The Hidden Developmental Patterns Behind Eczema Flares

Introduction to eczema, brain health, and Dr. Laura Hansen 0:00

Hey team, welcome back! If you have a child with eczema, you already know that it goes so much deeper than the skin. You feel it in the exhaustion and the mood swings and that constant sense that something bigger is going on underneath it all. And you are absolutely right! And today's conversation is gonna help you understand why, from a completely different angle. Dr. Laura Hansen is a doctor of chiropractic with a specialty in pediatrics, and she is board certified neurofeedback practitioner and a certified autism specialist.

And she's also the founder of Connect My Brain. This conversation is going to really shift something for you because we talked about the developmental window and why timeline really does matter here when we're dealing with this type of inflammation, the same type that triggers eczema as well as autism and all other autoimmune diseases and why kids can turn this around faster than you think and just why it is so pivotal to get this under control as soon as you possibly can. and what happens when that window starts to close.

And we talked a lot about the gut-brain connection and how what's happening in your child's body right now is actively shaping their brain development. We talked about patterns that keep kids stuck in this chronic stress response and actually what it looks like to change them. So this is the kind of conversation that makes you feel way less crazy and way more clear. If by the end you're thinking, I am ready to stop guessing and get a real plan for my child, a real eczema reversal exima elimination plan, for My Child.

The link to book a free alignment call with me is in the show notes. Let's get into it. Is your child struggling with itchy nights and endless flare-ups? I'm Andrea McHugh, mom of four and host of eXima Kids. Here you'll find natural solutions that actually work, so you can heal your childhood exima without steroids, without the overwhelm, and finally see calm, healthy skin again. Lets get in to it! Hi team, welcome back. If you've been on this journey with your child's eczema for any length of time, you know it's not just about the skin.

There's the sleepless nights and the mood swings and brainfrog and anxiety and so many of us are left wondering, is it all connected? And my guest today has spent nearly 30 years working with kids whose bodies and brains just aren't quite connecting the way that they should. She's a doctor of chiropractic with a specialty in pediatrics, a board certified neurofeedback practitioner, and a certified autism specialist and the founder of Connect My Brain, which is a facility that takes a whole body approach to helping kids thrive.

So, Dr. Laura Hanson, welcome to the show. Thank you so much. It's great to be with you. I wanted to start with something that a lot of parents in our community feel, but they just can't quite put into words. And their child's eczema seems to flare when they're stressed or when the ate something or they haven't slept, and they sense that skin is just the surface of something bigger. I know you tackle things with a three-tiered approach of body and brain and fuel, help us understand what we can do in each of those arenas and why you can't address just one without looking at all three.

Well, that's a great question, and I'm sure you focus on that too, because we are all 3 of these things at the same time. So even you and me sitting here talking, we're holding our bodies up, We're listening to one another, we're thinking about, okay, how should I answer this question? So there's many things that are going on. There's a fuel system inside that's allowing you and I to have the energy to do this. I think the most interesting way that I could connect some dots, I went through this with my daughter.

And here I have this pristine background on nutrition and all these kinds of things, and around eight years old, which is an important time frame, that's when my daughter's eczema really erupted. And I'll have to tell you, at first, it was not even on my radar that it eixema. I thought, my gosh, maybe she's got poison oak or something like that. So, of course, I'm doing all kinds of research. And one of the interesting things that I found was I had a yeast infection in that pregnancy, and yeast infections are an automatic transfer to the baby.

So lots of times people really want to know the why. And so that was our why, I practice with, but why? And if we can get to the, why we then can fix it. But the longer this stuff goes on, the harder it is on those little bodies because they're in a developmental window.

Why developmental timing matters for eczema and neurodevelopment 5:00

Now, if it happened to you or I, we would have an extensive library to work with in order to get to our why. But when that child is in a developmental window, all those other systems are being impacted. And so not only was it the yeast infection, it was a very stressful pregnancy for me. And I was under a lot of stress. And when a woman is pregnant and in a lotta stress, you can actually rob cortisol from your baby through the umbilical cord. So now I'm building a bucket. And that's the thing I try to help parents understand, is what all is in that child's bucket, because we've got to figure out what are the things that we really need to work on.

So I was in stress, she was stress. And I can remember taking this picture of her when she about four months old, and that significant. It was just an adorable pink little outfit, but her posture was And I looked at her and I went, oh my gosh, she's in a moral reflex right there in front of me. So the primitive reflexes are also trying to integrate. And if something is going on inside of the body, that can keep a reflex from not integrating in the proper timeline. Then that could keep her stress response heightened throughout.

So, of course, we had to go do all the things. We had clean up the diet even more.We had get some lab work and figure out what is it that we have to address. But these patterns, these pattern can stay very long standing in these children and that's why if we can get to it within those developmental timelines. Like I said earlier, that eight-year-old mark is really important because the subconscious mind is being created from the last trimester of pregnancy up until about seven and a half, eight and half years old.

So if something was happening at eight on her. That was almost like getting solidifying in her brain patterns. So it took a lot of work and I know from both of my children they've taught me so much and then of course I'm able to take it and look at other children that way. But that stress in that body, we can actually measure it now. We just did a stress response test on a almost 12-year-old boy with autism right before you and I got started. And the information that it gives us is so powerful because we may work their program one way, But he's got a four standard deviation away from what is expected for his heart rate during stressors.

So what does that mean? We have all kinds of equipment on everybody and so he gets to see different stressors. He gets experience different stresses and we're monitoring his heart rate during that time and for standard deviations means that if I had a pie chart. and I put a line down the middle, that would be the median norm. He's four standard deviations away from the medium norm and he's in a developmental window even at 12. And that's the way his heart is being conditioned. So if we don't remove those stressors when these kids are trying to heal, especially with the work that you do, it looks like you're trying something and it doesn't work.

But we got to get the whole picture, and then we can make sure that we're tackling everything. And you talked a little bit about why eight years old is such an important marker in development. I mean, would you say really that that pliability lasts through 18, or would say it's much shorter than that? Well, you always have neuroplasticity, right? But as you get older, the repetitions does change. And really what it is, it's 14 becomes more adult-like as far as the number of repetitons that is needed.

in order to make a significant change and that's what I have found is that people with like you know 15 and 16 year olds and you're trying to say look you got to be ready to roll up your sleeves we can do it but they're burned out by that time they've been trying so many things And that's why I think I love, at least where healthcare seems to be going, is that there's such a broader picture now, and people are feeling more comfortable looking at different things, especially the earlier, the better.

I know I do like the emphasis now on early intervention because it makes such a big difference. And I always say, I mean, it took me a while to feel this way, but my goodness, we're the lucky ones. You know, when my kids were really, really struggling, one was just a baby and one who was two years old with Dexma with this condition and, you know my four year old. was struggling with their own thing and thankfully they were just so young when this was going on and while that was insanely hard you know once you get the right inputs lined up you really can snap out of it pretty quickly like yes you can yes i can honestly but then you're right once they hit 14 things get significantly harder, and I certainly believe and know and have seen in practice that it's not impossible.

It's like, oh well, we can't do anything about it now. That's never the case, but I like the way that you said that. You just got to roll up your sleeves and really be in it for the longer haul. And that 90-day timeframe is not a realistic picture once, yeah, 14 and up. The patterns are just so rooted, but absolutely you can change it and you just, you have to be ready for the work. So what got you into this work? You mentioned your child struggled with autism, were you in this before then or tell us a little bit more about your background?

Okay, so I was actually going to be a lawyer because my mother told me my whole life, you're going be lawyer. And then I started off after college as a paralegal and I absolutely hated it. I would never survive the emotional part of that.I could probably do great arguing, but the emotion was tearing me up. And so I left that field and at that time I was married and I decided because my husband was actually studying to be a chiropractor. And I said, I'm just going to go work on campus. I just was so intrigued by all the health stuff.

Wow, this is really good. And I had already really gotten into competitive bodybuilding and teaching aerobics and a personal trainer. So the model behind chiropractic really, really spoke to me. But remember, I was studying to be a lawyer, so I didn't have any of the sciences. and I had to go through and get biology two, chem one and two in physics. And I said, okay, I'll be 90 years old before I would get any of this stuff done.

Dr. Hansenu2019s background and path into pediatric care 13:00

I'm gonna do the accelerated classes. If this is meant to be, God's gonna open up this brain and he's going to help me get all this information in there. and i did it, and was really surprised. i was like, wow, ok, this was ok. I'm a very visual person, but I know now that what I created actually helped me create part of my program. So I made this giant poster, both in physics and in organic chemistry, that demonstrated all these different pathways and reactions and they were color-coded and had all these different things to connect the dots.

Well, everybody loved my posters, and so everybody wanted one. So I actually made $5,000 selling my poster. No way! So, I was like, this is pretty cool. But what I found later on was like I use interactive metronome in my office. And so now when we're using interactive Metronom, okay, so let's do our vocabulary words. I want you to get a giant poster note. i want You to do maybe 10 vocab words, write them five times a piece, and then we are going to practice interactive with you spelling. So I even see how the way that I learned, I have been able to blend that into the program.

I got my chiropractic license and the very first year, we don't get a ton of pediatrics in chriopractic school, so I went to a conference in Chicago and was, like, blown away. Wow, there's still so much to learn. And so I dove into the pediatric diplomat program. Then they asked me to teach in the program, and they ask me teach neurology. Well, that's not a very simple subject. So then, of course, I wanted more. I got introduced into how I could measure the moro reflex by that stress response test.

And that led me into the world of QEEG and neurofeedback. Especially as a chiropractor, most people immediately go, oh, hey, I got this pain in my neck or my back. Our education is really so far away from that mentality. But I felt like I had to go get every credential possible so that I could stand on my ability to work with children that are struggling. But it's been a fantastic journey learning all of this. And my daughter taught me first about eczema. but my son taught me before her. And he was a very traumatic, unplanned c-section, and he got stuck in my pelvis and was conehead.

That led into learning issues for him. The first place that it showed up was his eyes. and he literally suffered an overstretched optic nerve in that birth delivery. And so then he had a great second grade teacher who said, your son can't differentiate sound. Well, Of course, I'm going to dive in and get research, but your eyes, your ears, and your vestibular are neurologically connected. They have intimacy. And if one is off, the other is on. That led me to actually build a piece of medical equipment that I call the Triangle of Development.

And that is a 10 hour brainstem integration program, making the eyes and the ears and vestibular find their rhythm together again. So I, you know, being a mother, just like you, I mean, look what your kids have taught you. And I'm just really, so proud of you for taking that step and look at what you've created from that. That's wonderful. Oh, thank you. I mean, part of the reason, yeah, that I do, what I, do is when we were going through, and it's just six years ago, six and a half years, ago. There's so many people, they're just afraid to touch children.

And I love that you just, you know, we segued into pediatrics. So there's, there are so, many, really well-meaning, amazing professionals out there, but they just don't want, you know, they're just, uh, They're afraid to touch kids. So that made it extra challenging. It's like, wow, I mean, my kids are really sick, right? This is an autoimmune condition and this needs to be remedied and it's not going to get remedies. There's just surface level stuff. And so like you, just really had to dive in and Yeah.

Good for us for doing that. Yeah, yeah. And luckily, I mean, no matter who you work with, you're the one ultimately carrying out the plan, right? And you are the feeding them day in and day out and you know, dealing with their symptom management and regulating their nervous system and all the things, and so you have to have a fundamental understanding, more than a fundamentally understanding. You have to really understand this condition and what you can do to resolve it. And in that process, you will resolve and, oh my goodness, does everyone's lives improve.

So I see a lot of parallels in our stories, but also I love what we've done because, my God, this population of kids with the neurodevelopment things My goodness, it's just another animal. It's so, so hard. And I know there's, I mean, my sister has a child with severe, severe autism. You know, he has few words and he's four years old and it is a challenge and she's been working really, really hard to get the best outcome that we can. How old is he? He's 4. The four-year-olds are really impacted because of everything that happened during COVID, regardless if you were pregnant with your baby or your child was born in that 18-month period because everybody was stressed out and everybody is walking around and they had their bags carried like this and here's children When you come into the world, you only hear low frequency sound.

You acquire middle and high over the first three years of life. So we skewed that developmental window. In addition, at four, You should be completed with what's called lateralization. And that is the organization of the brain. and you'll see it on the outside of the body with the dominant eye, ear, hand and foot. And anybody can do that little kind of a test where you probably already know what hand your child would navigate a crayon with, but you would also then maybe sit down a paper towel roll, no paper, and see how the child grabs it and puts it up to their eye.

Do they grab it with the left hand and then they go to the right eye? What do they do? And then put the phone down and the same thing. Which ear do the put it to? Then roll a ball to their foot. What foot are they going to kick with? By four, that should be organized. Now, the reason that's important is because you have all these lateral columns on each side of the brain. The need to talk is on the right. in order to have a conversation like you and I are having. So unpack how many things those are.

One is the reflex asymmetrical tonic neck still firing. Is the child dampened on the right-hand side, which is very common, and there's typically more emotional reactions with that. And then is the child not able to pull sound in in a typical way? And all of those things can be worked on, especially at four, in order to re-engage. So we started a little boy here, he was only two and a half, at round Thanksgiving time last year. And when that little boy came in, he had lost his language. That's another thing.

Were we babbling and ooing and coo-ing, and then did we lose it? So that's a another piece to the puzzle.

Early development, reflexes, and the vestibular system 22:00

So, He had oowings and coupings, then lost His language, Okay, so there's usually always a reason behind that. And then when he came in here, he could not let go of his mother, and all he did was scream. So that's a very primal behavior. Step one for us was we had to calm the nervous system down just to kind of get to him, right? And that took us till about January. And there's also a significant part to that. Mom was actually on psychotrophic drugs during her pregnancy for anxiety. I'm not sure if your audience knows this, but pregnancy is actually considered a disease.

It's in the Diagnostic Statistical Manual as a diagnosis code, therefore it's a disease. So the primary patient is mom, okay? So they kept her on the anti-anxiety medication because she needed it without any direction of what it would do with the child. We've recently last year started doing a genomic test. That's not genetics, it's genomics. Genetics is chromosome to chromosome. genomex is the variants that have been found on different genes. And this is really coming from all of the research thinking they're going to find a gene that says you're gonna get autism, and they didn't find it.

What they found was a ton of variants, so we are way more than genes. And this little guy, it's just a saliva test, which is super simple, especially in the pediatric population, but this variants to bring about more stress and anxiety for him. So again, that's in his bucket, a predisposition. And so we worked with him and then around January, we were able to go to the movement floor and start working with mom and with them because now he's three. He's just a little guy, right? But now what is so fabulous, We are in May and they're getting ready to finish up the program because he works independently.

He says more sounds than he ever has, and he'll keep acquiring them, but we had to get him caught up. And we used sound work, we use metronome, balance activity, all these things to bring that nervous system to the respected age three where he should be. And he's so comfortable working by himself at three. So now we can see on the outside, he has got a calmer nervous system. And when children are caler, they are going to heal. I'm sure you've seen that too. That's a big part of our work. be a big part of parenting no matter what right it's just right you can only do your your child justice by helping their nervous system and keeping yours under control and really you know having this front of mind so those are the tools that you really use to help calm down his nervous systems or the metronome like the balance activities Well, and a lot of gut work.

So I do a lots of lab and we have a very simple gut cleanse that the majority of the kids are all recommended to do. And then pinpoint, especially from that genomic test, what other things does his body really need? Because when you are so stressed out, you're just burning through things so rapidly that even at two and a half, three, your gonna need some support. So we've re-educated about food, we reeducate about how to help that parent manage that dysregulation, how promote words in children. What I find happens for a lot of parents is they begin to speak for their child and they began to be the only ones that can figure out what it is that they really want And again, it's just another pattern.

It's not a judgment. But if that becomes the pattern, there's no drive or motivation, right? And these kids, especially in the autism community, they need that higher brain to be pushed because what they have found is that They're not pruning like they're supposed to. And what that term means is that why babies' heads are so big, you had a lot of neurons up there. You're suppose to cleave some of those away. So in the spectrums, they are not doing that and there's a lots of excess. We've got to fire up that system and get pruing re-engaged.

and you do prune into your 20s. So the ability to do that is there. Now, of course, it gets more infrequent and not as bulky, but you still do it. You still fine tune. And that's why neuroplasticity is so fantastic. But you got to fire it up. I wanted to go back to your notes about the vestibular system and because this is a real challenge. I experienced it with my children, you know, the motion sickness just in general when they were really struggling. Like I couldn't even bring my baby to pick up the other ones from school because she would throw up.

It was just out of control. And I see this as a through line through a lot of my patients. I attribute it a lot to certain mineral deficiencies that are pretty standard within the eczema population. But what else can we do if you're noticing those types of things like a tendency towards motion sickness or trouble balancing, other signs that the vestibular system is not on point, which it can't be if all these other systems are failing, you know, if your experiencing exima, like there's so many other things that're going on.

So, of course, the Vestibulor system is affected, but can you just go a little bit more into the vestibular system itself and like where this audience specifically could glean a bit of insight into eczema? Sure. So, the Vestibula system is thought to be the very first system to come online in the womb and to be completely mature, myelinated by the time that baby is born. So it's a very important system. It's why we always want to know, did you feel the baby moving when you were pregnant? Did you fell that maybe kicking you?

You think about women who have in their history that they were bedridden. or that there was some other kind of complication. A cesarean section is also going to interrupt the final journey of what input is needed during that transition. The other thing that it's very sensitive to is inflammation as well as antibiotic use. One round of antibiotic changes the viscosity or the fluidity inside those canals. So, you have three canales. You have an anterior, a posterior, and a horizontal. And those give you all the different motions that we go through.

This anterior one, like swinging on a swing, or tilting left and right, the posterior going in circles and jumping up and down, horizontal sliding back and forth, and then flexion and extension. Now those are outward motions that we all understand, but we also have very distinct motion inside of our bodies. Our blood travels a particular way, our food digests a Babies are conceived a particular way. When any of those motions are not going in the right direction, there's poor feedback, and the vestibular would even be part of that.

So any interruption in that motion idea could impact how that vestiblular is going to function. Body chemistry, any inflammation, is going to disrupt the fluid that's in each of these little canals, and it makes it thicker and tacky. So there has to be another way, too, to really get the inflammation down. You've got to stop pouring the gasoline on the fire, right? So when a baby's in a car seat, the typical posture is they're facing the back. Now remember what I said about our triangle of development.

There's an intimacy between the vestibular system, which is inside of the ear, The auditory system how you hear, and the visual system. They're all three connected. So if my vestigular is off, And I'm looking at the Back of The seat. I have no idea where the horizon is. it's going to disrupt that baby. So one of the recommendations that I've made to parents is, maybe put the car seat in the middle, just so that there is more visual input, especially for the periphery. And your peripheral vision is your eyes, ears, your vestibular, but it is 94% about how you see.

Central vision, is only 6%. So we need to bring about greater peripheral. And then I would put a mirror. I'd put the mirror for the baby to look through because then they would actually see out that front window and our eyes, every time you move around, your eyes subconsciously are always trying to find the horizon. So we want to bring about that environment for them to see, and that could really help. But if you're suspecting that your child's vestibular system is not working right, the best way to work on it is those three motions.

Gut-brain connection, birth factors, and immune development 33:00

Make it an active part of the day that we're going to swing with intention. We're gonna roll around with attention. we are going pay attention to how we feel when we do that. Now, the big red flag is if your child won't do. That means that your childhood is already associated. When I do, that kind of movement, I don't feel good, so I want to do it. So we want always modify. So if a child gets on a swing and it scares them or whatever, start with the child in your arms. Rock the children in a rocking chair.

Even if it's only for 15 seconds, then just do it more frequently. Whatever you do, don't give up the first time your child get upset. Modify, modify the intensity of the motion and then build on that motion. Thank you so much for that. I never thought of it like that, the car seats, and how it's required by the legal system to have them backwards facing. It just matches so well, which makes all the sense in the world. circadian rhythms. Obviously, you're supposed to be awake and get the sunshine in the morning and then the melatonin increases throughout the day.

Just by getting that exposure in early morning, it increases your melatone production late at night so then you can get a restful sleep and so it goes. The exact same thing. Oh my goodness, that you are always in search of the horizon. When you aren't situated that way, the impacts that Thank you. That makes so much sense. Oh my goodness. Wow. Okay. Well, can you also speak a little bit more to the gut-brain connection? Because everyone listening is very aware. that there is such a thing and they're seeing it play out with the moods and, you know, the resistance in a lot of cases.

And then on top of that, these kids are just physically miserable, right? They're itchy and it's hard, being inside their bodies at that particular moment. So could you just talk to us a little bit more about that connection and what we can do to make things go smoother for them? Well, the gut-brain connection, especially in the children. The beginning pattern is so important to try to preserve because when they come into the world, they still got an abundance of development that they've got to go through.

And within the first couple of years, that child's gut is already maturing. So it's influenced inside of the womb. It's influence through the birth process. So I never want anybody to feel bad about having a C-section, but let's just say somebody out in your audience is anticipating that they may have to have that. One of the things that some of functional doctors are doing now is they are literally taking the bacteria, the good bacteria from mom, and they're coating it all over that baby. Now to tie it into the vestibular too, if you end up having a c-section, you really want to work that all the way down as if it had come through the birth canal.

Give it that proprioception, give it the pressure because those are neurological tracks that they're looking for. And that's the why I like how you responded, is that what their body is actually looking. So we have to go on the outside and go, what would you be doing if you were doing it for yourself? And so that's one of those pieces. So see if you are facing a C-section, if your doctor will do that for you. There's great research out there on that. I had four cesareans and I know I didn't get hip to this until I guess I felt boldened enough to challenge the powers that be by my fourth and was like, this is what's happening.

But they made me do it. Which is fine, like the seating and all of that, I mean, it wasn't ideal. I would have loved to have somebody that was more on board and more than just permissive, but like actually helpful. Combine your support systems with other people, a doula, midwife, people that are really focused on giving you as much of a natural, really natural birth as you possibly can have. So that's super important. Now we have to think about what options do we You always hear that slogan, breast is best.

Well, it is if mom is healthy, okay? And many women, unfortunately, do not know their state of health when they're conceiving babies. And so it can be little things. You could have food sensitivities. You could have a yeast infection, you could be really deficient in typical vitamins and minerals, and that's going to impact your child as well. So I'm a big advocate on planning, I am a Big Advocate on knowing your state of health when you get pregnant. So even don't forget about the teeth. You know, there's more ways of getting your teeth cared for today, but a lot of people still have silver amalgams.

And silver Amalgam's that's partly mercury and it causes the tooth. to fracture and it leaks and goes into your body and can go into the baby. So it's little things like that knowing how far it can really impact the development of the child. How are you going to feed your baby? So let's say you are going nurse and you're healthy. Okay, great. wonder if you have challenges with that. Some women, because they're in a lot of stress, they are not producing, and so they've got to get these babies fed.

And the next thing you know, their feeding them formula. I know you probably have seen an incredible connection between that and eczema, but I would encourage your audience, especially if your are in that situation, There's a cookbook called Nourishing Traditions from Weston Price. Oh, it's just a great cook book, right? So good. It's got a baby formula recipe and I do a lot of remote work and i've been helping this family in California and this little guy's, got, a genetic issue But of course, you know, they were doing formula.

This kid was just laying around and I go, well, the first thing we got to do is we've got get the right fuel in him. So I got them to start learning and it's a learning curve and i get it. But if this family can do it, anybody can. And they created a grass-fed beef liver formula for this little guy. And today, this kid's in a stander. He's holding up his head. They're actually coming to my office next week. We've made so much progress, and I know the fuel was just absolutely imperative. Now, the other part of it is, too, though, we have a massive overlap with the immune system becoming mature around age three.

So when we've got gut and immune, this is what they call the neuroimmune interface. And what I would love your audience to understand is that what fires together, wires together. So if my gut's maturing, and my immune system is maturing, whatever's going on in my gut is gonna impact myimmune system. And then you gotta realize this is a feedback system, so whatever is going in the gut, is also priming the development of the brain. When you're a baby, you fully form, but you are not fully functioning.

You're down in your brain stem. And so whatever's going on in that body becomes the role model for how the midbrain is going to turn on. How the higher brain is gonna turn, on how, the right side of the brain's gonna, turn. So when we come into the world, we're not just down in the brainstorm. We're also right brain dominant. Now I had mentioned before that that is the need to talk, but it's also your big muscles. It's also your emotional quotient. And so what happens a lot of times for some of these kiddos is that right brain goes dampened, the left comes on prematurely, and we just think these kids are so super intelligent.

but they have emotional meltdowns. And really, a child should not be one side over the other. It's balanced when you are developing. it is not until you get past that eight and a half mark that we should be thinking about, or even, I'm going to take thinking out of it, and I am going say observing, wow, my child's got this really nice little strength. They need to be able to use both sides before some big historical thing is going to declared on them. I think this whole thing with gifted children has almost clouded our vision.

The first thing, when I look at a kid and some parent goes, yes, my child is super gifted, I go, could you just take off your shoes for me for a second? And if those little ankles are rolled in and they're pronated to no end, You might have some good intellect, but the right side of your brain is not firing and eventually it's going to crash. And that's what I think chiropractic has taught me the most. How can I prevent something? That's when I want to do. I wanna prevent it. Yes. So do you think, I mean, if you do get in a child, any child under 12, and they start doing chiropractic work, you're just noticing imbalances in any of these areas, but do think chiropractic is the way to just help them moderate those differences, those imbalanced and move on appropriately according to the standard milestones?

Well, i'm so grateful that you brought up chirepractic.

Chiropractic, neurofeedback, and brain retraining 44:00

I love chiropractic. I'm 65 years old and I am under chriopractic care and i so appreciate everything that it's brought to my body. If the chiropractor has insight into the development or how children develop, there's so many things that can happen under that chiriopratic adjustment. But you've got to be able to figure out What's the input that that child really needs? So I would not ever just do an adjustment alone. I got to integrate that new information because if your feet are pronated, even if I adjust your foot, your brain doesn't know it yet.

So it's kind of like when kids have their eyes turned in and parents decide to cut the muscles, that is a cosmetic reposition, but the brain doesn't know it yet. And nine times out of ten, those eyes go right back because the in the rehabilitation. Same thing with scoliosis. If you had a really bad scoliosis, 35 degrees or something, and somebody decided to put a rod in there, you went from 35 to 0 degrees overnight, nobody prepared your brain for the change or worked with your Most of those cases, those people are in an enormous amount of pain after that kind of a surgery.

So, and even in chiropractic, if we don't include the brain re-educating that pattern, it is very difficult. This is why I went the way I did. I was a traditional chiopractor in the very beginning, but one of my very first patients was And all she did was scream every time she heard my voice. And I had to end up whispering every times she came in. But I'm a wide person, so I am going, what is going on with this child? I couldn't even use an activator on her, which is a little tool that makes a clicking noise, okay?

So it made me go look and that's how I learned about sound and how children develop and so we worked on it. And so it led me, I'm going to retrain the way you hear sound. I am going see if it's the same on both sides of your head. And as we worked on that, that particular case only took about six months. And the next thing you know, she came running into the office, Dr. Hansen, you got to see my picture. She was screaming for herself, but she needed that input. One of the ones that would relate us back to stress and how stress can impact those little bodies and really make it difficult to clear up eczema is the psoas muscle.

So the Psoa's muscle is on the front of the spine. It's a big fat muscle, it splits and goes into the pelvis. The mechanical part is it allows you to pull your knee towards your belly button. You know, most of our muscles have different roles. And the role for this muscle, every time you're in a fight or flight, you get a slight flexion to your belly because your brain doesn't know if you are about to be shot, punched, or stabbed. So it's going to protect the vital organs. Now, if that continues, If the chronic stress continues and what they believe, is for every year that we are in some kind of dysregulation, we're actually losing 2.3 cubic centimeters of gray matter in our brain.

For as long as that continues, you'll actually lose sarcomeres. And a sarcomeere is an individual muscle motor unit. It's not just a tight muscle, it's actually loosing length. and staying that way. Now think about posture over a continuum. Little kids, their inflection, and then they begin to get upright. And then, unfortunately, in the human condition, many people end up back into flexion, or let's just look at our phones all day long and bring that flexing into our head, which they're also starting to say this is what we're calling dementia posture.

And that can be an epigenetic change to yourself. But if that psoas stays short, You're sending a feedback message, gut brain, to your brain. Threat. And then there's a part of your that its job is to protect you. So the very first time that you ever felt a threat, the amygdala said, hey, what was that? All right, I'm going to code it. Let's just say for simplicity, it codes it ABC. And now your amigula scans the world for ABC, but over time, The amygula goes, not so many ABCs, But hey there's an A.

There's a BC and now you're responding to things that never were the initial threat and you are actually giving yourself the feedback like in neurofeedback and biofeed back. You're giving your brain this feedback and that is why it is so important to look at the brain so that we can understand what are the patterns, where do we need to get reorganized and the cool part is it does it all the time. So that's what I like to do. I love it. Is it somatic work? Like, what does that? Oh, no, it's actual brain training.

So in neurofeedback, you first start off with a cap on the head, and there's 19 channels all the way around. And you fill each of the little holes with this gel, And all it does, doesn't read your mind, It picks up the electrical energy coming off of cells in the brain. That information travels back through what's called an encoder, that splits it all apart, and then we have a recording of what's going on in each of those 19 locations. Now, for as long as I've been doing it, I can look at it and like when your eyes are closed, alpha, which is one of our brain waves that should be dominant in the back of the brain, When your eyes are closed, it should go way up.

It's about processing. Its about locking in on your resources and being able to really process information. So if your eye are close during the recording and we don't see those big changes, well I can certainly read that just on the screen. But I do like to make sure I never miss anything. We have a reporting company. we upload our recordings to them and they send us back like eight different reports on eyes open, eyes closed. I typically am going to narrow it down to one or two for parents because it's a lot of information and help them understand, connect the dots.

Okay, if your child has attention issues, you typically have too many slow waves in the front. That's the classic one. So what are we going do about it? Well, the therapy You go back, we create a program for you based on what we found. You sit in a chair comfortably. We may only put one or two leads on your head now. There's some ear clips. And then you get to pick the show that you want to watch. we do regulate.We have no fantasy going on or nothing violent going. It has to be enjoyable because you're training your brain.

but it's for the conscious mind. And this is a big part of why I got into this. Neurofeedback works on the subconscious mind, now remember that's formed last trimester of pregnancy to about seven and a half, eight and half years old. That's why they call kids, that your little acorn, they just follow you around, okay? So, we want to get into the subconscious mind. That's where the pattern is going to be changed. So a filter goes over what you're going watch and every time your brain engages correctly, the picture goes bright.

And there's a little sound. So we're doing visual and auditory, like we talked about, triangle. You're sitting up in that chair, so that's vestibular. And you are literally learning how to engage in your own brain yourself. Over time, kids pick this up even better than adults do, to tell you the truth. Adults want to muscle it. I like the kids that I'll start off and they'll go, hey, Dr. Hanson, could you get my picture brighter? I can't see it, and I go oh, no, I cannot do that, but you can. And then the kid sits there and goes, okay, well, how do I do this?

And as they relax, they get, oh it's got pride. How did I that? Before you know it they're totally engaged in the process. Then we teach, Hey, How Did You Do Today? I did really well. I go, how do you know? Because the picture was bright the majority of the time. Fantastic. And then we teach it to the parent. When something's going on at home, we've got to change the pattern at-home. Ask your child to sit down quietly, take a breath, because we do teach a lot of breath work, too. Take a few deep breaths, and in your mind, make your minds brighter.

take that and begin to create that strategy for themselves. That's incredible. Oh my goodness. I could talk to you all day. There's so many more questions. We'll have to do a round two. Do you see people I mean, everybody that comes into your practice would have to go into office, correct? Or do you see people virtually? I'd start typically when people are from out of town. I'll typically start remotely because there's so many things that we could start with the primitive reflexes. We have a program called the Foundation Stability Method that really works on the core.

And those are so easy to implement at home. And if they're working with you, you're already working on the gut, I'll leave that to you and you can just collaborate. But that would address the mechanical, the chemical, and the brain.

How to work with Dr. Hansen and closing takeaways 55:00

If they like working me, that gives them an easy way to get to know me. then we invite them to come for an intensive. And that's when we can do all the other different diagnostics that we have. But you can absolutely have home programs. We have people in California. we've got a family in North Dakota. I've had a Family in Germany. and sometimes the cool part about working from a developmental model. i like to give the example of the beautiful abstract work that people do with dominoes. You know, there's people that build those just beautiful art, I call it art.

And they give one little push and then the whole thing just comes down. So think of your child's development as that abstract. One of those dominos comes out of place. Now I could go on the other side of that domingo and push it forward. But then there's always going to be this interruption. But if you go back far enough, if find out what that missing domino really needed, and you push it back in, lots of times it just starts to go. And that, to me, is the beauty behind developmental work. That's amazing.

Dr. Hanson, this has been such an eye-opening conversation. Thank you so much. I know so many parents that are listening that feel seen in a different way and oh my goodness I learned a ton today. Oh I'm so glad. The idea like we know what's happening in the skin is connected to everything else but knowing that it is predominantly this message from your brain is really something that we need to be talking much more about. And thank you for giving us these practical tools and just the understanding behind it.

Where can everyone find and follow you? Well, thank-you. This has been very enjoyable too. I love when we can just have a conversation and see where it can go. what kind of information. I love to educate. When I started my podcast, I was supposed to be going to Paris for a pediatric research conference, and I supposed be presenting, so excited. And COVID, it got canceled. So I said, okay, got to get my message out there somehow, someway. and I started my podcast. So we have a podcast, we phrase it now, Connect My Child's Brain, and it's on Spotify, it is on Apple, on all the places.

And then the website though is connectmybrain.com. you are more than welcome to schedule a complimentary consultation with me and that's where we can discuss your story. And we see if there is something that we could do for you so that your child gets going in a great direction. We also have an app. I got really upset during COVID again because the CDC changed all the developmental milestones and crawling isn't even on there anymore. This craziness. So that's called Connect My Brain. There are tools out there and we'd love to partner with you any way we can.

Perfect. Thank you so much for your time today. All that will be linked into your show notes and will talk soon. Okay. Have a wonderful day. You too. Isn't she great? Oh my goodness, I learned so much. I know you did too. All of her links are in the show notes if you're dealing with any sort of neurodevelopment inquiries or situations. And friend, i want to leave you with something Dr. Hansen said that I just can't stop thinking about. that there is a window, friends. And the younger that your child is, the faster their body can turn it around.

You have heard the saying that the best time to plant a tree was yesterday, and the second best is today. The same goes for healing. for day one of putting out that fire that is burning freely inside of your child's body. That's what inflammation is. And your children needs support. You need support to get your childhood through this because it isn't just one thing. It's so many things stacked on top of each other and it's different for each child that I work with. But we can. We can get to the root cause and I just want you to know that every season that passes does matter.

And if this episode is stirring something in you and you are ready to stop piecing it together alone, the free alignment call is where we start. It is a real conversation about where your child is right now, what you've already tried and what it would actually take to get to the other side of this. it's very enlightening and gives you a clear step as people leave that call feeling like somebody actually sees the full picture and that sees them. I just want your child to be well. I want you family to well and I can't work with everyone and can work within a lot of situations but when we have an alignment call I'll let you know if this is something that will work for you and your family.

And that link is in the show notes.I would love to talk with you friends. Go ahead and sign up for a free slot and i will talk to you next week. Take care. Thank you for helping with my eczema. Love you. Thank you for listening today, friend. I know healing your child's skin isn't easy, but you're doing it one smart step at a time. If this episode gave you a little hope or a better night's sleep, leave a quick review so more exhausted parents can find eczema kids and finally rest easy too. Follow, share, and let's help more kids heal.

Take care.