Your Child's Brain Needs Energy Before It Needs Therapy

A while back I sat down with Dr. Jordan Shilts, who owned a hyperbaric oxygen clinic and who is now part of our Minnesota team. We spent most of the conversation talking about mitochondria. That sounds like a strange thing for two people to get excited about, but it turned into one of the most practical conversations we have had on the podcast, because mitochondria are where your child's energy comes from.

What mitochondria actually do

Oxygen is the key to life, and the reason is what happens once it reaches the mitochondria inside your cells. That is where oxygen gets converted into ATP, which is the fuel your body runs on. As Dr. Jordan put it, we need ATP for just about everything. Focus, speech, emotional regulation, movement, digestion, sleep.

Hyperbaric oxygen therapy works by increasing the pressure in the environment around the body. That does two things. It drives more oxygen into the tissues, and it shrinks the oxygen molecules enough that they can dissolve directly into the plasma instead of needing a red blood cell to carry them. The result is more oxygen reaching the mitochondria, and more energy available to do the work of rehab.

Photobiomodulation, the low level laser therapy we use here, gets at the same target from a different direction. And here is the part Dr. Jordan pointed out that I think is the most hopeful piece of all of this. The body is an adaptation machine. When you consistently give it more oxygen or more light, it does not just use what it is given. It responds by building bigger mitochondria and more mitochondria. That is what carries beyond the office.

Why we prep before we push

Dr. Jordan described a pattern he sees in his clinic. Someone Googles hyperbaric, decides it is going to be the silver bullet that fixes everything, does two to four weeks of sessions, and sees very little change. Then they spend time working on the underlying metabolic issues, balancing blood sugar, and come back to the same therapy. This time it goes differently.

He compared it to working out. If you jump straight into it with no preparation, you get sore muscles, you risk injury, and you do not get the outcome you were after. The therapy was never the problem. The body was not set up to use it yet.

We see exactly the same thing with the kids who come here for intensives. When a family has spent the weeks or months beforehand building a foundation of appropriate nutrition, getting inflammation down, and regulating blood sugar, the results are so much better. That is why we order labs before families arrive, and it is why our two to three month waitlist is not time wasted. It is time spent making the body more efficient so it can handle far more once they get here.

More is not always better

There is a very American instinct that if something helps, more of it must help more. With this population, that is often backwards. A child who is dealing with neuroinflammation and is sensitive to oxidative stress can regress if you jump straight to the highest pressure.

So we start low. We use soft chambers and lower pressures, because for the nervous system it does not take much pressure to move oxygen into those tissues. Dr. Jordan is a bigger fan of frequency than pressure, and the research on autism tends to land in that lower range rather than at the top of the dial.

The same logic applies to laser. We start with a lower dose, less time, and wavelengths that do not penetrate as deeply. Sometimes a child does not respond well to infrared at first, and then after a week of building up through the gentler wavelengths, they respond really well to the very thing that did nothing before. The therapy did not change. Their capacity did.

Why this matters for your family

Look at the environment your child is growing up in. Once you start digging into the toxins around us, it turns out that almost all of them are mitochondrial disruptors. The products we put on our skin. Water carrying herbicides and pesticides. Particulate matter in the air. Meanwhile, kids are not playing five or six hours a day, not getting out in the sun, not moving and breathing hard, not eating the foods that build mitochondria. There is an enormous amount depleting these little guys and almost nothing on the other side rebuilding them.

One thing Dr. Jordan said has stuck with me. You have to treat these kids like professional athletes. A player heading into the NFL combine has a nutritionist, has labs run, has a team priming his body and brain for high level performance. For a lot of our kids, high level performance is getting through an ordinary day.

Final thoughts

We are so quick to jump to high level therapies without addressing the foundational issues underneath them. Get the foundation of energy in place, then work through normal neurological development. It sounds almost too simple, and it is not easy, but the changes that start happening once the ball is rolling are profound. It takes an intense amount of effort to get it moving, and then a lot of things start clicking into place.

These mechanisms are not new. Photobiomodulation goes back to the 1960s and 70s. Hyperbaric was theorized during the building of the Brooklyn Bridge, when workers in the pressurized shafts below the surface healed better than expected. What is new is that the research is finally catching up, and it keeps pointing at the same place.