The Experience Miracles Podcast

Seizures: Exploring the Impact of Birth Interventions, Toxins, the Vagus Nerve & more

Mar 19, 2024

What Causes Childhood Seizures? Birth Trauma, the Vagus Nerve, and Drug-Free Solutions

Episode 12 — Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP — Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: March 19, 2024 | Duration: 68 min

Key Takeaways

  • 470,000 children under age 14 in the United States are currently living with epilepsy and seizures — yet mainstream medicine still defaults to a genetic explanation that, for the vast majority of these kids, doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
  • Most childhood seizures don’t originate in the brain — they originate in the brainstem and vagus nerve, which are housed in the neck and upper cervical spine and are frequently injured during forceps, vacuum, C-section, and other birth interventions.
  • Anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) suppress seizure activity but do not address the root cause, and carry severe documented side effects including cognitive delays, behavioral dysregulation, anxiety, depression, and GI dysfunction — side effects that worsen as dosages stack over time.
  • A neurological concept called diaschisis explains why seizure activity registers on EEG in the brain even when the original injury is in the brainstem or spinal cord — meaning standard diagnostics measure the effect, not the cause.
  • Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care, guided by INSiGHT scan technology measuring thermal patterns, surface EMG, and HRV, can locate and address the underlying subluxation and vagus nerve dysfunction — with documented cases of children becoming both seizure-free and medication-free.

What Causes Childhood Seizures — And What Can Be Done Without Drugs?

Childhood seizures are not simply a “brain problem” or an inevitable result of bad genetics. According to Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP, the root cause for most children is nervous system dysregulation — specifically, subluxation, vagus nerve dysfunction, and dysautonomia stemming from physical stress during the birth process and compounded by early toxic exposures. These are the structures and conditions that conventional EEGs and MRIs measure around, but never directly address.

The brainstem and vagus nerve are located in the neck and upper cervical spine — the exact area most vulnerable to physical trauma during deliveries involving forceps, vacuum extraction, cord wraps, emergency C-sections, or prolonged induction. When this region is injured, the nervous system shifts into sympathetic dominance — a chronic fight-or-flight state — and the parasympathetic (calming) branch, mediated by the vagus nerve, becomes suppressed. This imbalance doesn’t stay isolated to the brain: it simultaneously disrupts gut motility, immune regulation, and motor coordination, which is why children with seizures almost universally also struggle with constipation, chronic illness, and movement challenges.

For parents who have exhausted anti-epileptic medications, genetic testing panels, and dietary interventions without achieving seizure control, the missing piece may be unaddressed neurological dysfunction in the brainstem and upper cervical spine. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care — guided by INSiGHT scan technology that measures thermal dysregulation, surface EMG, and heart rate variability — can identify and address this dysfunction directly, without drugs or surgery.

A Personal Mission: Dr. Tony’s Son Oliver and the Birth Trauma Connection [0:00 – 14:53]

Dr. Tony Ebel: This is a deep dive into a condition that I think sucks more than any other one out there. That’s an unfair comparison, because when we see our kids struggle with health challenges of any kind — from an ear infection to an upset stomach — it pulls on our heartstrings like nothing else. But this episode is about seizures, and watching my own son, as a brand new baby, have seizures was the worst thing I have ever experienced in my life.

I have a real personal relationship with seizures — as a dad and as a doctor. Because of that, I’ve made it my personal life mission to get this message into the ears and hearts of millions of families. 470,000 kids in the United States alone, under the age of 14, are dealing with epilepsy and seizures. It’s a massive, debilitating neurological condition. And the medications — called AEDs, anti-epileptic drugs — are just nasty. They’re riddled with side effects, they become less effective over time, and as dosages go up or neurologists have to stack multiple seizure drugs together, the side effects compound exponentially.

My son Oliver was born on Memorial Day 2009 — not just six weeks early, but with a physically traumatic brainstem and what’s called a hypoxic brain injury. There was physical trauma to his neck and his brain that limited oxygen, CSF (cerebral spinal fluid), and proprioception. He experienced seizures — both visible ones and those confirmed by EEG. His EEGs showed what are called burst suppressions: a surge of seizure activity in his brain, immediately followed by a suppressive response where the nervous system had to go dormant to protect itself and stay alive.

We were told Oliver had a 99% chance of epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and autism. He needed phenobarbital, Keppra, and a stack of other medications. The prognosis was that he would struggle with seizures his entire life.

“Medicine served its job. There were doctors in that hospital who saved my son’s life. But they’re the fire department. They know how to put fires out. They don’t know how to rebuild, restore, repair, reorganize.”

He didn’t end up with the outcome medicine predicted. Oliver left the NICU six weeks later after medical care saved his life. During that NICU stay, he was also receiving neurologically focused chiropractic adjustments two to three times per day, along with clean nutrition every day. He left with a perfect EEG. His post-MRI showed no brain damage — the brain had healed. The burst suppression and seizure activity were gone.

I had spent five years as a nervous system-focused pediatric chiropractor studying autism, epilepsy, cerebral palsy, and its connection to vagus nerve and brainstem damage via birth interventions — forceps, vacuum, C-section, induction. The dots were easily connected for me while they were impossible for the medical world to connect.

How Seizures Destroy Quality of Life — Way Beyond the Seizures Themselves [14:53 – 26:14]

When a child is struggling with seizures, the list of what else goes sideways would take half an hour to run through.

Living in constant fear and anxiety — especially as kids get older and start to understand what’s happening to them — shifts the nervous system further into sympathetic dominance, which actually increases the threshold and trigger for more seizures. The neurological dysfunction driving seizures simultaneously wrecks the gut and the immune system. The vast majority of our epilepsy patients have constipation, eczema, severe gut issues, and immune dysregulation. They’re constantly sick. They deal with massive allergies. They get put on antibiotics and steroid medications — which mess with the gut-brain connection, stress the nervous system further, create more inflammation, and contribute to more seizures.

Their gut is a mess. Their immune system is a mess. Their motor system is a mess. Many of them have what are called myoclonic or myotonic seizures that affect the movement of the body — dyskinesia, motor tics, mental-emotional-behavioral dysregulation. All of it comes together.

“I have yet to meet a child struggling with seizures who didn’t have issues with their gut, their immune system, their motor planning, their behavior, their emotion, their anxiety. The nervous system controls everything.”

I know from cases like Cole and Francesca and many others — kids we’ve been able to help as teenagers and young adults — that seizures lead to social isolation. The anxiety turns into exhaustion, depression, and not wanting to be here anymore. The seizures, the stress from them, the medications and their side effects had become so bad that many of these patients reached a stage of life with depression and suicidal tendencies.

To say that seizures disrupt quality of life is probably the most dramatic understatement I could make on this podcast.

Types of Seizures — and Why Most of Them Start in the Neck, Not the Brain [26:14 – 32:20]

There are generalized seizures, which affect the whole brain and nervous system. And there are focal seizures, which affect only one part of the brain. What can happen with focal seizures is that as they continue to fire — if the root cause isn’t addressed — they spread. The principle at work here is neuroplasticity: nerves that fire together wire together. The more the brain seizes, the more stress it brings, the more seizures follow. That’s a conversation that has to happen even with kids who are only having a few seizures.

Absence seizures are the most commonly missed. They’re not easily recognizable — the child gets confused, looks spaced out, seems not to be paying attention. Once you know what to look for, they’re easier to spot, but most pediatricians and parents miss them entirely.

Atonic seizures — sometimes called drop attacks — involve a surge of sympathetic nervous activity, then a complete loss of muscle tone. This is the “pendulum effect” at work: the body creates an excessive parasympathetic vagus nerve response to save itself from going too far into tension, and the child falls. It’s neurologically very similar to vasovagal syncope.

Myoclonic seizures are brief neuromuscular jerks — and this is critical. They most commonly show up in the neck, jaw, upper arms, and shoulders. That is not a coincidence. The most common — and most overlooked — trigger of seizures is subluxation and neurological dysfunction in the neck and brainstem. The nerves coming from that area supply exactly those parts of the body first: the neck muscles, upper arms, shoulders, jaw, and eyes.

If your child is having myoclonic seizures in those areas, ask: was there ever a neck injury? Was there forceps, vacuum, C-section, cord wrap, or induction at birth? The storm almost always begins exactly where the subluxation and original neurological dysfunction is located.

Seizures Don’t Start in the Brain: Diaschisis, the Brainstem, and the Vagus Nerve [32:20 – 39:34]

What I’ve been blown away by, for my entire career, is that medical epileptologists and neurologists still believe seizures start and live only in the brain. The brain is critically important — obviously — but it’s only one part of the nervous system. From the bottom and back of the brain is the cerebellum. From there, the brainstem. From the brainstem, the spinal cord. From the spinal cord, the spinal nerves. The nervous system is one connected loop from the brain to your child’s pinky toe, and the middle man of that system is the neuro-spinal system and the brainstem.

“What if they’re brainstem and body-based problems that end up in the brain? What if the EEG is kicking off stress from the brain, but it didn’t start from the brain?”

The brain processes approximately 300 trillion bits of information per second. We’re consciously aware of just 50 of those. So when we think these are purely brain-based problems — epilepsy, autism, seizures — we’re looking at the end of a very long chain.

The clinical concept that explains this is called diaschisis — from the Latin meaning “shocked throughout.” It describes how an injury in one specific part of the nervous system causes symptoms to show up throughout the entire rest of the system. If your child’s seizures are appearing on an EEG, are they coming from that part of the brain, or ending up there?

What we see again and again: kids with physical injury to their neck, neuro-spinal system, and brainstem end up with seizure activity. Kids whose gut-brain connection — which is mediated by the vagus nerve — has been overwhelmed by toxins, chemicals, antibiotics, or environmental exposures end up with an inflammatory cascade that shifts the nervous system into sympathetic dominance, just as a physical birth injury would. And for most kids with epilepsy and seizure activity, they’ve had both: physical injury from birth trauma, plus toxic reactions from early interventions.

The Medical Approach: EEGs, Medications, and What They’re Actually Measuring [39:34 – 46:31]

The standard medical workup for seizures includes EEG, MRI, possibly a CT scan, and blood work. Blood work is run because metabolic imbalances can increase seizure activity. But as a doctor focused on cause, the next question has to be: what’s causing those metabolic imbalances in the first place? The answer, as always, is the nervous system.

So when we look at EEG, MRI, and blood tests — are they revealing the deep root cause of seizures, or are they just showing us the middleman? Frequently, a child won’t even have visible seizure activity on an EEG but will still be put on seizure medications. Is that testing telling us why the abnormal findings are there, or just confirming they exist?

The most important question — the one every parent has been asking the whole time — is: what is causing this? Seizure medications do not answer that question. They suppress. Anti-epileptic drugs do exactly one thing: shut down nervous system activity. Fatigue, drowsiness, anxiety, depression, dizziness, GI issues, mood changes, cognitive impacts — the side effect list is one of the longest in pharmacology.

Was Oliver on phenobarbital for three weeks? Yes. Was it important and necessary? Absolutely — during that window, we weren’t focused on healing Oliver, we were focused on saving him. Medications save lives. But they have nothing to do with healing. There isn’t a single pharmaceutical medication designed to heal — medicine’s design is to kill things, cover things up, and suppress symptoms.

The cross-pollination of kids struggling with seizures who also have autism, ADHD, sensory issues, anxiety, and depression isn’t only because the underlying neurological dysfunction causes all of those things. For many families, it’s the seizure medication itself that’s disrupting motor development, cognitive development, social-emotional development, speech, and behavioral development. When you mess with the nervous system, you mess with everything.

Rejecting the “Bad Luck” Genetics Narrative [46:31 – 51:42]

We don’t buy that seizures are just bad luck. We don’t blame genetics alone — just like with autism, ADHD, or any other neurological condition. Does genetic predisposition matter? Yes — some kids’ nervous systems have a pre-wiring that makes them more sensitive to stress and more likely to be triggered in this direction. But for the vast majority of those 470,000 kids under 14 with seizures, the genetic explanation doesn’t add up.

Again and again, families can’t find seizures on EEG, can’t find anything on MRI, can’t find it on lab work. So medicine sends them through round after round of genetic testing. At the end of thousands of dollars and months of testing, they end up with a syndrome label. That’s not a root cause — that’s a name given to something medicine can’t explain.

I spent my undergraduate degree studying genetics and molecular biology. I know genetics inside and out, and I know that they explain very little of what we’re actually talking about in most pediatric seizure cases. It’s simply more convenient to pin the tail on the genetic donkey than it is to say birth intervention, antibiotics, and environmental toxic load are at play.

“So often a genetic label is given to something medicine can’t explain. When they can’t find the root cause, it’s a whole lot easier to blame it on genetics.”

Even our children with CP, trisomy, or other confirmed genetic conditions — those kids go through The Perfect Storm as well. Their seizures often come from the neuromuscular components of their genetic condition combined with the accumulated stress of that perfect storm, not just from having a genetic label.

The Perfect Storm: How Seizures Actually Begin [51:42 – 58:41]

Here, in sequence, is how we see seizures develop in the vast majority of kids:

Component one: A high-stress, high-risk pregnancy. More prenatal stress means more nervous system strain on mom, which flows directly to the child. A stressed mom is more inflamed, more likely to develop preeclampsia or high blood pressure, more likely to go into preterm labor, and more likely to require interventions at delivery.

Component two: Birth trauma. Forceps, vacuum, cord wrapped, grabbing a child by the head and neck and pulling them into the world. Most seizures come from brainstem and vagus nerve dysfunction — and the brainstem and vagus nerve are housed in the neck and upper cervical spine. This physical injury is the most overlooked component and trigger of childhood seizures. If it’s triggering them, we need to find it and address it.

Component three: Sympathetic dominance and the nervous system cascade. Once the brainstem is stressed, injured, and subluxated from birth trauma, the nervous system locks into sympathetic dominance. The first thing it shuts down is gastric GI motility — so now the child is constipated, refluxing, and pro-inflammatory. When the gut can’t move things along, it can’t clear toxins, viruses, or bacteria. A neurological problem sets up first in the gut, second in the immune system, third in the motor system — all at once, because the vagus nerve controls the tone and motility of the gut, the inflammatory cascade of the immune system, and motor coordination in concert with the rest of the nervous system.

Every child we’ve seen with seizures has severe motor imbalances. Medicine grades motor milestones by whether a child can walk and talk. That misses the quality of motor tone and function entirely. A disrupted, subluxated, neuromotor-gastro-immunological system is a wound-up, disorganized nervous system, and that is what triggers seizures.

This also explains the common triggers parents notice: gut changes, immune challenges, growth spurts, weather changes, full moons, seasonal shifts. These regular life events increase seizure likelihood because a child with seizures already has an overly sensitive, imbalanced, dysregulated nervous system. Any additional stress pushes it over the threshold.

What Parents Can Do: INSiGHT Scans and Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care [58:41 – 1:08:15]

Seizures don’t come from stress alone. There’s a second component: asymmetry and disorganization in the nervous system. What the brain despises most is not just too much noise or stress coming through subluxation — it’s confusion. It’s the signals from one side of the nervous system not matching the other. That asymmetrical presentation is what pushes a stressed nervous system into actual seizure activity. This is why case history matters so much: the more we know about when and how the storm started, the more precisely we can identify and address the original neurological dysfunction.

For parents who have done the EEGs, the MRIs, the medications, the lab work, the gluten-free and casein-free diets, the supplements, the homeopathics — and the seizures are still there — it’s very likely that subluxation, dysautonomia, vagus nerve dysfunction, and nervous system dysregulation are still at play.

The way to know for certain is through INSiGHT scan technology — the three-part assessment used by all PX Docs offices and nervous system-focused chiropractors in our network. It includes:

  • Thermal scanning — measures dysregulation in autonomic nervous system function
  • Surface EMG — measures neuromotor tension and imbalance
  • HRV (heart rate variability) — measures the overall stress load on the nervous system

These aren’t just general wellness screens. They allow us to answer three specific questions: Is your child subluxated? If yes, how severe is the dysfunction? And, most importantly, exactly where in the neuro-spinal system is that dysfunction located? That precision matters for seizures specifically, because the location of the subluxation tells us where to direct the adjustment.

“Your child can heal. They are meant to heal. The nervous system is meant to be plastic and heal. It’s not meant to be stuck in this storm. You need help getting it from where it is to where it’s meant to be.”

Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care — particularly from practitioners trained through the PX Docs network — knows how to calm the sympathetic storm, stimulate and activate the vagus nerve, and most importantly, reorganize and reintegrate the nervous system so it can do the healing work on its own.

This is not back pain chiropractic. It’s not massage, rehab, or orthotics. It’s a specific, scan-guided clinical approach aimed entirely at root cause nervous system dysfunction. It doesn’t treat or cure seizures — it addresses the subluxation, dysautonomia, and vagus nerve dysfunction underneath them.

Oliver is 14 now. He’s not only seizure-free — he’s neurological dysfunction-free, medication-free, and living his life to the fullest. That outcome is possible for more kids when parents have access to this information. That’s why this podcast exists.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can birth trauma actually cause seizures in children?

Yes — this is one of the most overlooked connections in pediatric neurology. Birth interventions involving forceps, vacuum extraction, cord wraps, emergency C-sections, or induction create physical stress at the neck and upper cervical spine, where the brainstem and vagus nerve are housed. Damage to this region causes sympathetic dominance and vagus nerve dysfunction, which Dr. Tony Ebel identifies as the most common and most underdiagnosed root cause of childhood seizures.

Why doesn’t my child’s EEG show what’s causing the seizures?

Because EEGs measure brain activity — they detect where seizure activity is occurring in the brain, not what triggered it or where the original dysfunction began. A neurological concept called diaschisis explains that an injury in one part of the nervous system (like the brainstem or upper cervical spine) causes symptoms to show up throughout the rest of the system, including the brain. The EEG catches the downstream effect, not the root cause.

What are the side effects of anti-epileptic drugs (AEDs) in children?

Anti-epileptic drugs carry a significant side effect burden that worsens over time and with stacked dosing. Common effects include fatigue and drowsiness, anxiety, depression, dizziness, GI disruption, mood changes, and cognitive and developmental delays — particularly with phenobarbital. Dr. Tony Ebel explains that for many children with co-occurring autism, ADHD, sensory issues, or behavioral challenges, the seizure medication itself is driving those additional symptoms by disrupting the nervous system responsible for all developmental progress.

What is vagus nerve dysfunction and how does it connect to seizures?

The vagus nerve is the primary nerve of the parasympathetic (rest-and-regulate) nervous system. It controls gut motility, immune inflammatory response, and motor coordination — all through its connection between the brainstem and the body. When the vagus nerve is injured or suppressed (as often happens from birth trauma to the upper cervical spine), the nervous system locks into sympathetic dominance and the gut, immune system, and motor system all begin to fail simultaneously. This systemic dysregulation is what creates the neurological environment in which seizures occur.

Is there a drug-free option for children with epilepsy who haven’t responded to medications?

For children with medication-resistant epilepsy, the missing piece may be unaddressed neurological dysfunction in the brainstem and upper cervical spine. Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care — guided by INSiGHT scan technology — can measure and address subluxation, vagus nerve dysfunction, and dysautonomia directly. Dr. Tony Ebel has documented multiple cases of children becoming seizure-free and medication-free following this approach, including his own son Oliver, who was given a 99% prognosis for lifelong epilepsy after a traumatic birth injury.

How do I find a neurologically focused chiropractor for my child’s seizures?

Visit the PX Docs practitioner directory to search for a trained, certified nervous system-focused chiropractor near you. Look specifically for providers who use INSiGHT scan technology (thermal, surface EMG, and HRV) — this is the standard of care in the PX Docs network. If no provider is listed near you, contact PX Docs directly through pxdocs.com or via Instagram or Facebook with your city and zip code.

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