How to Advocate for Your Child in Medical Settings: A 5-Step Framework
Episode 126, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: August 1, 2024 | Duration: 29 min
Key Takeaways
- Slowing down a medical decision is not just acceptable, it’s your right. In the vast majority of non-emergency scenarios, there is time to pause, ask questions, and gather more information before consenting to a medication, intervention, or diagnostic test.
- Informed consent has three required parts: understanding the full risks, the full benefits, and all available alternatives, including the option to watch and wait. Most providers give you only the recommendation, not the complete picture.
- Your parental instincts are neurologically grounded. The vagus nerve directly connects your gut instincts to your child’s wellbeing in a way that no clinical data sheet can replicate, and science backs this up.
- Documenting everything in real time changes provider behavior. When medical staff observe you writing down names, recommendations, and risk discussions, Dr. Tony Ebel reports they consistently soften their stance and become more willing to have an honest conversation.
- Modern medicine excels at emergency intervention and struggles with chronic health. Parents benefit from navigating these two realities simultaneously, accepting what emergency medicine genuinely offers while pushing back on unnecessary upselling of medications, tests, and procedures.
How Do You Advocate for Your Child in a Medical Setting?
When a doctor, nurse, or hospital system says “we need to do this,” most parents feel they have no choice but to comply. Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP argues that this assumption is both false and dangerous. Parents are not passive bystanders in their child’s healthcare, they are the primary decision-makers, and they have the legal right to ask questions, slow down, seek second opinions, and refuse interventions they haven’t fully evaluated.
The framework Dr. Ebel teaches, forged through his own son Oliver’s six-week NICU stay and decades of clinical experience, is not anti-medicine. It is pro-informed consent. Modern emergency medicine is extraordinary at saving lives in acute crises. The same system that excels in those moments also, by Dr. Ebel’s account, routinely recommends unnecessary medications, redundant tests, and interventions that parents can and should evaluate critically. Medicine is either the first or third leading cause of death depending on the data source used, and ranks in the top ten causes of chronic illness and disability. These two realities coexist.
The practical answer for parents is a five-step process: slow the decision down, demand the full explanation, get clarity on urgency, trust your gut and seek a second opinion, and document everything. A sixth bonus step, bringing a personal advocate, rounds out the framework. Taken together, these steps allow parents to get the best out of emergency medicine while protecting their children from the worst of it.
Why Parents Feel Trapped in Medical Decisions [00:01:00 – 00:05:30]
Dr. Tony Ebel: The premise of this episode is that parents are wired to question, and that’s a feature, not a flaw. The neurologist, the pediatrician, the hospital, the geneticists: they don’t have all the answers. In fact, the pharmaceutical pathway they’ve put most families on is often the reason parents end up in these high-pressure medication and intervention decisions in the first place.
The medical system moves fast. Providers are busy, timelines feel urgent, and the default message to parents is “we know best, you don’t know anything.” That framing has never been true. What has changed is that parents now have access to data, second opinions on demand, and a growing awareness of what informed consent actually requires.
Dr. Ebel’s own son, Oliver, spent six weeks in the NICU after a traumatic brain injury at birth. During that time, the same team that saved Oliver’s life also tried to keep him on medications until age three, with no clear clinical justification beyond “because we do.” That experience, repeated again recently in an overnight emergency room visit with his daughter, shaped every element of this framework.
“Prevention is the best medicine. Staying away from modern medicine is the best medicine for health and wellbeing. The less you go into a hospital, the better.”
Step 1: Slow Down the Decision [00:06:00 – 00:10:30]
Dr. Tony Ebel: The first and most powerful step is also the hardest in a high-pressure emergency setting: slow down.
Here’s the rule: if a decision truly cannot wait, if it is genuinely life-threatening in that moment, it won’t actually be presented as a decision. Providers will act. There’s no sitting down knee-to-knee. They’ll come in and say, “We’re taking your child to do this.” That’s medicine at its best.
Every other scenario, the CT scan, the antibiotic, the steroid, the tetanus shot, is one where you are allowed to say: “We need a moment to think about this. We have questions and we need more information.”
Expect pushback. The common response is “everybody else just says yes.” That’s the point. Don’t be everybody else. You don’t want your child growing up like everyone else in a country where chronic illness, stress, and anxiety are the statistical norm.
Slowing down creates space to pray, process, call a trusted provider, consult a second opinion, or simply breathe. None of that is possible if you bypass this step.
“We work for you, and so does every other provider, no matter the scenario.”
Step 2: Ask for the Full Explanation, Risks, Benefits, and Alternatives [00:11:00 – 00:12:45]
Dr. Tony Ebel: Step two has three required parts. Write them down.
First, ask for all the risks, not a summary, the full list. Second, ask for all the benefits. Third, ask what the alternatives are, including the option to watch and wait.
The foundation of informed consent is not just understanding the recommendation. It’s understanding the risks and knowing whether other options exist. Most providers give you the recommendation. That’s not consent, that’s a sales pitch.
Watching and waiting is a legitimate medical choice. Punting a non-life-threatening decision for a day, a week, or a month while you gather more information is often the smartest move available to you. The medical environment is fast-moving and high-pressure by design. Your job is to stay calm and process at your pace, not theirs.
Step 3: Get Clarity on Urgency [00:13:00 – 00:18:00]
Dr. Tony Ebel: The question to ask at step three is direct: “Is this life-threatening right now? What happens if we wait, observe, and try something less invasive first?”
The trump card is this: “What would you recommend if this were your child, given the true urgency?”
That question reframes the conversation entirely. It asks providers to step out of the role of recommendation-machine and into the role of informed human being.
During a recent ER visit, Dr. Ebel asked a charge nurse to take him through the clinical signs and symptoms that would warrant a CT scan for his daughter. Her response: “Well, if you don’t want to do it, we don’t have to.” Not one clinical justification was offered. The calmly delivered question was enough to dissolve the recommendation entirely.
The same visit produced a push for oral antibiotics for a topical wound. The rationale: the antibiotic they had on hand wasn’t even the right match for the injury, and a better one could be obtained the next day. Dr. Ebel declined the inferior antibiotic, trusting his daughter’s immune system, which he and his wife had spent years building, to handle a cleaned wound.
Calm, respectful, and firm: that’s the posture. “You get a lot more with honey than with vinegar.” Providers respond to parents who communicate clearly, not parents who come in guarded and combative.
Step 4: Trust Your Gut and Seek a Second Opinion [00:18:00 – 00:20:00]
Dr. Tony Ebel: This should honestly be the subtitle of this podcast. Trust your gut.
There’s real science behind the instinct. The vagus nerve and your cognitive capacity are more connected to your child’s wellbeing than any doctor data sheet ever will be. When something doesn’t sit right, that feeling is neurologically rooted, it’s data, not weakness.
Going through steps one through three naturally activates your instincts more clearly. When you’ve slowed down, gathered information, and processed without pressure, you can hear what your gut is actually telling you.
And here’s something parents rarely hear: sometimes you’ll go through this entire framework and say yes. That’s okay. The difference is that your yes will come with confidence and clarity, not hesitation and regret. There is no going back. There’s no DeLorean, no second chance at the decision. The point of this framework is to make sure that whatever you decide, you made it fully informed.
Step 5: Document Everything [00:20:00 – 00:26:30]
Dr. Tony Ebel: Documentation doesn’t need to be elaborate. It just needs to happen.
Write down the names of every provider involved. Write down their recommendations. Write down the risks they disclosed and the risks they didn’t. Write down your questions and their answers.
What Dr. Ebel consistently observes in clinical and personal experience: when providers see a parent writing things down in real time, they change. They get less pushy, less dismissive, more willing to talk. The act of documentation signals that this conversation is on record.
During Oliver’s six-week NICU stay, Dr. Ebel went to the hospital records department in the basement every single night and had them print Oliver’s notes from that day. He did it immediately, because he’d seen medical records altered or quietly omitted in his clinical work with families, including birth records where forceps use appeared in the parents’ account but not in the official notes. HIPAA is your legal right. Providers must give you the records. You don’t need a medical degree to ask for them.
His advice to parents: be firm, be kind, and be consistent. His method with Steve the records clerk: offer coffee and donuts, show up at the same time every day, and make clear this is happening regardless. “I was being nice, but I was being firm, and I stood my ground.”
“There’s nothing worse than feeling forced into a decision as a parent and it going in the wrong direction.”
Bonus Step 6: Bring an Advocate [00:27:00 – 00:29:00]
Dr. Tony Ebel: This is optional, but powerful: don’t go into these situations alone.
Bring your spouse. Bring a family member. Bring a trusted friend or another provider on the phone. Someone who knows your family’s values and has your child’s best interests at heart, not someone who will amplify the panic, but someone who will help you stay grounded in the framework.
In Dr. Ebel’s chiropractic practice, the best care happens when families come in with their full team. Grandma who worked in medicine, grandma who’s been holistic since the 1970s, the uncle who’s an anesthesiologist, the more informed perspectives aligned with your values, the better the decision.
The more people in the room who are on your child’s side, the harder it is for any single provider to steamroll the process.
“Remember, you’re the parent. You get to choose who’s on your kid’s team and who helps you make decisions.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Can you really slow down a medical decision in the emergency room?
Yes, in most cases. Dr. Tony Ebel teaches that if a decision truly cannot wait, if it’s immediately life-threatening, providers won’t present it as a decision. They’ll act. Every other scenario, including most medication recommendations, diagnostic tests, and elective interventions, allows time to pause, ask questions, and gather information before consenting.
What are the three parts of a full medical explanation I should always ask for?
Dr. Tony Ebel outlines three required elements: the full list of risks, the full list of benefits, and all available alternatives, including the option to watch and wait. Most providers present only the recommendation. Informed consent legally and ethically requires that you understand all three parts before making any decision.
How do I push back on a medical recommendation without becoming combative?
Dr. Tony Ebel’s approach is calm, empathetic, and firm. He recommends asking providers to walk you through the clinical reasons for a recommendation, not as a challenge, but as a genuine request for information. In his experience, calm and respectful questioning gets better results than defensive or confrontational postures. “You get a lot more with honey than with vinegar.”
Why does documenting everything in writing change how providers act?
When medical staff observe a parent writing down names, recommendations, and risk discussions in real time, Dr. Tony Ebel reports that they consistently become less pushy and more willing to have an honest conversation. Documentation creates accountability. Under HIPAA, you also have the legal right to request and receive your child’s complete medical records at any time.
What is the role of the vagus nerve in parental instinct?
Dr. Tony Ebel explains that the vagus nerve directly links your cognitive capacity to your awareness of your child’s wellbeing, more accurately than any clinical data sheet. When something doesn’t sit right with you as a parent, that feeling is neurologically grounded. He frames trusting your gut not as a soft concept but as a scientifically real signal that deserves weight in any medical decision.
How do I find a chiropractor who can help support my child’s nervous system health?
PX Docs maintains a searchable directory of neurologically-focused pediatric chiropractors trained in Dr. Ebel’s clinical approach. You can find a provider near you at pxdocs.com/directory.
Resources & Related Content
- The Perfect Storm Framework, Dr. Tony Ebel’s explanation of how prenatal stress, birth trauma, and early toxin exposure create compounding neurological dysfunction in children
- Birth Trauma and Its Neurological Effects, How birth interventions like forceps and vacuum extraction affect the upper cervical spine and brainstem
- Vagus Nerve Dysfunction in Children, The role of the vagus nerve in regulating immunity, digestion, sleep, and stress response
- Find a PX Docs Office Near You, Searchable directory of PX Docs practitioners
- Next Episode: “Chiropractic Saved Her Life” — What Every NICU and Special Needs Mom Deserves to Know