Advanced Approaches in Chiropractic Pediatric Neurodevelopmental Care

Speaker Introduction and Background 0:00

Hello and welcome to the Practice Upgrades Summit. I'm doctor Dennis Perman. Our next speaker is a 2010 graduate of Parker University, where he earned a B.S. in Health and Wellness and a doctorate in chiropractic. Now licensed in both the US and by. He's a fellow of the International Board of Functional Neurology, specializing in childhood neurodevelopmental disorders. He's a board eligible functional neurologist of the Crick Institute, and studied biomedical science and business administration at Texas A&M University.

He practices in Austin, Texas, where he focuses on families who seek help with disorders like autism, ADHD, Tourette's, and OCD, and also takes care of patients with chronic pain and other neurological issues. He's an expert in photo bio modulation, lecturing worldwide on the effects of light and laser on the brain and body to improve health and wellness. He founded Shed Light, a company dedicated to training doctors in laser therapy and supplying cutting edge equipment. He serves on the medical board of sgRNA technologies, who make the neuro Sage software he presents on neurodevelopmental disorders for Doctor Robert Melillo, concentrating on the use of laser, and has recently launched his own seminar series for the general public called balanced, where he explains how to use functional neurology, laser therapy and holistic healing strategies to generate and maintain health and wellness.

He's experienced his own healing miracles through this work. We're leaving Tourette's syndrome in himself and his son married with two boys. He enjoys sports, the outdoors, traveling, teaching, and of course, taking care of patients. This is a true Renaissance healer and visionary, a blossoming leader in pediatric neurology. Please help me. Welcome to the practice Upgrade summit, doctor Brandon Crawford. Doctor Crawford, welcome aboard. Thank you. Man. I sound a lot better whenever you read all that stuff back to me.

Well, it's it's all the stuff. About you. So it must be true. The computer told me so. Must be true. Excellent. So, Doctor Brandon, tell us a little bit about how you became interested in functional neurology. Oh my gosh. Okay, so that's that's the story. Let me tell you. So I was actually accepted into, Texas AMS, medical school program. But then I got married and I knew that, you know, I didn't want to be in school until I was 45. I wanted to be a neurosurgeon. So, you know that that plan didn't really jibe with my plan to be, you know, a family man and, you know, a good husband and whatnot.

And I just didn't really feel led in that direction, just to be honest, at that point in time. And so I said, okay, let's see. I've been working in a pharmacy my whole life. I'd worked in a pharmacy since I was in high school. All through college, it was easy money, you know. And so I got accepted to pharmacy school, I got accepted to a couple of different pharmacy schools, and I was actually, I was sitting in a field hunting because I'm from small town Texas. And that's what we do. We shoot things.

And so I was sitting in a field hunting, and honestly, I was sitting there just kind of praying and meditating on where to go to pharmacy school. Right. And so in my head, there was this is booming noise that said, you're not going to pharmacy school. And I kid you not. It was an audible voice in my head and I thought, Holy moly, what in the world am I going to do? So obviously I couldn't bring myself to to go to pharmacy school. So I started praying about it, meditating on it, and something led me back to when I was injured in high school.

I got a really bad, herniated disc. Felt like my entire leg was in a fire. I went through back surgery. It failed. And there was a chiropractor in my, church that saw me hobbling down the road. He goes, hey, why haven't you come and see me? I was like, well, I don't know anything about you. You know, I've heard chiropractic doesn't really work, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I said, by the way, I've already had surgery, so you can't work on me. He said, actually, just come and see me. He said, something inside of me tells me I'm supposed to see you.

Just come see me. You didn't even charge me. Okay, two weeks later, I'm completely out of pain. And my my life had been changed, right? And so I was taken back to that point in time whenever I was like, oh my God, what am I going to do? Okay, so I was taken back to that point in time and told Ghost Shadow this guy. And so I did. I went, I called him up and said, hey, for some reason I think I'm supposed to shadow you. He said, absolutely, come on. And so I went shadowed him for a week. And I'm telling you, I'm not joking.

The thing that set him apart from all the other doctors that I shadowed and, you know, went and saw and all this kind of stuff because I was always that type of person. If I wanted to do something, I wanted to go experience it. And so I went shadowed him. And the one thing that really stuck out, he loved what he did. Okay. And I was sitting there watching this guy interact with patients of all types. Okay. Autoimmune disease, pain, yeah, you name it. Okay. And I said, okay, there's something to this.

I don't know much about chiropractic, but there's something to this. And so I got accepted to Parker. I went to Parker my first semester there. I'm sitting there going, I still don't know why I'm here, but I'm here for something. And then in comes the room. Doctor John Danoff for you. You remember him? I do.

How Functional Neurology Found Him 5:00

Okay, so this guy gets up in front of class in front of our class, and he starts talking about how chiropractic affects the brain, and we can adjust the extremities, and we can have an effect on, you know, the brain. And if we change brain function, we change everything. And just. And I'm just sitting there enthralled and and after he, after he gets done, I go down, I said, look, you don't know me. I don't know you, but what you just said is what I'm supposed to do. And he he just he knew the passion that I had just with the way I marched down there, that I told him.

I looked him in the eyes and said, this is what I'm supposed to do. And he took me in under his wing and he started teach me everything he knew. I just fell in love with it. And so, you know, I knew that I was supposed to go chiropractic school. I know I'm supposed to be in functional reality. I know I'm supposed to be a part of this developmental functional neurology paradigm shift. So, you know, I 100%, without a doubt, know that I'm doing what I'm supposed to do on the face of this planet. Wow. That is a congruent story.

I tell you what your your passion is very obvious right from the get go. So how did you get interested in seeing patients with neurodevelopmental disorders? So, as you read in the beginning, you know, I struggled with Tourette's growing up, right? So I had a vocal tics. I would also I have kind of a shoulder shrug. And so that really, you know, kind of ate at me. Now, I had, two older brothers. And so any time I would have, like, a vocal tic, what would they do? They would punch me. Right? So they kind of.

Yeah. Exactly. Right. So again, small town Texas is how we handle things, I don't know. But anyway, so I would grow up with these vocal tics. I became very self-conscious about them. I learned how to hide them. Just to be honest. I just coped with it. When to college, you know, same thing. Had a shoulder shrug, coped with my vocal tics and whatnot. And then again, once I went to chiropractic school and started learning about functional neurology, and started learning about, you know, brain balancing and hemispheres city and about the hyper direct pathway in the, in the right hemisphere that can, you know, reduce tics and tremors and, and these types of things.

And I started rehabbing my own brain and my tics went away. Right. And so once I saw how it had a huge influence on myself, I went, man, there's so many kids that need help. And I looked at the data, you know, and neurobehavioral disorders was skyrocketing. And again, I was just led in that direction. You know, I've always wanted, to work with kids now. Funny story. All right, so, I graduate, I'm in practice. My first autistic patient. Right. Severe autistic patient comes in, they're spending a week with me.

It was, you know, the the intensive model that I've kind of been in, this whole time that I've been practicing. They come in, they trashed my office. Okay, this kid's running around punching me, spitting on me, biting me, you know? And and after that week, I go home, and I look at my wife, and I go, I am never working with another autistic kid ever again. And, you know, the funny thing is, though, is that, you know, they got results. I saw a life change. And just every week since then, you know, it's been with some kind of, you know, whether it's autism or ADHD.

Tourette's ticks, pandas, patterns, pans, whatever you want to call it. You know, I've just been entrenched in this pediatric neuro world, and again, I'm just I'm called to it, I'm passionate about it. And I love working with kids. Well, I have to say, Doctor Brandon, your passion is intoxicating. I feel like I want to go out and work with kids just because. Oh. So tell us, I don't know what photo bio modulation is. What does that even mean? Okay, so that's a fancy word. What it means is changing lights with lights.

All right, so photo light, bio life, modulation to change. Right? So we're changing life with light. Just a fancy word, but basically what happens, or whenever you turn on a flashlight or a laser or an LED or whatever it is, you step outside, you're being barrage by photons, right? So photons are literally, you know, massless, massless, units of light that are produced. And what they do is they interact with our cells. We actually have, little things called chromatophores all over our body, on the outside and on the inside, in these chromatophores, a way to describe it is they're like solar panels.

Right? And so whenever you get the right wavelength with the, with the right frequency, really good things start to happen. And basically, it's just like a solar panel, right? So when light hits a solar panel, it generates energy. Same thing with your body if we use the right wavelength, if we use the right frequency, whenever that light starts to hit our body, whether it's, you know, our head, our, our body, our gut, there's actually studies that show that, you know, the right wavelength of light will actually increase good bacteria and decrease bad bacteria all through their microbiome.

But what happens is we start to increase, mitochondrial function, we generate more ATP. But on a molecular level, what we're doing is we're actually raising the voltage of the cells. Right. And so, you know, that goes into the whole, you know, well, what does a cell need to heal story. Right. Well, a normal, healthy cell operates at a pH of 7.35 to 7.45. We know that from the biology textbooks. Well, that actually correlates with an electrical potential of -20 to -25,000,000V. Okay. Now the cool thing is that when a cell is injured, if that cell is going to heal of of course we need to replicate and make new cells, right? That's how we heal.

Okay. Well, we don't get cellular replication unless we raise the pH, aka raise the voltage to -50 millivolts. All right. It's in the biology textbook. I'm not just I'm not making this up. This is legit. Now here's the interesting part Albert Einstein. He won a Nobel Prize for discovering the photoelectric effect. Now, the photoelectric effect tells us that when a photon comes blazing in, it smashes into an atom. Well, it actually likes to interact with the electrons more than anything else. And so to actually bounce off these electrons and they'll jump into a, further orbit, or they'll actually be ejected from their orbit.

And when that happens, what do they do? They raise the voltage of the tissue. And so that's really you know, and I've been talking about that for a few years now, just to be honest. Now, I finally, saw this verbiage come out in a research article, this year. It was published this year where they're starting to talk about this photoelectric effect and how, you know, laser light therapy is raising, you know, raising the voltage of the tissue, speeding up healing and all that kind of thing. So, you know, in a nutshell, what is photo by modulation?

Well, it's a fancy word that means changing life with light. And that's what we do. We speed up healing of all types. And that's the cool thing, is that this modality, applies to so many different things. It can promote health and wellness is going to help with pain. There's several studies on how it helps with brain function and, you know, healing brain injuries. There's studies on autism, neurobehavioral disorders.

Treating Neurodevelopmental Disorders 12:00

You name it. This this modality has been around since the 1960s. There's thousands of studies that's been done on it. There's hundreds of human clinical studies that's been done on it. It's one of the safest modalities, by the way, there's a study out of Harvard that says, you know, laser light therapy should be used on the brain as a primary source of of brainery AB simply because it's so safe and effective. So obviously is one of my favorite modalities. You know, I've been playing with them for about a decade now.

But, you know, in a nutshell, that's what photo by modulation is. Wow. So when you say photo bio modulation is about changing life with light, that makes a lot of sense to me. The rest of it, it seems to me like for a layperson or for a patient, they would not really necessarily have a first clue what you're talking about. Do you have a way of explaining this to a patient so that they can dial in to what you're saying, and then they can cooperate even better? 100%? Yes. So thank you for asking. So whenever I really started talking to laypeople and really start to relay this information, this is how I explained as I look, this might be a little confusing, but let me break it down to you the way that it really came to me.

Okay. Again, you know, you've heard me, referenced my faith a few times. So here's the thing. When you look at the Bible, what did God create? First? God created light. Okay. First I was like, all right. That was that was in place before life. Do you think that was for a reason? The answer's yes. So of course it is for a reason. Everything's for a reason. Okay, so we know from the beginning that life cannot be sustained without light. Okay. So let's just go ahead and establish that fact. Great. So if we're trying to heal, if we're trying to promote life, if we're trying to improve function or anything like that, do you think it would be applicable or useful to use light therapy?

Absolutely. Of course it would be. Okay. Now again, another way to communicate it. We have solar panels all over our body. You know what a solar panel is? Absolutely. What does it do? It takes light and it generates energy. Exactly. We have solar panels on us, in us. And when we use these, laser and light therapies, what do they do? They generate energy in our cells so they can heal faster and more efficiently. And that's how I explain it. Wonderful. Crystal clear. So then, I know doctors are watching this and they're saying, well, that sounds incredible.

So tell us a little bit about how you founded Shed Light and, a little bit about the kinds of doctors that should be interested in finding out more about what you do. Absolutely. All right. So the way I found about or founded Shed Light was based on another story. Right? So you'll notice I tell a lot of stories because that's how, you know, I like to communicate things. I think that the human, you know, the human race has been raised and grown on stories, and that's how we need to continue to propagate, knowledge.

So basically, the story around the founding of Shed Light is that I was actually asked, to be a consultant, for a, for a group in Jordan. Okay. Over in the Middle East. They asked me to come over there, and they asked me to come help with, neuro neurodevelopmental disorders, specifically autism. But all types of neurodevelopmental disorders. And basically, you know, the way they found the I hope the kid and they knew someone that knew someone that knew someone, you know, how that goes. Right? So I was actually on sabbatical in Costa Rica, and I get this phone call, you know, someone wanting me to travel to Jordan and to go help these kids.

And I thought, man, no way. Not doing it. I'm living life in Costa Rica. I was, you know, just hanging out there with my family. I'd run a real busy practice. We sold that. I was trying to heal my own adrenals. Right. And so we said, nope, not going to do it. And so after that, we came back to the States. And my old office manager at my other office, you know, called, kept on calling me. And she said, Brendan, look, these guys are not giving up. They want you to go to Jordan. All right? Great. So, so I went to Jordan.

Started seeing all these kids, the, you know, we had lines down the road. It was crazy busy. Had one, you know, non-verbal autistic kid that started speaking in three days. This thing just lights up like crazy. I'm on all the new stations, you know, being published in, magazines, so on and so forth. So I'm sitting there and I'm looking at, you know, this population of kids and, I know how to help them, don't get me wrong, but I'm sitting there and I'm looking at their labs, and they all have high levels of inflammation.

Some have infections. I'm suspecting autoimmunity. But, you know, we can't run labs over there for that. Really? And I'm going, man. And I started asking about supplementation, you know, can we have, what are the supplements over here? What does that look? Well, they don't really have access to anything that great quality. Plus they don't really have the money for it. And so I'm scratching my head going, all right, then how am I going to continue to help these kids? And I remembered, you know, okay, wait a minute.

Laser light therapy. Well, I know that that'll reduce inflammation. I know that that helps with autoimmunity. When you use it, it doesn't necessarily get rid of infection, but it helps the immune system mount an attack on the infection, right? So it improves the host's immune system. And I'm sitting there going, this is perfect. This is a perfect modality for the situation. And so basically what I did is I started, you know, using all the lasers on the market because I had only used a couple, of the major ones on the market at the time.

And so I started using all the major lasers and I said, man, you know, this this just isn't really what I'm looking for. Either they're not economical or they don't have, you know, the frequency capabilities or the wavelengths I need, or the power, you know, that we really need. And so what happened was my business partner, Doctor Damian Griswold, said, hey, there's this engineer out in California, and he's put together this laser,

Understanding Photo Bio Modulation 18:00

and I went, get him on the phone, let's see what's going on. So he actually, flew in to Austin, met with me and Damian, saw the laser was fantastic. And boom, the the story just, you know, it started from there because it was everything we needed. It was ergonomic, it was easy to use. It was super easy to use. It was, you know, an adequate power that you could actually alter. Right. Because you can ramp the power up or you can turn it all the way down to a class two. Right? So whatever you want to do there, it had, hundreds of frequencies that we could program in, actually had two different wavelengths and infrared in the red.

So it had everything that I needed. And, you know, that was basically the, how we founded the company was based on a need, you know, on a project I was doing in another country. And I'll be honest, man, the the need for this, in our profession and other professions, is reverberated in the types of, doctors that we talk to every day because they've been searching to write in. The cool thing is to hear the story of the doctor that was just like me that had been using, you know, x, y, z laser. And they get this one, which oftentimes is actually cheaper, by the way.

And they start telling us, you know, they're getting better results, faster results, so on and so forth. So I know the need was in the market, right? It was there. And it's the classic business 101. Find the need and fill it right. Find the need and fill it. That was the my first business class. That was the the first thing we learned. And so you also asked, you know, what type of practitioner needs it here, I'll make it easy for you, any type of practitioner that is working with a patient that they're trying to heal.

Okay, so chiropractor, physical therapist, pediatrician, general practitioner, we had neurosurgeons using our laser. Optometrists use our laser. You name it, man. Veterinarians use our laser. So again, what does it do? It speeds up healing. It makes it more efficient to heal. So what type of doctor or physician or therapist doesn't need that, right. So that's how I answer that. Terrific. So how does that dovetail with the chiropractic adjustment? You use chiropractic in your practice I assume. So how does that because many of many of our listeners and viewers are chiropractors and they're thinking, boy, that sounds a lot different from what I do.

But you use chiropractic in your in your care of your patients as well. Don't you? Yes, sir, I do. So, you know, that was another thing that was, big with Doctor John the not for you. And that has certainly lived on, through myself is that we love chiropractic. I love the chiropractic adjustment. You know, these are our greatest healing instruments. Okay, 100%. You cannot replace this. Okay. And I definitely, you know, jive with that for sure. So what happens? I actually have a little protocol. I taught it in a class not that long ago on how this is going to help this stabilize.

The adjustment is going to help to, help the adjustment last longer. And you can implement that in several different ways. But basically, what I like to do is this. So I also have an acupuncture background into my acupuncture license. And Doctor Yanni, taught us to take the I forget it is called the tension I believe and tap it up and down the spine for the bladder meridian. Before you do your adjustment. And so I've been doing that for a long time, and, man, it does it does make adjustments easier.

It helps people get better faster. And so I take the laser now there's studies that show laser therapy can activate an acupuncture point faster than a needle. And so I'll take that laser and I'll run it up and down the spine. I'll do the adjustment. Now I'm brain based right. So I'm looking at brain balance and so on. And so after that then I'll put it on the cerebellum. Or maybe I'll put it on a cortex. Or I'll flip the motor and I'll put it on their gut, because we know there's a big connection between the gut and the brain.

And so that's my little simple chiropractic protocol. Now, obviously, you can, you know, put it on, you know, an injured extremity, you know, the rib heads, you know, whatever we need to do at that point in time, there's protocols for that. But, you know, I 100%, you know, use it in my chiropractic practice. All my patients love it. And they requested, I personally think, you know, it's it's a vital part of chiropractic because like I said, you know, it's this is our healing instrument, okay? This is our healing instrument.

And I was I was taught this again. I'm going to get a little, you know, weird on you here, but I was taught by another mentor that whenever you deliver an adjustment, imagine a white light coming out of your body and into that patient. Right. And so I've always been in this mindset of this light being delivered to my patients when I'm adjusting them. And now I'm literally delivering light with my adjustments. Well, there's nothing weird about that as far as I'm concerned. I mean, chiropractic is an innate, innate experience, and light is completely consistent even as a conceptualization of it, but it's actually real.

So you told us about this miracle case in Jordan, and that was fascinating enough. But I bet you have some amazing favorite miracle cases to talk about, to tell us about some of the amazing results you've gotten in your office. Oh, gosh, man, the the hard part about that is where to start, in which one to discuss. I'll be honest. I mean, I just talked about, you know, this week, you know, this week. So started with, a little baby case. She's, she's eight, 8 or 9 months old. She came in with a failure to thrive diagnosis.

She was on, you know, having to be g-tube fed, you know, not much muscle tone. A very colicky, you know, would not soothe, would not sleep very well. All the things. Right. So, you know, so I took a look at her and, and said, you know, yes, I can help.

Explaining Light Therapy to Patients 24:00

And we, you know, had a discussion about it. We started using the laser. I adjusted her, we started doing some real simple, primitive reflex work after that. She comes in this week. So sorry, I think to actually, I think three times before we got her in for an actual intensive, this week, she comes in, her color is completely different. She was, like, yellow and kind of pale and just didn't look very alive. Right. So she comes in, I actually had a functional medicine doctor, a medical doctor actually shadowing me, this week.

And the first thing he does is the first patient on Monday morning, he walks over to him and he goes, hey, tell me about the results you're getting with Doctor Crawford, right? And I'm seeing you're going crap. Have all the patients go pick this one to go and start chatting it up with. But it was perfect because the mom looked at him and he she goes, it's a miracle she's no longer having to be fed on the with the g-tube. She's eating by mouth. Her muscle tone is improve like crazy. She's developing like crazy.

She's blowing through her milestones, you know, and the mom sitting there in the baby sitting up, right. The baby sitting up and. And before she can do that, and I come in the room and I'm like, oh, my gosh, this is a different kid. But, you know, the cool thing about that is this is the kind of stuff we see all the time. And, you know, I'm fortunate enough to be able to work with, a lot of pediatric brain injuries. And so this is a case, you know, a situation that we do get to work with all the time.

But, I mean, you name it, I mean, movement disorders, Tourette's, you know, severe depression, suicidal people, very, very, very severe pans. Bhutan's pandas, where people are literally, you know, getting all the knives out of the house and, and, you know, making sure that, you know, safeguarding the house, that these kids can't hurt themselves or others. And then, you know, getting phone calls going, oh, my God, I had my kid back. I mean, just, two weeks ago, I had a mom, call. Actually, no, she came in, she came in. She needed.

I think she needed some supplements or something. She came in, I said, hey, how's your kid doing? And it was it was, moderate to severe pandas case. And she goes, well, does pandas ever go into remission? And I said, well, you know, standard medical text will say, no, but we see it. And she goes, well, my child's in remission, you know? And that was just from working with their kid for a week and then doing some home care. So you know, that that it's just it's amazing. And, you know, again, I know I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing, because these stories keep coming in, and it's just it's amazing.

Absolutely great. Tell us a little bit about autism. You know, this is a hot button for people right now. And you get such extraordinary results with autistic kids. Tell us a little bit about what you do and maybe pick out a favorite miracle story. Okay. Yeah. So, you know, when we started talking about autism, in in this realm, you know, we have to mention the name Doctor Robert Melillo.

Founding Shed Light and Choosing the Right Devices 27:00

You know, after John Danoff, doctor Melillo is absolutely been, my, my mentor. I've learned so much from him. And honestly, I mean, he's been the one that's pioneered the way for developmental function neurology. He's been the one that's really propagated and promoted, the hemispheric model of of this paradigm that we're in. And so with autism, what we see is under connectivity, in the right hemispheres of the brain now and then we'll also see over connectivity in the left hemisphere of the brain.

And again, you know, doctor has done studies showing this. He's done EEG studies. There's MRI studies, and so on that are actually proving this out. In fact, there is a study done now, this is on ADHD with the study done at Harvard that showed the hemispheric model outperformed output, speech and medication so much so, so much so that they tripled the size of this study. That's now been published. And so, you know, when we work with autism, we have to understand that, we are two sided, right? We do have two sides of the brain.

We have a right brain, we have a left brain. And they can do very similar things, but they do it very differently. Okay. The right brain is very concerned with the whole body. It has what we call long range connections. The left hemisphere is very interconnected with short range connections. You know, so whenever you, you start talking about the right brain or the left brain, you start defining with the weak right brain, you start defining all these symptoms of autism. And and, you know, Doctor Malone is the one that said, hey, you know, he started, you know, seeing all this and correlating it and going, autism is a right brain deficiency.

It's a right brain weakness. And so what do we do? We direct all of our care. Right? We do direct all of our therapies, whether it be adjusting or vibration or, you know, using a Tens unit or islets or other types of visual stimulus or, you know, a whole body vibration or whatever it may be. We start doing, you know, more activation on the left side of the body to take the right brain. And so that, you know, is really what autism is. And this is the only the only model that really makes sense is the only model that really, you know, defines the symptoms of autism and why it develops.

You know, the whole premise behind this is genetic just doesn't make sense. It doesn't make sense. You can't have a genetic explosion, you know, from nothing. I mean, these kids are not, going out and having having babies, right? So most of them are not, you know, having babies and propagating this, this gene. So then why is it continued to explode? And, you know, the funny thing about that is I was in Dubai, at a, the largest, you know, medical expo conference in the world called Arab Health. This was, probably three years ago.

And I was there listening to a lecture on autism, and it was three experts, you know, on autism. And this lady, I think she was from New Zealand or Australia, just sat out there and just told everyone, this is genetic. It's genetic based. That's all there is to it. No. No other factors. It's not diet. It's not toxins. It's not you know, this hemispheric thing is not any of this stuff is just strictly genetics. And I just simply went up to her after the lecture and I said that these kids are not propagating kid.

Yeah, they're not having kids. Like, how can you explain that? And she said, oh, because it's epigenetic. And I said, well, timeout your timeout because that's different. I said, you just completely debunked your whole lecture up here. Right. And and I'm like, if you're just now if you just said it's epigenetic, you're telling me that there's environmental influences. And I went off on her because that's a load of crap. She can sit up there and say one thing and then turn around and say another.

And so this is the only model that truly makes sense, is the only model that you'll get consistent results with when you're working with autism and all these other, neuro behavioral disorders.

Chiropractic, Healing, and Patient Success Stories 31:00

And, you know, you asked for an example. I mean, you know, the classic, you know, moderate to severe autism, autism cases are the nonverbals, they're the kids that come in and, you know, they can't speak, or, you know, they were talking up until a certain point and then boom, you know, there is an event, and, and they no longer could speak anymore. And, and that's the number one priority when these families come in is, hey, can you make my child speak again? Well, absolutely. We can, we see it. We see it often.

And, you know, one of my staff members got to witness it for the first time a couple of weeks ago. We were we were doing our therapies, and this kid was, I call them little alligators. Right? It's like wrestling with the little alligators. So it's fun, but it's also, you know, draining. And so, we're sitting there wrestling with this little alligator, and I had him on his back on a vibration platform. We're both sweating. My staff member leans over him, and, the kid looked at her. Now, we were in a dark room. Right.

So we're thinking maybe he thought it was his mom, and he starts saying, mama, mama, mama, and and my staff members are like, wait a minute. He's he's nonverbal. He doesn't speak. And I'm like, yep, that's how it goes. So, you know, but there's absolutely nothing better on, you know, the face of the planet. Nothing better in my world. When you can get a kid who cannot communicate, cannot speak to start to speak again. Because from there, you know, the ultimate thing, right? The ultimate thing that we want these kids to be able to do is we want them to be able to love now the ability to love and to show emotion and to accept and be loved is housed in the right hemisphere.

Right. And so that's my ultimate goal. And again, that was propagated through Doctor Melillo. You know, we had a heartfelt conversation about that. You know, that's our goal. We want these kids to be able to love and to experience, to be loved. What a wonderful outlook. What a wonderful perspective. Are these some of the stories that you tell in your seminar series, balanced? Want to tell us a little bit about that? So the balanced seminar is it's basically the things that I used to teach for a doctor.

Donofrio kind of boiled down for the layperson, because what I wanted to do, is I wanted to start to get this information out to laypeople. You know, there's plenty of people, teaching to doctors right now. But what I saw as the gap, was, was the layperson, you know, they they don't know about right brain, left brain. They don't know about how chiropractic affects your brain. They don't know, you know, really about how the gut is connected to the brain. And so the series is really just, you know, educating the community on what chiropractic really is, you know, in the beginning of the the first module, I talked about, chiropractic and how we initially were helping mental illness, you know, that that was our, you know, the first thing in chiropractic was we were helping mental illness.

Man, why am I boiled down to back pain, neck pain now? Because that just doesn't make sense when you look at the statistics, they were getting better results. Okay. When when they would be adjusted in these, in these psych wards. Right. They were getting better results with chiropractic than than not chiropractic. Why have we turned away from that? The evidence is clear. And now we can back it up with science. I mean, we all know that exercise always outperforms antidepressants. Well, what is the chiropractic adjustment do?

On the neuroscience perspective? We send a barrage of sensory information up into the brain. And if we alter the frequency of firing of those primary afferents, we're going to change what we call the central integrated state of the brain. We're going to make the brain stronger. If we do that, all of our motor output changes.

Autism Care and the Balanced Seminar 35:00

What's our motor output, how we think. It's how we move. It's how our organs function. It's our how our, you know, glands secrete, you know, enzymes and digestive enzymes, all the rest. Right? That's the power that we have in our hands. And that's the story. That's the message that the layperson needs to hear. Okay. I love helping people with pain. I love getting people out of pain because it's debilitating. I get it, though. We're so much more than that and people need to hear it. So that's really what the balanced seminar is all about.

Marvelous. Just marvelous. So, Doctor Brandon, it's clear that you're a visionary. I mean, most people don't talk like you talk or do what you do. What do you believe is the future of our profession? Where do you think we're headed? So our profession is the only profession that can carry this human race through all this bullshit that we're going through. I'll just be frank, okay? We're the only profession that hasn't sold out. We're the only profession that has a clear cut message of what we do, why we do it.

Okay, what we need to do as a profession is we need to stick together. We need to continue to propagate our message. We need to remain unique. All right. And if we do this, if we do this, we're the only ones that are going to be able to continue to help the human race. Who cares if we get persecuted? We've been persecuted against for forever. Okay. We're going to. Why? Because it works. If this if this thing called chiropractic did not work, then we wouldn't be here. I mean, that's just that's all there is to it.

We wouldn't be here. So, you know, my message is, screw all that. Stand up for what? You know, be confident in what you know, tell your patients, hey, if you're worried about getting an infection or, you know, depression or whatever it may be, you need to see me. You need to be adjusted. You need to be healthy and well. You need to do all of the things that we talk about, right? Be a gardener, not a mechanic, you know? You know, explain it. They need to hear it. Guess what? It's going to fall on deaf ears.

Who cares? You did your job. Walk away. Let them do that. What they what they will. It might ring a bell later on. Sometime when they're sitting in an emergency room because something happened. They're going to pay for their health. At some point in time. They can pay for it now with you, and it's going to cost a lot less. Or they can pay a whole lot in the end. And it's going to really, really suck. Right? So where do I think we're positioned? I think that we as chiropractors are positioned to be the the only healing profession that can really carry this human race to the finish line.

Well, you are a remarkable young man, and I'm so delighted that we're able to have this conversation. Doctor Brandon Crawford, thank you so much for being on the Practice Upgrade Summit on this program. Thank you.