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Childhood Seizures and Birth Trauma: Root Causes, Drug-Free Care, and the Role of the Brainstem

Episode 164, Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: December 12, 2024 | Duration: ~44 min

Key Takeaways

• Birth trauma, from forceps, vacuum extraction, C-sections, cord wrap, or prolonged labor, is the most commonly overlooked trigger of childhood seizures, causing subluxation in the upper cervical spine and brainstem dysfunction that disrupts the nervous system’s ability to self-regulate.
• A PX Docs Network case series found that 87% of children with seizures had severe upper cervical subluxation, and 78% achieved seizure-free status or significant reduction in seizures following Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, with an average recovery window of three months.
• Seizure medications suppress brain activity but do not address the root cause; they also carry significant side effects including cognitive delays, lethargy, GI problems, and developmental regression, all of which resolve when the underlying nervous system dysregulation is corrected.
• The brainstem, not the brain alone, is the primary control center of the nervous system, managing heart rate, respiration, digestion, and sleep. When it is stressed or subluxated, the entire nervous system shifts into sympathetic dominance, creating the excessive neurological activity that produces seizures.
• Dr. Tony Ebel’s son Oliver was born with a traumatic birth (forceps, vacuum, emergency C-section, Apgar score of 3) and had his first seizure on day two of life. After six weeks of specific pediatric chiropractic care, he became seizure-free. He is now 14 years old, medication-free, and neurologically healthy.

What Causes Childhood Seizures? The Brainstem, Birth Trauma, and the Overlooked Root Cause

The dominant medical explanation for childhood seizures, that they originate in the brain, is incomplete. According to Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, the brainstem, not the brain, is the primary control center of the nervous system. It is the first structure to develop in the womb, it regulates every involuntary function (heart rate, blood pressure, respiration, digestion, and sleep), and it forms the central switchboard through which all signals between the brain and body must pass.

When the brainstem and upper cervical spine are subluxated, structurally disrupted from their normal position and function, the nervous system cannot regulate itself. It gets locked into sympathetic dominance: a sustained fight-or-flight state where electrical activity runs too high, inhibitory parasympathetic function is suppressed, and the threshold for seizure activity drops dramatically. The vagus nerve, which runs from the brainstem through the neck to every major organ, loses function. Without vagus nerve activity, the body cannot calm itself down.

What causes brainstem subluxation? In most pediatric cases: birth trauma. Forceps, vacuum extraction, prolonged labor, cord wrap, emergency C-sections, and induction all place mechanical stress on the baby’s head, neck, and brainstem at the moment of greatest neurological vulnerability. This physical injury, what Dr. Ebel calls the first component of The Perfect Storm, sets up a cascade that can produce seizures days, months, or years later. The good news is that correcting that subluxation, restoring brainstem function, and reactivating the vagus nerve can stop the seizures without medication. The PX Docs Network has demonstrated this in hundreds of cases.

Understanding the Types of Seizures [00:00:00 – 00:06:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: Seizures break down into two broad categories: generalized seizures, which affect the whole brain and nervous system, and focal seizures, which affect a specific region. Focal seizures are especially important to understand because, if the root cause isn’t addressed, they can spread, a product of neuroplasticity, the nervous system’s wiring principle of “nerves that fire together, wire together.” The more the brain seizes, the more it reinforces the seizure pathway.

Within these categories, the most commonly recognized form is the generalized tonic-clonic seizure, the convulsive seizure most people picture when they think of epilepsy. But tonic-clonic seizures are not the only type, and they’re not the most commonly missed.

Absence seizures are far easier to overlook. A child having an absence seizure may simply appear to be staring off, daydreaming, or not paying attention. These episodes can last from a few seconds to a few minutes. Because they lack the dramatic physical markers of a convulsive seizure, they are frequently missed by pediatricians and parents alike, yet they share the same underlying neurological mechanism: a stressed, disrupted nervous system.

Atonic (drop attack) seizures involve a sudden complete loss of muscle tone. This happens when the nervous system surges into sympathetic tension and then swings to an extreme parasympathetic release, what Dr. Tony calls the “protective pendulum effect.” The body shuts itself down through an excessive vagus nerve response, causing the child to fall.

Myoclonic seizures are brief neuromuscular jerks that most commonly appear in the neck, jaw, upper arms, and shoulders. This is not coincidental. The nerves that supply those areas originate in the neck and brainstem, the exact location where birth trauma most often creates subluxation. If a child is experiencing myoclonic seizures concentrated in those areas, the location of the seizure activity points directly to where the underlying nervous system dysfunction is rooted.

“The most common trigger of seizures is something the world doesn’t know about yet, tension, what’s called subluxation and neurological dysfunction in the neck and the brainstem.”

The Brainstem Is the Circuit Breaker: Why Seizures Start in the Neck [00:06:00 – 00:10:00]

The medical epilepsy field has traditionally located seizures in the brain. Dr. Ebel’s argument is not that the brain doesn’t matter, it’s that the brainstem is where the signal goes wrong first.

The brainstem sits at the top of the neck. It is the first part of the nervous system to develop in the womb (detectable on ultrasound at six weeks, before the cortex exists at all) and it controls the essential involuntary functions that keep the body alive: breathing, heart rate, blood pressure, digestion, and sleep. Nerves from the neck travel both upward into the brain and downward into the body. When the neck is subluxated, misaligned, disrupted, or dysfunctional, those signals are compromised in both directions.

Dr. Ebel uses a simple analogy: “If a house loses power, we don’t go check the light bulbs first. We go check the circuit breaker. The circuit breaker for the nervous system is the brainstem and the neck, so we go there first before treating the brain with medication.”

A key concept here is diaschisis, the neurological principle that an injury in one specific location within the nervous system can produce symptoms throughout the entire system. When EEG shows abnormal brain activity, that doesn’t necessarily mean the seizure originated in the brain. It may mean a disruption in the brainstem or neck is sending disorganized signals upward, producing what looks like a brain-based problem but is actually driven by a structural one.

This is also why the nervous system needs to be measured directly, not just observed symptomatically. Three scan technologies, thermal scan (measuring temperature asymmetry along the spine), surface EMG (measuring muscle electrical activity), and HRV (measuring sympathetic/parasympathetic balance), allow practitioners to quantify the location and severity of subluxation before and throughout care.

Oliver’s Story: Birth Trauma, First Seizures, and Six Weeks to Seizure-Free [00:10:00 – 00:22:00]

Dr. Ebel’s son Oliver is the origin story of the entire PX Docs Network. Oliver’s birth involved forceps, vacuum extraction, a scalp monitor, and an emergency C-section after failure to progress in labor. His Apgar score was a 3. He spent his first days in the special care nursery. On day two of life, June 2, 2011, he had his first seizure.

When the medical team offered phenobarbital as the only intervention, Dr. Ebel refused and left the hospital against medical advice. On the drive home, he searched for natural and drug-free options for seizures, and found the research on subluxation, brainstem dysfunction, and pediatric chiropractic care.

Two days later, they brought Oliver to a pediatric chiropractor who ran neurological scans. The results showed severe upper cervical subluxation, a 10 out of 10 dysfunction score on one side of his brainstem, with the opposite side registering at zero. The brainstem signal was almost entirely blocked on one side.

The adjustments began immediately. They were gentle, fingertip pressure only. Within the first week, Oliver’s seizures dropped from multiple per day to one per day to one every other day. He was adjusted three times per week. At six weeks, he was completely seizure-free. He has had no seizures since. He is now 14 years old, has never been on medication, and has no neurological dysfunction.

“We don’t treat seizures. We don’t cure neurological challenges in kids. We address subluxation, neurological dysfunction, dysautonomia, and nervous system dysregulation. And when we clear that out of the way, these neurological challenges like seizures get out of the way, too.”

A second case, a two-year-old girl named Sophia, had suffered absence seizures since six months of age. After three failed medications, her parents came to PX Docs. The scans showed the same profile: severe upper cervical subluxation, brainstem tension, vagus nerve dysfunction. Within one month of care, her seizures dropped by 50%. By three months, she was seizure-free. She was weaned off medication under her neurologist’s supervision and is now developing normally at age four.

The Network Research: 87% Subluxation Rate, 78% Improvement [00:22:00 – 00:27:00]

Beyond individual cases, the PX Docs Network has gathered data across hundreds of practitioners and thousands of cases, a scale of clinical evidence no single practice could generate.

Across children with seizures presenting at PX Docs offices:

• 87% had severe subluxation in the upper cervical spine
• 78% became seizure-free or saw significant reduction in seizures following care
• Average time to results: approximately three months of consistent, specific neurologically focused chiropractic care

These are not isolated anecdotes. They represent a consistent pattern across hundreds of doctors and multiple years of clinical data.

Dr. Ebel also addresses why seizures connect so predictably to The Perfect Storm framework. The three-component model describes how prenatal stress, birth trauma and intervention, and toxic exposures in early childhood compound to produce chronic neurological dysfunction. For children with seizures, the Perfect Storm pattern appears again and again in their case histories, a high-stress pregnancy, a traumatic or interventional birth, followed by a cascade of gut, immune, and neurological challenges that accumulate until the nervous system hits its tipping point.

Physical stress (birth trauma, falls, injuries), chemical stress (medications, vaccines, environmental toxins), and emotional stress (anxiety, separation, home environment) all converge on the same two targets: the brainstem and the vagus nerve. Addressing those targets through specific chiropractic adjustments to the upper cervical spine is how the nervous system gets the opportunity to reorganize and heal.

“We don’t buy that seizures are just bad luck. We don’t blame genetics only, just like autism, just like ADHD. We see the Perfect Storm pattern again and again in the case histories of kids with seizures.”

Sympathetic Dominance, the Vagus Nerve, and Why the Nervous System Gets Stuck [00:27:00 – 00:35:00]

The nervous system has two main branches. The sympathetic nervous system drives fight-or-flight: elevated heart rate, elevated blood pressure, muscle tension, suppressed digestion, heightened alertness. The parasympathetic nervous system drives rest-and-digest: slowed heart rate, relaxed muscles, active digestion, sleep, growth, and healing.

In a healthy nervous system, these two branches stay in dynamic balance. In a child with subluxation, that balance breaks down. The nervous system gets stuck in sympathetic dominance, it cannot shift back to parasympathetic. Every input, whether a growth spurt, a fever, a weather change, a dietary shift, or an emotional stressor, now has the potential to push the already over-stressed system into a seizure.

The key nerve that drives parasympathetic function is the vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body, originating in the brainstem, traveling through the neck, and connecting to the heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, liver, and pancreas. When there is subluxation in the upper cervical spine, the vagus nerve gets compressed, irritated, and dysfunctional. The parasympathetic system loses its primary driver. The body cannot calm down.

This is the mechanism behind seizures at a neurological level: too much sympathetic tension, not enough vagal tone, and a nervous system so disorganized and asymmetrical in its function that it periodically fires in an uncontrolled electrical surge.

The three INSiGHT scans, thermal, surface EMG, and HRV, give PX Docs practitioners objective measurements of exactly this dysfunction. The thermal scan reveals asymmetrical temperature patterns along the spine. The surface EMG reveals abnormal electrical activity in muscles. The HRV scan measures whether the child is stuck in sympathetic dominance. These are not estimates or clinical impressions, they are quantifiable data that track nervous system function before, during, and after care.

“I am not anti-medication. I am pro-nervous system. And I believe that medication should be the last resort, not the first option.”

Chiropractic Adjustments for Seizures: What They Are, What They’re Not [00:33:00 – 00:40:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel: A pediatric chiropractic adjustment is not about cracking bones or moving joints. It is a specific, gentle neurological input to the spine that signals the brainstem to reset, to shift the nervous system out of sympathetic dominance and back into parasympathetic tone.

In Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, adjustments use pressure as light as checking a tomato for ripeness. They are delivered to the exact spinal level where the scans revealed subluxation. The goal is not to treat seizures directly, it is to correct the structural disruption that is preventing the nervous system from self-regulating.

When that correction is made consistently over time, several things happen simultaneously:

• Sympathetic fight-or-flight tone decreases
• Vagus nerve function is restored
• Parasympathetic tone increases
• The brain receives organized, balanced signals from the brainstem rather than disorganized, asymmetrical input
• The threshold for seizure activity rises as the nervous system stabilizes

Seizures improve. Sleep improves. Digestion improves. Immune function improves. Behavior and development improve. These are not separate effects, they are all downstream results of the same upstream correction: a nervous system that can finally do what it was designed to do.

For children already on seizure medication, the approach is not to stop abruptly. Dr. Ebel recommends working with a pediatric chiropractor while remaining under a neurologist’s supervision for medication management. As the nervous system heals and seizures reduce, the neurologist can guide a gradual wean. This is what happened with Sophia, seizure-free after three months of chiropractic care, weaned off medication under medical supervision.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can birth trauma cause seizures in babies and children?

Yes, according to Dr. Tony Ebel, birth trauma is the most commonly overlooked cause of childhood seizures. Interventions like forceps, vacuum extraction, C-sections, cord wrap, and prolonged labor place significant mechanical stress on a newborn’s brainstem and upper cervical spine. This creates subluxation, structural and neurological dysfunction that disrupts the nervous system’s ability to self-regulate. Left uncorrected, this dysfunction can produce seizure activity days, months, or years after birth.

What is subluxation, and how does it relate to seizures?

Subluxation is structural dysfunction in the spine, particularly in the upper cervical spine and brainstem, that disrupts normal nervous system signaling. When subluxation is present, the nervous system shifts into sympathetic dominance (chronic fight-or-flight) and the vagus nerve loses its ability to activate the calming parasympathetic system. This produces the neurological imbalance and excessive electrical activity that generates seizures. PX Docs Network research found 87% of children presenting with seizures had severe upper cervical subluxation.

Can chiropractic care help kids with seizures?

PX Docs Network data across hundreds of cases shows that 78% of children with seizures who received Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care became seizure-free or saw significant seizure reduction, with an average improvement window of three months. Chiropractic adjustments do not treat seizures directly, they correct the underlying subluxation and restore nervous system balance, allowing the body to regulate itself and reduce seizure activity.

What are the signs of brainstem or upper cervical subluxation in a child?

Dr. Tony Ebel describes a simple “neck check” parents can do at home. Signs of upper cervical subluxation include: a head tilt (one ear lower than the other), torticollis (the child habitually turns to one side), a reverse or forward curve in the neck, or visible asymmetry in the neck and shoulder muscles. These physical markers often correlate with a history of birth trauma and indicate that a neurological scan and evaluation is warranted.

Should I take my child off seizure medication to try chiropractic care?

Dr. Tony Ebel is explicit: do not stop seizure medication without neurologist supervision. His recommendation is to pursue Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care in parallel with ongoing medical care. As the nervous system heals and seizures decrease over weeks and months of chiropractic care, a neurologist can guide a gradual and safe medication reduction. Many families in the PX Docs Network have successfully reduced or eliminated medication through this coordinated approach.

How do I find a neurologically focused pediatric chiropractor trained in this approach?

Search the PX Docs practitioner directory at pxdocs.com/directory. Every listed chiropractor is trained in the PX Docs clinical protocol, uses INSiGHT neurological scanning technology (thermal, surface EMG, and HRV), and is qualified to assess and address subluxation, dysautonomia, and vagus nerve dysfunction in children.

Resources & Related Content

• Seizures & Epilepsy in Children, PX Docs condition overview: causes, signs, and drug-free care options
• Birth Trauma, How birth interventions affect the brainstem and nervous system
• The Perfect Storm, Dr. Ebel’s framework for understanding the root causes of childhood neurological challenges
• Vagus Nerve Dysfunction, The vagus nerve’s role in nervous system regulation and healing
• Find a PX Docs Office Near You, PX Docs Practitioner Directory
• Next Episode: Why Some Kids Are Always Sick: The Nervous-Immune Connection Most Parents Never Hear About