The Experience Miracles Podcast

When Nothing Works: What To Do When You’ve Tried Everything For Your Child

Jul 9, 2024

When Nothing Works: The Nervous System Healing Hierarchy for Children With Chronic Illness

Episode 28 — Experience Miracles Podcast | Host: Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP — Pediatric Chiropractor & Founder of PX Docs | Published: July 9, 2024 | Duration: ~65 min

Key Takeaways

  • Healing must follow the same sequence as development: the Nervous System develops first, then digestion and immune function, then the Motor System, and finally brain-based functions like speech, socialization, and cognition. Doing things in the wrong order reduces the effectiveness of every therapy applied.
  • When a child’s nervous system is stuck in Sympathetic Dominance — locked in chronic fight-or-flight — the gut, immune system, and motor system cannot fully respond to diet changes, supplements, or therapies, no matter how carefully they’re executed.
  • Applying too many interventions simultaneously to a neurologically depleted child can cause individual therapies to cancel each other out and sometimes trigger regressions in sleep, sensory processing, and behavior — a pattern Dr. Tony Ebel observed firsthand after expanding his own clinical practice.
  • Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care works on the Autonomic Nervous System and Vagus Nerve foundationally, creating the neurological stability that allows PT, OT, speech therapy, functional medicine, and dietary interventions to finally produce real results.
  • The first signs of genuine neurological healing — better sleep, improved digestion, stronger immune response, and better motor coordination — reliably appear before brain-based improvements in behavior, communication, and focus, and serve as predictive markers that deeper healing is on track.

Why Your Child Isn’t Getting Better: The Healing Hierarchy Explained

When a child is struggling with autism, ADHD, anxiety, epilepsy, or other chronic health conditions and parents feel like they’ve already tried everything, the problem is rarely the individual therapies. The problem is the Healing Hierarchy — the order in which healing must happen.

The nervous system is the first system to develop in the human body. From the moment of conception, the neural tube forms before any other structure. Every other system — digestion, immune function, the motor system, and eventually higher brain functions like speech and emotional regulation — builds on top of that neurological foundation. What The Perfect Storm of prenatal stress, birth trauma, and early toxin exposure does is dysregulate the nervous system first. That means all the downstream systems are working from a compromised foundation.

When a child’s Autonomic Nervous System is stuck in Sympathetic Dominance, their gut cannot properly absorb nutrients or eliminate toxins. Their immune system remains hypersensitive and inflamed. Their motor system stays poorly coordinated. Their brain cannot settle into the regulation needed for communication and focus. This is why parents can execute perfectly on diet, detox protocols, PT, OT, speech therapy, and supplements — and still plateau. None of those interventions address the root cause. For parents who feel like they’re doing everything right and still not getting there, Dr. Tony Ebel’s answer is direct: get the nervous system better first, and everything else on that list will start to work.

The Frustration Parents Bring Into Every Practice [00:00 – 04:00]

Dr. Tony Ebel, DC, CACCP: There is absolutely nothing worse than watching your child struggle with their health. Even acute, short-term issues like a cold, sinus congestion, or a cough can stress us parents out. So when our kids’ health issues turn into chronic, lifelong challenges — instead of growing out of it like the pediatrician told us they would — they grow into things like autism, ADHD, anxiety, epilepsy, allergies, asthma, POTS, PANDAS, and so on.

When that happens, our worry, stress, and anxiety go up 100-fold.

But there is a whole new layer of frustration that almost 100 percent of parents who come into our practice report to me — one that goes a couple of layers even deeper. That is the feeling that they’ve already tried everything out there, traditional and natural, to help their child heal and nothing is working.

Day after day, I meet parents who have not only exhausted the traditional conventional medical system — gone through the pediatrician, the neurologist, the immunologist, and every specialist they were referred to — but now they’ve also gone through all the natural health options: diet changes, detoxes, vitamins, supplements, essential oils, tongue tie revisions, primitive reflex therapies, functional medicine, biomedical interventions, and on and on the list goes.

They truly, literally feel like they’ve done it all and nothing has worked. Or at the very least, sometimes some symptoms are better and life is a little bit easier, but they still have not reached their goals of optimal results and full recovery for their child’s chronic health issues.

This is where the frustration mounts and parents really get exhausted — as each new doctor, provider, specialist, or therapy can be so promising when you first hear about it online or from a friend, and when you first get started. But then so often something just falls short and the results are not there.

The Healing Hierarchy and the “Do Less, Not More” Principle [00:04 – 08:00]

In this episode, I’ll break down for you the exact missing piece — and it will surprise you with honestly how simple and almost hidden in plain sight it truly is.

Everything can change for the better for so many kids if we just do two things. First, focus on what we call the Healing Hierarchy — the batting order that is absolutely essential to getting results for kids with chronic neurological conditions. And second, learn how to do less, not more.

So often, parents are absolutely doing all the right things — but not necessarily in the right order or sequence. And how would they know? When our kids are struggling with their health, we do everything we can and then some, all at once to help them. What feels right is to throw the book at it and try every doctor, therapy, treatment, and care program out there that we can find, afford, and do.

But the problem with that approach is we first need to understand that chronic illness and disease develops in a very specific order. And in the same way, optimal health and neurological development has a specific sequence — what we call the neurological health and developmental hierarchy.

What you will see by the end of this episode is that healing needs to happen in a specific order. And so often, once you really see it, you’ll find yourself needing to do less going forward — at least in the short term — in order to first spark and start healing in the right place for your child. Get what’s called momentum. Once you have momentum and your child’s nervous system is restored and better regulated, and they reach what we call neurological stability — meaning they finally have some adaptability and resiliency again — now different therapies, different supplements, and different interventions can work so much better.

“You’ve got to do things in the right order and we’ve got to get the body and the brain healing in the right sequence. Once you see the forest through the trees with this explanation, you will finally be able to take a deep breath.”

How the Nervous System Develops — and Why It Must Heal First [00:08 – 30:00]

To understand how healing really works, we have to go back and look at the sequence of how development was supposed to happen in the first place. To study how to get sick kids healthy, we need to study health. This is why medical doctors are not good at chronic disease — they didn’t study health. They studied sick care.

The nervous system develops first. Even at the moment of conception, the brain — the neural tube — forms first. It is incredible to look at God’s design from a neuroanatomical standpoint and see how wildly brilliant, specific, and sequential it is.

The nervous system develops first. Then primary functions — heart beating, lungs breathing. Then, after primary functions, digestion, respiration, and immune function develop on the inside. And then you have the outside — the motor system. Gross motor development is supposed to happen first, with the big skeletal muscles, then fine motor development after that.

What matters most by far is the sequence. What matters least compared to the sequence is the calendar — when they go through this development. The sequence and order are essential. Some kids are born early and their neurodevelopment according to the chart will be different. Some kids are bigger and develop a little slower. Understanding that the sequence is more important than the calendar is essential.

Nervous system first, then digestion, then immune system, then motor system. And if we ask which is most important? The nervous system gets that answer first. Which is next? The motor system — movement and motor development — is essential to brain and nervous system development.

“Get the nervous system better first, and then the gut gets better. Get the nervous system better first, and then the immune system gets better. Get the nervous system better first, and then the endocrine system, the motor system, speech, socialization, and emotional and behavioral regulation get better next. There is a foundation, there is a sequence — and that conversation is not had anywhere else.”

What you were probably told — and it is so close to the right answer — is that the gut and the microbiome and the gut-brain connection are the key. If gut microbiome is disrupted, there’s leaky gut, toxins get into the bloodstream, create inflammation, that inflammation goes systemic and to the brain, and that’s why red dye #40 and gluten cause problems. That is accurate — but we’re not done. We didn’t get to the roots.

Why is the gut of kids today so susceptible? Why are there so many more food intolerances and environmental allergies than ever before? Have we really changed our lifestyle that much in the last 20-30 years? No. What is different is that kids of this generation have more stressed, more off-track nervous systems than ever before. The Perfect Storm of stress during fertility, pregnancy, labor, and delivery is hitting earlier, more often, and worse than ever before. It throws their neurodevelopment off track.

And if you start with an off-track nervous system, your digestive system — which is already immature and needs to strengthen through natural optimal development — is really off-track when the nervous system is off-track. The immune system being so sensitive to foods and so easily triggered into inflammation? That’s because the nervous system is first sympathetic dominant and ultimately off-track.

So the nervous system is the first thing to develop optimally. And it’s the first thing that The Perfect Storm shuts down, stresses out, and dysregulates.

Dr. Bruce Lipton — the pioneer of epigenetics — puts it this way: “The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment and coordinate the behavior of all other cells.” All other cells. The gut and the microbiome are cells. The immune system is cells. The motor system is cells. When you work on the Central and Autonomic Nervous System, all other cells can get better.

Why Doing Too Many Things at Once Can Actually Make Things Worse [00:30 – 46:00]

Here’s where I have to tell you something that took me years in practice to learn — and it’s not a fun one for me to say.

When I built my clinic 15 years ago, I took the exact same path that parents take. Every class, every seminar, every certification added more that I was supposed to do to get kids with chronic illness better. Within three to five years, I woke up and my clinic had literally everything under one roof. We were a functional neurologist, biomedical integrative office before it was cool.

And the more I did, the less good we did.

Each thing individually that I learned was a good thing. But nobody taught me — and providers teaching other providers don’t know this either — that there is a specific order, a specific Healing Hierarchy through which healing needs to happen. And it needs to mirror the hierarchy that development and health-building was supposed to follow in the first place.

When I started to add more integrative therapies to my practice, we actually started to see kids whose sensory issues, behavior issues, and sleep challenges had improved with chiropractic adjustments start to get worse. The more we would push a detox too soon. The more we would work on primitive reflexes or cranial work and brain-based therapies too soon.

“The more we did, the less good we did. Less, but more specifically, the right sequence is way better.”

Here’s the scientific reason this happens. Retained primitive reflexes are only present because when the nervous system is stressed, subluxated, and dysregulated — stuck in Sympathetic Dominance with the Vagus Nerve parasympathetic system offline and suppressed — those reflexes persist as a downstream consequence. They are secondary to sympathetic dominance. They are not going to go away no matter how much you work at them directly, until the nervous system stress goes away first.

If you work on secondary, tertiary, or quaternary things within retained primitive reflexes, brain-based therapies, neurofeedback, biofeedback, or laser therapies before the foundation is addressed, the best-case scenario is that nothing happens. The not-good scenario is that you can actually cause a child to backtrack and become even more dysregulated.

That stuff looks impressive on Instagram and sounds advanced. And it is great — if done in the right timing and the right sequence. But it won’t be effective, and it can sometimes produce the opposite of what you want, if the foundational healing of the Central and Autonomic Nervous System isn’t addressed first.

The Gut-Nervous System Connection [00:46 – 57:00]

Let me walk you through exactly what is happening in the gut when the nervous system is off-track — because this is the explanation that will make sense of why diet, detox, and supplements aren’t getting your child all the way there.

The nervous system is the boss of the gut. The gut, the microbiome, and the immune system are controlled by the Central and Autonomic Nervous System. When we say nervous system, we mean those two things together.

Dysautonomia — dysfunction of the autonomic nervous system — is what happens when the perfect storm creates chronic sympathetic dominance. Here’s the mechanism: when a child is in a fight-or-flight response, which is the natural primal response to the triggers of The Perfect Storm — stressful pregnancy, labor, and birth trauma to the Brainstem — the entire nervous system shifts into sympathetic dominance. In that primal, protective state, it steals energy from digestion because it’s worried about the fight or the flight.

Kids stuck in autism, ADHD, anxiety, and epilepsy are stuck in sympathetic dominance 24/7/365. So the first system most compromised is the digestive tract — its motility, absorption, assimilation, and elimination.

This is why you can follow a perfect diet, do parasite cleanses, take every supplement on the list, spend $1,500 a month on biomedical interventions, retest six months later, and still see toxins, still see heavy metals, still see deficiencies. You are doing everything right. But it won’t work in full until the nervous system stress is addressed, because the gut cannot fully heal without the nervous system going first.

And here’s another piece most people haven’t been taught: the digestive tract is anatomically a muscle. When you stretch it all out, it is the longest, biggest muscle in the body — all connected. The esophagus, the stomach, the small intestine, the large intestine — we call them different things because they have different regional functions, but they are one long muscle tract. A motor system dependent on motility more than chemistry.

“You cannot get the gut all the way back online. You cannot heal the microbiome and the gut-brain connection without getting the nervous system better first.”

The gut-brain connection runs through the bloodstream, through the Vagus Nerve, and through the enteric nervous system. The digestive tract has more sensory nerve endings than perhaps any other system. Its tone, coordination, motility, activation, and inhibition are all dependent on nervous system function first.

This means gut healing — real gut healing — is fundamentally a nervous system problem as much as it is a dietary chemistry problem. Both matter. But the reason so many families have done everything to heal the gut and still aren’t there is because motility is compromised first by nervous system dysregulation, and until that is addressed, the gut won’t fully restore.

The Sequence of Healing: What Gets Better First and Why [00:57 – 1:03:00]

When we start adjusting kids with Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care — tapping into the nervous system, not just the spine and skeleton — here is the sequence of healing we see consistently.

The first responses: sleep gets better, digestion and bowel regularity improve, immune challenges become easier to move through, and then motor planning, posture, and neurotone coordination get better. We call these the neurological foundational signs of healing — the neurological soft signs.

For the first 90 to 100 days, we focus on those basics obsessively and only. When a child comes in with autism, epilepsy, or any brain-based condition — regardless of age — we don’t worry about the brain first. We get the body better first. We get those foundational developmental systems online in a specific sequence.

When sleep, digestion, immune function, and motor planning start improving, we use what we call predictive neurophysiology — we know that the brain is next. You can actually see the signs of real sequential neurological healing happening before it arrives in the brain-based symptoms.

This is why so many parents doing PT, OT, and speech therapy for years plateau entirely. That child’s nervous system is so stuck, so stressed, so subluxated, sympathetic dominant, and dysregulated that it simply cannot respond to therapy. The therapy is good. It just isn’t working for that child. When you add neurologically focused chiropractic in first and foundationally, and their nervous system becomes better regulated and more receptive, those same therapies start to produce the results everyone was hoping for.

My own son Oliver — who after a NICU stay and severe birth trauma was given a 99% certainty of autism, cerebral palsy, and epilepsy by his medical team — is now 15 years old with no seizures, no delays, no challenges, and optimal health. The outcome was different because the foundation was addressed.

The master key is the nervous system. When you get the nervous system better first through neurologically focused chiropractic, you get the sympathetic system out of overdrive, you get the Vagus Nerve and the parasympathetic side back online — which controls not just rest and digestion but also inflammation, socialization, and communication — and then everything else on the list finally starts to work.

“Get what’s called momentum. Once you have momentum and your child’s nervous system is restored and better regulated and they reach neurological stability — meaning they finally have some adaptability and resiliency again — now different therapies, different supplements, and different interventions can work so much better.”

The foundation and the sequence matter most. It may feel like you have to go backwards to go forwards. The truth is, once you do this one thing first, it opens the door to everything else working better.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why isn’t my child getting better even though we’ve tried everything?

The most common reason is that healing is being attempted in the wrong order. According to Dr. Tony Ebel, chronic illness in children develops in a specific sequence — starting with nervous system dysregulation — and healing must follow that same sequence in reverse. When the Autonomic Nervous System is still stuck in Sympathetic Dominance, the gut, immune system, and motor system cannot fully respond to diet changes, supplements, or therapies, regardless of how well those interventions are executed.

What is the Healing Hierarchy for children with chronic illness?

Dr. Tony Ebel describes the Healing Hierarchy as the specific sequence in which the body must heal, mirroring how it develops: the nervous system must be addressed first, then gut function and immune regulation, then the motor system, and finally brain-based functions like speech, behavior, and cognition. Attempting to fix brain-based symptoms like autism or ADHD before the foundational systems are stable is like trying to finish the walls before the foundation is poured.

Can doing too many therapies at the same time actually make things worse?

Yes. Dr. Tony Ebel observed this directly in his own clinical practice after building a multi-modality integrative clinic. When neurologically depleted children — already in a state of chronic sympathetic dominance — are given multiple simultaneous interventions, those therapies can overwhelm an already overwhelmed nervous system and cancel each other out. In some cases, interventions like detox protocols, cranial work, or brain-based therapies introduced too soon have caused regressions in sleep, sensory processing, and behavior.

Why does diet and detox work for some kids but not for mine?

The gut is controlled by the Autonomic Nervous System. When a child is stuck in Sympathetic Dominance, the body steals energy from digestion to maintain the fight-or-flight state. This compromises gut motility, absorption, assimilation, and elimination. You can execute a perfect diet and detox protocol and still retest at six months with the same toxins, metals, and deficiencies — not because the interventions are wrong, but because the nervous system hasn’t been addressed first. Gut healing is fundamentally a nervous system problem as much as a dietary one.

What are the first signs that neurological healing is actually happening?

According to Dr. Tony Ebel, the neurological foundational signs of healing appear in this order: improved sleep, better digestion and bowel regularity, stronger immune response to common illnesses, and then better motor planning and coordination. These improvements appear before brain-based changes in behavior, speech, focus, and emotional regulation — and they serve as predictive markers that deeper healing is on track. Dr. Ebel calls this predictive neurophysiology.

How do I find a neurologically focused pediatric chiropractor near me?

The PX Docs directory lists trained practitioners across the country who specialize in Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care for children with chronic health conditions. Find a PX Docs Office Near You

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