that.

I loved my time teaching and talking. I especially, as always, most loved my time after I came off the stage, put the PowerPoint down. I just got to sit knee to knee with so many parents and kids. It was such an incredible experience. Definitely put it on your calendar to make this conference, especially if your family is in the brain injury world. It’s a must-make conference.

We wanted the message there to reach even further across the world. So we thought that our podcast community would really love to nerd out with us, and that’s why I’m sharing this with you today.

We’re talking about the kind of pediatric brain injury that truly does turn life upside down for families: seizures, significant developmental delays, feeding and breathing struggles, sensory overwhelm, paralysis, chronic illness, and just a level of challenges that impact nearly every part of daily life.

When we can get into their nervous system and start to make changes to function and regulation, get into the vagus nerve and get the brain and body to work better, we can vastly improve so many daily life struggles. And honestly, it’s really personal for me too. It’s the world my son Oliver lived in right out of the gates. His birth trauma, seizures, and early neurological brain injury changed the course of his life and mine. That experience is why I’ve spent the last two decades studying how early neurological brainstem and brain injury happens, how it affects everything, and, most importantly, how healing and transformation is possible.

If you’re raising a child with a significant neurological or brain injury, or if you’re overwhelmed by therapies, hospitals, stem cells, PT, neurointensive programs, and you’ve just wondered what is the best first path forward, this episode is for you. There is clarity. There is hope, and there is a way forward.

Meet Dr. Tony: Faith, Family, and a Team Fighting for Your Kids [00:05:00 – 00:10:30]

I’m gonna start by sharing my son’s story to kick us off, my pursuit of all this neuroscience, and how Neurologically-Focused Pediatric Chiropractic (which is very significantly different from regular chiropractic) came to be my life’s work.

My whole team back home has a brick-and-mortar practice outside of Chicago. We do intensives, we have six docs. Then we teach other chiropractors this work. We have a team of 50 people and I just want each of your families and kids to know that we are praying every single day for your families. There is absolute neuroscientific research in hope, it’s a central part of healing.

What we titled this presentation is really the thing I want you to pull out of it: The Foundational First Step in Neurological Healing and Why Sequencing Matters Most. Because when we’re fighting through traumatic brain injuries and all of the neurological challenges our kids go through, it opens up an entire long list of things to do. And the frustration I really meet parents with, when we sit down knee to knee, is feeling overwhelmed by all the options.

In these incredible Facebook groups, how can this mom’s comment say “it worked” and the next comment say “it didn’t”? Because the nervous system is the most complex, multifaceted system, and each of our children had different mechanisms of injury, ages, and health going in. So we need to get right into the crux of this: what’s the foundation?

The foundation, when we look at neuroplasticity and the way God designed our children to develop, that sequence is the same healing sequence we need to use for repair and recovery. We have to go back to how brains and bodies were supposed to be built, ideally. And we need to go into that to get the work done.

“We slow down to speed up.”

Oliver’s Story: The Birth Trauma That Changed Everything [00:11:00 – 00:20:00]

My path as a chiropractor started very standard. I had never said the word “chiropractic” the first 20 years of my life. When I was 19, 20 years old, I went and shadowed a chiropractor. I always wanted to work with health. I love neuroscience, I love helping people. And when I would shadow people in the hospital, I understood, they save lives, but they don’t necessarily rebuild lives. They’re the fire department. They put the fire out. But then after that, we have the brain damage, we have the injuries. What do we do to rebuild?

I started to study neurologically focused chiropractic from a brainstem injury standpoint. And then God knew what he was doing with my life and the storm we would go through, so that I could be there to pull Oliver to the other side of it, and then live there for my entire career to help other families as well.

On Memorial Day of 2009, Oliver showed up six weeks early. He shot out on the very first push. My wife was on all fours on the bed. And I watched Oliver have a whiplash, hypoxic, what I would now describe as a hypoxic brainstem injury from birth. The midwife didn’t expect him to come out on one push, so he wasn’t caught.

I took Oliver, cord still attached, turned my wife around, put him on her lap, and made his first Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic adjustment. That literally kicked the fluid out of his lungs. As I was adjusting him, I was pumping oxygen into his brain. I was pumping parasympathetics and vagal nerve tone into his brain.

He went from two days at one hospital, they life-flighted him there. He had a hypoxic brain injury. I watched him have a seizure within his first hour of life. They transferred us to Lutheran General in Chicago and he had what’s called an ECMO procedure, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation. They thought he’d be on that machine for 14 to 20 days and maybe never come off of it. His brain injury was so bad.

Oliver came off that machine in five and a half days.

His EEG showed the worst burst suppression seizure pattern. His MRI, you could actually see the brain damage on there. Oliver left the NICU six weeks later with a perfect EEG, no seizures, off all of his medications. And the MRI, his brain fully healed. You could see the pre and post images.

And the neurologist told us he had a 20% chance of living to age one, and if he lived past one, he had a 99% chance of cerebral palsy, autism, and epilepsy.

I remember walking the halls and being inspired by those stories, and then doing everything I could to maximize my child’s healing from the beginning. And thank God, truly, that he put me down the path of being a neurologically focused chiropractor first, so I could install those things and get after them.

Oliver is now a 16-year-old who runs a 4:40 mile in high school cross country. That’s our miracle man.

“They told us he had a 20% chance of living to age one, and a 99% chance of cerebral palsy, autism, and epilepsy. I said: understood, thank you for saving my child’s life, but no thank you to that outcome.”

When to Hit Pause: Clearing Room for Foundational Healing [00:22:00 – 00:28:00]

Our goals are three things. First: what is the neurological hierarchy, what is the foundation, what moves the needle most? Second, hard, but so important, understanding why more isn’t always better until we figure out what is most important. And third: how do we rebuild and repair?

The conventional medical world blamed genetics. That got us nowhere. Now we’re learning about gut health and the microbiome, and I know every single one of your families has changed your diet many times. But there’s something beneath that, the way God designed our children and all of us to function and heal is even more foundational and simple than that.

What’s changed in my career is something that hit me from chatting with parents. Their page two intake form used to be filled with medications. Now it’s filled with supplements, homeopathics, all kinds of interventions. And that is amazing, our generation of parents has woken up and said, “Better living through chemistry isn’t working for this.” We used to joke we should answer the phones: “Welcome to the last resort.” Now we’re second to last resort. And I’m here to tell you the options are all these things, but the order, the order matters most.

What I realized is that sometimes we need to hit pause on some of those things to clear room for more foundational healing. Change the sequence of everything the family is doing when they get there. Sometimes what we do is take these incredible, transformative interventions that you’re already doing, we will need them later, and we save them for later when the brain and nervous system are going to be more ready for them.

I’m here today not to teach you about the 152 things you can do to get your child to heal. I know God’s calling for me is to focus on the foundation.

The Neurological Hierarchy: How Brains Are Built and How They Heal [00:29:00 – 00:36:00]

Back on track, this is called retracing. They called it retracing back in the day. We call it neurological reorganization and repair, to get to regulation. And what we know is that the very first thing to develop in neurology is the brainstem.

The bottom and back of the brain, the central and the autonomic nervous system, develop first embryologically. Once life begins in utero, everything goes from that: then the heart, then the lungs, then the muscles, then the skeleton. So the central nervous system needs to develop first because it’s going to control and coordinate everything after that.

If we build on that from embryology and look at neurodevelopment, motor milestones matter massively to brain development. Even a conventional pediatrician knows this. Did you know that they actually took crawling off the CDC recommended motor milestones altogether? Because it was already getting so bad. But brains are built bottom-up, back-forward, and then they connect the two hemispheres. Crawling is essential to that process.

So the neuromotor system is next in the foundation. It’s really the neurosensory system, that sensory input triggers everything within the body. Motor system, then gut and immune.

What is the gut? It’s a muscle. The esophagus is a muscle. The stomach is a muscle. The small intestine is a muscle. And our immune system really just relies on plumbing.

When your child has a completely Sympathetic-Dominant, locked-in nervous system, they have neurospasticity and asymmetry, primarily upper cervical, CT junction, upper thoracic, and through the thoracic. Scoliosis comes in and the whole neurospinal system gets locked. How are the ears, the sinuses, the lungs, the esophagus, the intestines, the colon supposed to drain and move fluid and poop and food out if they can’t move at all?

If you have spasticity and hypertonic muscles, the body compensates with hypotonic, weakened, shut-down muscles on the other side. So we need some muscles to relax and get out of the way and let the ears and gut drain, and then we need others to turn on and activate. The gut and immune system, even with perfect nutrition and supplementation and detoxification, we’re literally trying to throw a water balloon at a forest fire.

And then the brain does what all three layers below it tell it to do. The brain works for the body. If we’re trying to calm the brain, we need to get the body to chill out first. If we’re trying to connect the brain, we need to get the body to be better connected. And all of that runs through the nervous system.

The Perfect Storm framework I put together in 2008, it really describes how maternal distress and birth trauma set up shop in this system. But the same neurology applies even with hypoxic injury and near-fatal events. So we can use the clinical protocols we figured out from birth trauma cases to heal TBI and everything else. And it’s working incredibly.

“A distressed, dysregulated, imbalanced nervous system is the root cause of all of these, no matter the age and no matter the sequence.”

Subluxation, the Cascade, and What a Chiropractic Adjustment Actually Does [00:44:00 – 00:53:00]

Subluxation is the hundred-dollar chiropractic word. When you hear me say it, it means: neurospinal dysfunction that affects the neurospinal system. It can affect any joint, but the ones in the spine are the most important. Because the brainstem, the spinal cord, the dorsal horn, it’s all in there. That is literally the conduit between the brain and the body.

People talk about the gut-brain connection. Guess what, that goes through the neurospinal system and the vagus nerve. Everything has to come through the spinal cord, through the brain, through the cervical spine, the brainstem, the back of the brain, and forward.

Subluxation at its basic level starts with dyskinesia, abnormal alignment leads to abnormal joint movement. The moment you have abnormal alignment and tension, and it can come from physical injury or from hypoxic injury that causes spasticity and asymmetry, the cascade kicks in. Dyskinesia leads to dysafferentation, abnormal sensory input into the neuromotor system. It then shifts the system into Sympathetic Dominance. Dysautonomia, dysregulation, close cousins, close meaning. That then leads to dysfunction of every other system downstream.

No matter how the trauma comes in, this is the sequence of how the body stores it.

The worst place for spasticity is right suboccipital, cervical, and thoracic. These children live stuck here, shoulders attached to their ears, everything asymmetrical. They can’t relax, they can’t get things going. If you can’t get things relaxed in the upper two-thirds of the neurospinal system, you actually limit what’s called CSF flow and even oxygenation into the brainstem and cord.

Neurologically-Focused, what we call Neuro-Tonal, adjusting is oxygenation into the brain. Chiropractors have now done studies with functional MRI and brain scans, and we know that a chiropractic adjustment increases CSF flow and oxygenation into the brain because the body’s been trying to get it in there. It’s literally just been obstructed.

This isn’t just a conversation about how powerful chiropractic adjustments are, they have to be done with the right protocols, right sequence, and right training. That’s where PX Docs come in. It’s a completely different kind of chiropractic.

You get oxygen in, you get regulation in, you get proprioception in. Has anybody been adjusted before? Physically you feel great, but mentally and emotionally you also feel calm, connected, regulated. If that’s the result for us as adults, imagine how profound it is for our children who just can’t get there at all.

Neurological Soft Signs: The Forgotten Trump Cards of Brain-Based Healing [00:53:00 – 00:59:00]

So what does healing look like? Let’s cover this in our last couple of minutes.

When Oliver was having seizures every single day, every single son-of-a-gun day, I wanted those seizures gone. Thankfully, I knew how healing works in this way. What we were obsessed with was his sleep, his breathing, his bowel movements, and his movement. We call those neurological soft signs, and they are often the forgotten trump cards of brain-based healing.

We often get so excited to get to work on the brain that we forget that the brain works for the body. And the body can’t do any of these things well. The brain is not going to do very well with what we’re asking it to do when we’re pushing it and trying to reset it.

When we start to see these soft signs change for our patients, we throw the biggest parties, we see the biggest changes. Because:

  • When they’re sleeping: neuroplasticity, healing, and recovery
  • When they’re having regular bowel movements: detoxification, elimination, parasympathetic surges
  • When they’re breathing better: respiratory immune function, oxygenation
  • When their neuromotor tone is more relaxed: the body is reorganizing

When you go to a PX Docs doctor, we use a multitude of chiropractic techniques. Some adjustments address hyperspastic, wound-up, asymmetric patterns. Some are very light force, very tonal, they don’t look like anything’s happening, but you just need that system to unwind. Some require us to get ahold of your children and really get them adjusted. And we need to address areas of oxygenation and digestion, what are called the transition zones. We do neuromyofascial release, cranial work, airway work, fascial work.

Some adjustments calm the nervous system where it needs calming. Others activate the nervous system where it’s exhausted. For children who have neurological injury, they are often all three things at the same time: sympathetic-dominant, neurologically disorganized and asymmetrical, and then exhausted. You have to fix that bottom-up too, activate the system first, rebalance and regulate it, then calm it down.

If you have a child who right now is in stage three neurological exhaustion, the therapies are going to be significantly limited in their benefit. Their ability to absorb nutrients from diet changes and supplementation, significantly limited. Their ability to detox, to go through PT, hippotherapy, OT, neuro-integrative, visual, oculomotor, and vestibular therapy, all limited.

Why is the primitive reflex still there? Because subluxation is still there. A primitive reflex is a compensation for foundational neurological subluxation and dysafferentation. When you get these things out of the way, everything else that needs to happen in sequence to get your child healing fully, it reaches the brain and works ten times better, a hundred times better, a thousand times better.

Oliver on ECMO: Watching the Monitors Change in Real Time [00:56:00 – 01:00:00]

I literally was adjusting Oliver while he was on ECMO. They didn’t even know I was doing it, just praying, making parasympathetic, vagal nerve-stimulating adjustments. His pulse ox would be at 80, 82, 84. He was hypoxic, PPHN, ECMO. I would make adjustments that looked like I just had my hands on him. His pulse ox would shoot up to 95, 98, 99. His heart rate would calm down, his respiration rate, autonomic improvement while my hands were on him.

After we calmed his nervous system, then he couldn’t eat, then he couldn’t digest, then he couldn’t poop, so they wouldn’t let us leave. We made adjustments to activate and stimulate his digestion and oxygenation, and he started to breastfeed on his own. He started to learn how to do these things on his own.

So we did everything, PT, OT, nutrition. We gave him breast milk. We added everything. But we did it in sequence. The nervous system is the boss.

“We did everything, but we did it in sequence.”

Closing: The Combination Lock and a Word for Every Parent [01:00:00 – 01:02:00]

You are absolutely courageous, brilliant, unstoppable parents that God called to be your child’s parents. You will find the answer. You will find the unlock, but it’s not a key. It’s a combination lock.

You have to be willing to feel like the move is going to feel three paces backward, then two forward, then another backward, then forward again. When you see healing neurologically that way, you can have the confidence to say: we’re doing things in the right sequence. The healing will happen from the inside out.

There is technology and scans I didn’t have time to get to today. We can track this objectively, with the neuro soft signs, with HRV, with EMG. If you can see that your child’s HRV, EMG, and soft signs of nervous system function are getting better, you can have all sorts of confidence that their brain over time will too. Your kids will do all the things that all the other doctors told them they couldn’t.

We have now trained over a thousand doctors in these clinical protocols. It starts with the principles scientifically, and then it has to do with the protocols. We are not everywhere yet, but God has been so good and so faithful to this mission for so long.

I believe in your kids. I believe in you, and I promise you, God’s got this. You got this, and we got this together. Thank you.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does “sequencing matters most” mean for a child with a brain injury?

Dr. Tony Ebel teaches that the nervous system was built in a specific developmental order, brainstem and autonomic nervous system first, then the neuromotor system, then gut and immune function, then the brain. Healing must follow that same path. When families try to run every therapy simultaneously, results are limited because the nervous system can only receive what it’s regulated enough to absorb. Establishing neurological regulation first through chiropractic care is what allows every other therapy to work more effectively.

Can chiropractic adjustments actually help a child with a hypoxic brain injury?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, research using functional MRI now shows that Neuro-Tonal Chiropractic Adjustments increase cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) flow and oxygenation into the brainstem when upper cervical subluxation is present. In Oliver’s case, a child who survived an ECMO procedure for hypoxic injury at birth, adjustments made while he was on the machine produced visible, real-time improvements in pulse oximetry and heart rate. Neurologically-focused chiropractic is designed to restore the nervous system’s ability to regulate itself.

Why isn’t more intervention always better when my child has a complex neurological condition?

A nervous system stuck in Sympathetic Dominance can only take in so much at one time, even if what it’s taking in is good. When the body is in chronic fight-or-flight, the gut can’t properly absorb nutrients, the lymphatic system can’t drain effectively, and the brain can’t rewire. Piling on therapies before the nervous system is regulated enough to receive them often produces frustrating plateau results. Dr. Tony Ebel recommends identifying the foundational intervention first, doing more of that, and then layering other therapies in sequence.

What are “neurological soft signs” and why do they matter?

Neurological soft signs are basic regulatory functions, sleep quality, breathing, bowel regularity, and neuromotor tone. Dr. Tony Ebel calls them the “forgotten trump cards of brain-based healing.” When a child’s soft signs begin to improve, sleeping more soundly, having regular bowel movements, breathing more freely, showing more relaxed muscle tone, it indicates the parasympathetic nervous system is activating. These changes precede visible cognitive and developmental progress, but they are reliable indicators that neurological reorganization is underway.

What is The Perfect Storm and how does it relate to pediatric brain injury?

The Perfect Storm is Dr. Tony Ebel’s clinical framework describing how prenatal stress, birth trauma or intervention (forceps, vacuum extraction, emergency C-section), and early toxin exposure compound to create nervous system dysregulation. The same neurological cascade, subluxation, dysafferentation, sympathetic dominance, and downstream dysfunction, applies to hypoxic brain injuries, traumatic brain injuries, and birth-related neurological injury. The framework explains why children with these backgrounds often share overlapping challenges across digestion, sleep, immunity, motor function, and development.

How do I find a neurologically-focused chiropractor trained in these protocols?

The PX Docs Directory is a searchable national network of chiropractors trained in Dr. Tony Ebel’s clinical protocols. These practitioners specialize in pediatric neurological conditions and use INSiGHT Scans to objectively assess nervous system function before and throughout care. Dr. Tony’s training program has now certified over 1,000 doctors in these methods.

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