Free shipping Over $100+
Pamela : Hi, this is Pamela Wirth with the Encourage Your Wellness podcast, and today I’m super excited. We’ve got Dr. Tony Ebel, lead writer and educational guide for PX Docs, a certified pediatric and wellness chiropractor with 15 years of clinical experience. He has been teaching and training other pediatric and family chiropractors for at least 10 years and spends a lot of time addressing pediatric neurodevelopmental challenges such as autism, ADHD, sensory processing disorder, epilepsy, anxiety, and so much more. Thank you so much for being here!
Dr. Tony Ebel : Yeah, this is such a blast because I love providing care to my patients. But, you know, you can’t provide care until you talk about it first, right? People need to find out about it, learn about it, and make sense of it. So, I guess that’s kind of what’s encompassed in the bio there. I write articles about it, get on podcasts, do videos, and sometimes my team makes me do awkward, uncomfortable dancing Instagram Reels about it. So thanks for having me, Pamela. I love doing this stuff.
Pamela : So what does all of this mean? If someone potentially has a diagnosis and needs additional help, where do you come in that’s different from other providers? How do you complement, communicate, and support, and what does that look like?
Dr. Tony Ebel : Yeah, that’s a great question. In fact, I think that might be the most important question we try to get across to our audience. When you’re trying to help your child heal, especially if it involves a chronic illness like autism and its various layers, it’s rare that a patient only faces one challenge. What can be overwhelming for parents is after exhausting traditional medical options—seeing specialists, getting dismissed, and being sent elsewhere—they then enter the realm of natural and holistic health. It’s exciting but can quickly become overwhelming due to the myriad of solutions available in Facebook groups and other resources.
The real difference with a nervous system-focused pediatric chiropractor, which is quite a mouthful but intentional, is that early in my career, I thought the best way to help kids was by becoming everything to everyone. I studied primitive reflexes, motor tone, gut microbiome, detoxification, and so on. It looked great on paper and in pamphlets, but over time, I found that addressing the central and autonomic nervous system was more potent and effective, especially in the initial stages of healing.
What happens is there’s a sequence to getting sick. We call it the “perfect storm,” where kids experience emotional trauma during pregnancy and birth interventions, which leads to susceptibility to toxins and gut issues. Long story short, what we do that’s different is focus on the foundational challenges: the central and autonomic nervous system. Many families feel like they’ve tried everything and are doing all the right things, but sometimes the nervous system is like the foundation upon which healing occurs. So, we dive deep into the function of the nervous system, and for many kids and patients, that’s where things are stuck.
Pamela : Yeah, which makes a lot of sense. We recently had Dr. Richard Jacobe on, and he spends a lot of time discussing how he believes all illness is rooted in the nervous system. By controlling inflammation, you can bring everything back into place. When people think of chiropractors, they probably think movement. And I’m sure there’s movement involved, but what other types of things do you do in addition to movement? What types of movements do you find are most impactful?
Dr. Tony Ebel : Yeah, great question! The adjustment itself and everything involved with chiropractic falls into the movement sciences. Sorry, parents, I’m a bit of a nerd. I’m an Iowa farmer mixed with a super nerd. I’ll get technical, then simplify it. I started my undergrad in kinesiology, which is the study of movement. Understanding how the body is supposed to move is step one. For kids, motor development is essential to brain development. Chiropractic is very much involved in these movement-based sciences, but it’s actually more detailed than other approaches.
The adjustment adds what’s called proprioceptive or mechanoreceptive input into the system. Two important points are where you apply that movement and the type of movement used. Most people think chiropractic and picture the spine as just bones, but the spine is a living, breathing neurological conduit. It’s the central access point, especially at the brainstem and upper neck, which controls the vagus nerve and autonomic nervous system.
What’s different in our approach is that we really dive deep into the function of the nervous system. Many families feel like they’ve tried everything and are doing all the right things, but sometimes the nervous system is the key part of the foundation for healing. We use various chiropractic techniques and personalize them based on the patient’s neurological and movement dysfunctions. There are over a hundred techniques in chiropractic, and we use them all. It’s like expecting the same medication to work for everyone—it’s not a one-size-fits-all approach. We assess and personalize the technique to the patient’s needs, which is the most rewarding part of the job.
Pamela : Yeah, and I don’t know if you do this, but I had done something similar with one of my kids who had ADD (not ADHD). They explained it as part of the brain being like a Ferrari and the back being like a dune buggy. They had him use a balancing board while counting backward with a bean bag and trying to build "highways." It did help, and we did it around ages six, seven, and eight. Do you do similar activities?
Dr. Tony Ebel : That’s exactly what I was getting at. I did similar things in the past. Here’s a gray-area answer: we no longer do that inside our clinic. When you try to be a jack of all trades, you can end up not being a master of any. Healing is a multifactorial path, so a multi-integrated approach is needed. The real magic is in the sequence of treatments.
In our clinic, we focus on neuronal adjustments and build a collaborative process. We often refer patients to other professionals for neurointegrative therapies, like movement-based exercises or brain training, after we’ve addressed the nervous system. If the nervous system is stuck in sympathetic dominance, even the best therapies won’t be effective. Once we get the nervous system to a better state, we hand off to professionals who can provide those therapies. The results can be incredible when done in the right sequence. If you’ve tried various approaches and they didn’t work, it might be because the foundational work with the nervous system wasn’t done first. It’s about the right sequence, which many providers don’t teach or understand.
Pamela : Well, so then if somebody wants, I mean I can't imagine that every single person with the designation of a chiropractor knows how to do this right, so what should people look for? Do you train people nationally if you know you're not in an area where someone can see somebody but they trust them? What does that look like?
Dr. Tony Ebel : Yeah, great question. You know, it was when we met through Beth Lambert and the amazing Documenting Hope crew, and when I got done speaking down there, everybody was so excited with the way I was able to answer this question live at the seminar. Because we do train, have trained, do train—we need many more, and we're working on that too. But yeah, my other job in addition to being in practice is training, and we have over a thousand trained PX doctors. Some of them are on their journey to get to the directory, but they are trained. There is a network of them. A lot of other presenters at the conference were just a one-man or one-woman shop, and so families were excited to hear about what they do, but then it's like, "I've got an eight-month waiting list." I never—I just couldn't fall asleep at night if I knew that parents could find out about nervous system-focused chiropractic but not access it. That's where many years ago I started training and teaching these iCal protocols to others. So here's what you want to look for. On our directory, PXsts.com, you hit the "Find a Cairo" button and it's there. But here's what you're going to find: If they're not on there, sometimes chiropractors haven't learned about what we're doing yet. So there are a few out there that are doing this. What you want to look for is number one: everything about their brand. Moms, you're smarter than all the rest of us put together. You can do a 30-minute scroll and you know when somebody's full of it and when they're not. So do your scroll, go to their Instagram, go to their Facebook, go to their reviews, go to their website. If they just mention Pediatrics and the nervous system like on the 17th bullet point, but there are pictures of people with back pain, that's not a pediatric chiropractor. You can kind of tell. I know this is a 30,000-foot view answer first, but their brand should be really clearly saying we help kids and we focus on the nervous system. Number two: you want to check out and see if they actually use what are called neurological Insight scans. To be a nervous system-focused chiropractor, we have to not just talk about it. We need to actually analyze and examine the nervous system. We use technology like neurotherm scans, EMG, and most importantly, HRV. I know you're well aware of that one, which is heart rate variability. Because we have to be able to get a baseline of where a kid's nervous system is, and then we use that technology and rerun those scans as care progresses. So you can know you're not just making symptomatic superficial change but you're making long-lasting improvements to the child's nervous system. So that's the second criteria I always tell parents to ask for. Do you run SCS? Do you use nervous system technology? Number three: you can really find out—you've got to get on the phone with them usually and kind of like grill them on this a little bit. Ask them about their care plan recommendations. What I mean by that is old-school chiropractic, you know, kids would get adjusted once a month or every other week. In today's world, kids' nervous systems are so stressed, so wound up, and so disorganized that the way neurological healing or any healing happens is frequency and repetition over a certain time interval that makes that neuroplasticity happen. So a real nervous system-focused chiropractor knows that most kids need to start at about three times a week. So if you call in and you ask, "What's your average care plan for a child with sensory challenges or especially if it's a nervous system-focused challenge?" and if they say just once a week or twice a week, it's actually kind of a tell that they're not quite up to the current neurological protocols we need. That's a very granular three-part answer, but it's our kiddos, so they deserve the best of the best.
Pamela : So in neuroplasticity, basically meaning that you're training the brain and training the nervous system, do you find that you have to attack this within a certain time frame by a certain age, or do you feel like you can also make an impact, you know, as teenagers, young adults, or people who haven't really thought about this sooner?
Dr. Tony Ebel : Yeah, totally. Great question. That is key. My start as a patient was a 20-year-old. I grew up with full-throttle sensory processing disorder and ADHD, so mine was pretty bolded there. Pamela, that'll surprise no one. And as we talk into this, it was almost a blessing in disguise. I grew up in a small farm town in Iowa a generation ago, so I had no clue that I had ADHD, which was a blessing because I don't believe—I know that's a funky word. It's kind of like when people say they don't believe in caring, well, I'm not a pastor. And I just feel like when we give kids or anyone a diagnosis with the word "disorder" in it, it hooks them. That's part of the emotional challenge. I won't go too far down that road.
Where I'm going with this is I didn't start getting nervous system-focused chiropractic until I was 20. I never could sleep, I never could focus, I never could calm down. I was blessed to channel my energy into sports, being a farm kid. I was active, so I didn't sit around. There's probably a lot of blessings just in the way that lifestyle was, that it didn't kind of overrun my nervous system. But it did. When I was 19 to 20, my life started to really fall apart. I couldn't pay attention. School got harder, junior and senior years of college, and I struggled massively. My lifestyle was also bad. I was on the Jimmy John's and Bush Light diet back then.
So, where am I going with my personal story? We have a big story with our son Oliver, and that's our miracle pediatric story. I started getting adjusted thinking it was for my bad shoulder and bad neck, which is the hub to the brain and had a lot to do with my ADHD, sensory, and sleep issues. I slept after my first adjustment for like 16 hours. I remember thinking I was in the middle of a movie when I woke up, because I was a kid who never slept more than one to two hours at a time.
Tony's story to say, I actually got my start as a patient and a practitioner with 17, 18, 19-year-olds, and they went through, and still do today, incredible healing. Now, the rules of neuroplasticity work this way: the longer it's been there, the more work you've got to do up front and the longer the duration to see results. It’s algebra; it’s actually kind of a mathematical equation.
So when we have an older kiddo who’s been through it versus a younger kiddo, they may go through what we call our intensive program, where for the first two weeks we might adjust them twice a day because their nervous system has reached a level of exhaustion almost. That’s where depression and these things set in, so we have to really wake up the nervous system before we reprogram and reorganize it. But healing happens for 71-year-olds after strokes neurologically. When you learn about neuroplasticity and specifically vagus nerve stimulation, which is the root of what we do with our techniques, neurological healing is absolutely possible for all ages, all conditions. And the last thing we do is ever put a limit on a kiddo, even our special needs, genetic population. They have certain things within their DNA code that are going to be there, but they have so many things tied to their quality of life where their nervous system gets stuck in sympathetic, stuck in anxiety. They get sick all the time, they're constipated. We just minimize and mitigate so much of that with this work too.
Pamela : Awesome. How long do you typically see people?
Dr. Tony Ebel : The individual care plan is personalized to the patient. Just like we were talking about an older kiddo who's been through the perfect storm and all the nervous system stuff, they may need a 6, 8, or 10-month care plan at a higher frequency per week to start with. I love talking about that right here on the podcast because I want parents to know that healing is possible, and in a lot of cases, it involves a lot of hard work. If there was any other way to do it, trust me, we would do it. I always joke with my team that I'm the hardest-working lazy person ever. If it were easier, we’d definitely do it that way.
For younger kiddos, our favorite cases are getting out ahead of the storm. Conventional pediatricians still today say about colic, chronic ear infections, constipation, and eczema, "Oh, don't worry, they'll grow out of it." No, they don’t; they grow into sensory, spectrum, neurological, autoimmune challenges. If we start with a kiddo in the first one to two years of life, that care plan may only need to be a month or two.
And then, part B of that answer is you better believe my kids are getting checked. The coolest part of chiropractic is the boringest part of chiropractic when you’re a wellness patient. That’s the coolest part of health, period. I was just having this conversation with my kids. We live out in the country, and I drive them to school every morning. I love this stuff, so we talk about our faith, core values, the nervous system, and I said, "Hey, being healthy is boring," and those who can fall in love with the boring of consistency—like our wellness patients—80% of our practice has actually already gone through their healing journey. Now they just come in once a week or every other week to keep their nervous system tuned up and living at their best and to be in our community. For wellness patients, we recommend about a once-a-week schedule because life is pretty hectic and toxic, even when we’re living as healthily as we can. That’s the schedule we find keeps families at their best.
Pamela : Yeah, no, that’s cool. I’ve met a lot of families where, whether it's the parents or the kids, they’re on half a dozen different medications. Do you find that you’re able to wean some of that off as you go through?
Dr. Tony Ebel : Yeah, big time. It is a process. We talk about our care plan, so when we’re discussing those durations of care, we get granular and break it into different phases. Having been blessed to start by seeing older kiddos with ADHD, anxiety, Asperger’s, and epilepsy, they had tried every medication on the market. They were on four, five, six of them, and many of our patients had a VNS (vagus nerve stimulator) implanted that was no longer even active. Anything outside, honestly, no different than cigarettes or alcohol, the body will become attenuated to it. You either need more of it or it just won’t work at all. That’s how medications work, especially for neurological conditions. Even when you get a symptomatic sort of head-above-water effect in the beginning, they all fade. That’s not my opinion; that’s clinical research.
What we need to do is phase out that care plan for those kiddos. We do it in my markers and say, "Okay, number one, the reason you’ve needed this medication is because the theory of medication is chemical imbalance." It’s accurate—serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, those things are out of whack, but those are neurotransmitters. They transmit messages for the nervous system. When you get to root cause work like we do, and you get to the nervous system and get it healing, then the chemicals start to get back in balance because that’s what they wanted to be all the time.
So, you reach a point where you can tell the child's nervous system is starting to heal. You reach a tough point where the medications could actually turn in the other direction and be a big detriment. The cool thing about the scans I mentioned before is we can actually see that happening and get out ahead of it. It’s not in my scope of practice—I do not want that responsibility or training in pharmacology. What we do is communicate with the parents and say, “At this point, you want to get your child to the other side of these medications. Go in, book that appointment, connect with your doctor, and have this conversation.” We’ll send the scans and I make myself available to any doctor of any initials anytime to help the kiddo get to the other side of this.
It splits this way: half the time, which is a good growth forward within even the traditional system, the doctor will listen to those parents and work alongside them. The other half of the time, sometimes doctors do what they do, and they try to threaten and scare the family. We have a list of other doctors we work hand in hand with, so we encourage the family to get a second or third opinion. We work together as a collaborative team, and thousands of cases of kids who started with us that were medicated are not at all anymore or have been able to come down significantly. My son had to be on some medication due to a traumatic birth, and it was absolutely right for the first few weeks to be on a heavy anti-seizure drug. But I really despise those medications because they get in the way of not just healing but neurodevelopment and a child living their best life. So anytime we can cross that gap, we work our butts off to do it.
Pamela : That’s awesome. Anything else that I haven't asked you that you want to make sure we cover? How can people find you?
Dr. Tony Ebel : Yeah, moms and dads, I just want to share something in my Iowa English: You’ve got to heal too. When our kiddos go through sickness and storms, we go in emotionally invested with them, and that stress can really bury us as well. We’re not just connected as a family based on our genetics and our ZIP code; we’re really tied into our nervous systems. One thing I was discussing on our podcast, The Experience Miracles Podcast, is that parents need to focus on their own healing too. Beth Lambert and I talked about how it’s crucial for parents to heal themselves for the child to heal, as anxiety and stress can limit our kids' healing.
Pamela : It truly becomes a family ordeal in many ways.
Dr. Tony Ebel : It does. You can find out more about our work through our new podcast, The Experience Miracles Podcast with Dr. Tony Ebel. We’re active on Instagram under PX Doc (PX stands for Pediatric Experience) and on Facebook. Our website is https://pxdocs.com/, which is full of articles and educational resources. If you want more information, that’s a great place to start. For finding a local chiropractor who’s part of our network, go to pxdocs.com. There’s a directory there where you can find someone near you. If you’re not in my area, we’ve built a network to connect you with local PX docs who can help.
Pamela : Awesome, thank you so much, Doctor. We really appreciate having you on today.
Dr. Tony Ebel : Absolutely, thanks for having me. Parents, remember your kids are designed to heal, and you’re the ones who make it happen. By taking action now, not only will your kids heal, but they’ll be ahead of this stuff for their future generations. We love your platform and send links to our patients to access your educational resources. Thanks for having me.
Pamela : Awesome, thank you!