What Helped My Son Recover When The Odds Seemed Overwhelming

Welcome to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. This show is for men and women who are exhausted, inflamed, living with brain fog, gut or skin issues, and who won't settle for answers like your labs are normal or just take this pill. Here we focus on the root causes of disease and on what I call repair deficit, the gap between what your body needs for optimal health and performance and what it's actually getting. This podcast is not personal medical advice. It is education to help you ask better questions so you can make better decisions about your health. Thank you for joining us and welcome to today's episode. Good morning, everyone. Dr. Stillman here, back for another fun and exciting Q&A. A couple of housekeeping items. First of all, this episode will actually air as a public podcast. So if you're listening to this on Substack, I want you to know, or anywhere else you consume or listen to podcasts, I want you to know that I actually do this every week for members of our online community. Details for that are coming. Stay vigilant. That sounds too serious, but watch for them. Why? We're starting at a founders-only rate. So you're going to get access, lifetime access for a very, very reasonable price compared to what we think this is going to command down the line. And that's a thank you for subscribing, for being early and for being committed. So stay tuned for that. I'm also starting training. For practitioners and people who want to become practitioners or just enthusiastic laypeople. You don't have to go out and get some fancy letters to put after your name. That is also in the works. Stay tuned for those emails and they'll be part of this community. So I'll explain more in the future, but for now, join the community. It's going to be amazing. The practitioner training will be built on top of that. So if you're going to be a practitioner or want to be in the practitioner training, join anyway, as soon as you can. All right. Without further ado. Today, the reason we're going to have a public Q&A is that I had, have received a few inquiries from dads who have kids with hypoxic ischemic encephalopathy, which is the diagnosis my son Benjamin unfortunately has. Benjamin, our son, suffered a birth injury a year and a half ago now. He'll be 18 months in a week or so. And I posted about that at the time on Substack. If you want to go read the post, it's the most popular post I've ever posted. I was just, please pray for our son. And I'm going to give you guys a fuller Benjamin update later. I want my wife around for that because she cares very much about how I say and what I say about Benjamin, and I want to respect her. And so she's going to record a podcast with me about that, where we'll also get a little bit more into our journey with this diagnosis. And for those of you who don't know what this diagnosis is, I should have probably mentioned that it's a diagnosis of— that means that the baby was without oxygen during delivery for a prolonged period of time, resulting in brain damage. So that's all I'm going to say about that. For now. Okay. But I got these inquiries from dads and I know we're gonna get more. And so I just decided, cuz one of them, well, they wanted to become patients of the practice. This doesn't always make sense because we're not necessarily set up for that kind of case. A lot of what you need is in-person care, but dads have been asking me these questions about, you know, and, and we've gotten a lot of inquiries over the last year and a half in relative terms, you know, what do I do? How can I help my kid? Who do I see for care? All this kind of stuff. And so I just said, let's record a podcast as a Q&A and I'm gonna run through basically what I think about this disease, this diagnosis, and what we've learned in the last year and a half with our son. All right, so these questions are from John, the dad who happened to write these up. Hello. So we are interested in your perspective on therapies or interventions you believe were most beneficial for Benjamin's recovery. Let me walk you through briefly what we did. First thing I did was call all my friends who are smart and particularly more experienced than me, particularly in the field of pediatrics. That included Larry Pilevsky, Derek Guillory, Jason Sonners, Scott Scher. I'm sure I'm forgetting people. Alan Scher, Scott Scher's dad, and asking them, what should I do? There was a global consensus that the first thing I needed to get was a hyperbaric oxygen tank. And so that was the first thing that we did. I'll include links to the hyperbaric oxygen tank that we bought for Benjamin with a full disclosure that it's an affiliate link. Purchases go basically to fund our son's care, frankly. And you know, I will also include, I'm not saying you should or have to buy from that company, by the way. I didn't have time to do a lot of like price shopping and comparing. And I talked to, to Scott Scher and Jason Saunders about that. Jason runs the company we purchased from. Scott runs another company that I guess we'll also link to. I don't know if we have an affiliate account with them, but basically they said, look, you need this tank fast. And Scott said that to me. He just said, look, get the tank that you can get fastest. And Jason's tank is going to come to you faster than ours. So we bought that one. It arrived, I think maybe a week after Benjamin got home after a 6-week stay in the hospital. And we started to dive Benjamin immediately twice daily for an hour. So that was an early morning dive and then a late afternoon dive. We did that for, I think, at least 4 weeks. And I was the one, or Michelle was diving him in the tank at first. That transitioned to being only me because Michelle didn't feel good in the tank or after the tank. So I ended up doing all the diving basically for the last year. Quick notes, you should really talk to someone if you're gonna do this about what kind of tank and why and how. There's tanks you can sit up in, tanks you can lie down in. For all I know, there's tanks you can stand up in, but why would you want that? So make sure you get the one for you that's going to work best for your family, for your space, et cetera. Cause you're going to spend a lot of time in the tank if you're looking to heal an injured brain. And I want to explain one of the things that I learned from Jason and Scott and from reading Jason's books on hyperbarics as well. People get sold 10, 20, 50 dives at a wellness center. And that's good. I'm not saying you shouldn't, but the reality is if you've got a really severe injury, stroke, Chi-E, autism, you know, something really severe for the brain or a really severe diagnosis like MS, autoimmunity. There's a huge literature on hyperbaric oxygen for autoimmunity. I mean, it's gonna be more, more cost effective to buy your own tank. I know it looks very expensive, you know, really low-end Chinese-made tanks I think are going for like $7,000. I didn't buy that just so you know, and I can't obviously vouch for the quality and I'd be really concerned about the quality. I'd be concerned about chemicals in the tank as well because they don't have good quality control for that over there. Not that we have perfect control over here. I just, you know, I've had worse experiences with foreign products from China chemical-wise than I have US products. I went for a higher-end tank that was a higher pressure and we bought the oxygen concentrator. We bought the whole thing because I knew, look, we're going to do hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dives. Yes, this is a 5-figure investment, but when you do the math, it turns into like $20, $30 a dive. That makes all the sense in the world because you're not going to find that at an outpatient clinic. If you have a smaller, you know, issue, maybe you just had a quick TBI, you know, maybe it was a TIA, like not a full-blown stroke. Yeah, I think it makes more sense to just jump into whatever tank you have available without obviously appropriate clinical oversight to just get the oxygen in rather than waiting for a tank and then diving, you know, dozens of dives on end. I will say, I think the future of medicine is for people to have a hyperbaric oxygen tank in their home. When you really step back and think about this, people buy new cars that are more expensive than these tanks, and those new cars, they might age out in 5 to 10 years. These tanks can last longer than that. And they're going to give you a lot more years of life than your car. So, you know, do the math. I think there's going to be in future years a dedicated wellness room or space in pretty much every house that's over kind of starter, you know, level because the value people are going to get from this and the fact that the population's aging. So it's becoming more and more relevant. All right. So that was hyperbaric oxygen. And I lead with that because it's the thing we've done the most of. I've done at least, I don't know, 200 and probably 50 dives with Benjamin at this point. Maybe it's more like 200 and 215 or 20. And we stopped diving daily. We stopped diving twice a day. We started diving daily and we did that for about a year straight. We had an interruption when we moved to Texas because our stuff was in storage for 3 months, not through our, through the negligence of Safeway Moving, which was a terrible company. Don't ever go to them for moving. They did a terrible job and I'm really upset with them. But anyway, hyperbaric oxygen, really helpful. PT, OT are important, but a lot of the PTOTs out there are dealing with a really broken, dysfunctional, outdated model of therapy, and they're just not effective. I hate to say that, but they are just not effective. We went to multiple therapists who we just— and a big piece of this has to do with their mindset. So if they're going to look at your kid and be like, sorry, you know, like, this is the best they're going to be, and best we can do is like not have them, I don't know, drooling all over themselves, or, or— and I'm not trying to be negative, I just— they have this negative attitude of like This is the function you're going to have. They're going to be limited forever. They're very resigned to that idea, which is just not real. It's not true. If you're going to accept, and I wrote this in my post on this, like if you're going to accept normal or average outcomes, really, you're just accepting a mediocrity that's people just think is real. The reality is there's a lot more we can do for these kids. The best group of clinicians for that, that we found were functional neurologists. What's a functional neurologist? They're, as far as I know, they're all chiropractors and they're chiropractors who look at the brain as an organ that really has does a lot of neuroplasticity and they do tons of different interesting things with stimulating the brain to wake it up and get it back online. And they're really cool, really like these guys. And we went to a functional neurologist, shout out to Dr. Amadeo in Naples, for the months that we were there before we moved to Austin, which is something I'll get to in a moment. We worked with a PT named Karen Pryor. Pick up her book if you want to. She does Zoom consults and you can fly to see her. We flew to see Karen for a week with Benjamin for an intensive. It was our little family vacation for that year. And if you're looking for someone good in the PT I would ask her for a referral or I would work with her directly. We had a lactation consultant, Jennifer Tao. Hello, Jennifer. Thank you for reaching out to me. Uh, cuz you really helped us, particularly with getting Benjamin to eat because these kids, this is a big problem. So for context, this is true by the way, of stroke victims who are adults as well as babies with HIE. Getting these kids and patients to eat is really important. The kids who gain the most weight have the best outcome, but there's a chicken or the egg problem there. Are they, you know, doing better because they can eat, or are they doing better because they eat? Okay. By which I mean, if you force feed these kids, you don't necessarily improve their outcomes. 'Cause really the reason they're not eating is the severity of the injury. So don't just think, oh, I gotta force as much food into these kids as possible. No, what you need to do is you need to rehabilitate their ability to eat, and that is what is going to help them then, 'cause you're really helping the brain to recover in that respect with some of its most fundamental functions. So functional neurologists are who we went to as far as the, well, and the various therapists. We also did craniosacral therapy with chiropractors. My wife and I will talk more about this when we talk about this in a podcast, but it's very hard to know what's working and what's not working. A lot of this is just sort of feel, sense, anecdote. A lot of the therapies we picked, physical therapy, occupational therapy, craniosacral therapy, Michelle noted anecdotal changes and improvements. I can't say that I ever saw some massive shift from those things, but you also have to appreciate that it comes over time. Like this is not a, 2 to 3 week game. This is a 2 to 3 year process. At least for us it is. We're 18 months in. So those are the practitioners we worked with. Those are the things that we tried. The hyperbarics is what I led with because it has the strongest evidence base. And it's really clear that that along with everything else has worked for Benjamin. Because we were in a scenario where we had enough help that we were able to have all these therapies. You may not be in that position. I mean, we went to family, we got family help. We went to friends, we got friends to help, you know, don't be shy, ask for help. Get as much as you can. Laundry, meals, cooking, driving to appointments, making appointments, paying for whatever you gotta pay for. But I mean, if I had to do it all over again, I would sell everything that I owned to buy the hyperbaric oxygen tank because I know that that was the best evidence-based thing for Benjamin and any kid like him, not just now, but long-term. And, you know, pound for pound, it punches heavier than say functional neurology appointments at $100, $150, $200 or more per appointment. Just so you guys know that. I think that about covers— we also, by the way, we consulted with a woman named Bonnie Brandis who runs a QRI, Quantum Reflex Integration, which is a really, really, I think, great resource and tool. It's the— it's a, it's a easier way to get into light and laser therapy than what we ended up eventually doing, which we'll talk about in a minute. And Bonnie has a real passion for working with these kids. She's helped a lot of them. And I would strongly recommend it to anyone. You buy the laser for, I think it's $3K, and she'll walk you through and give you manuals. And she's got a Facebook group where she helps people people understand. We saw some significant improvements with that, I will say, in the beginning, but then we transitioned to working with a functional neurologist more intensively, who I'll talk about in a minute. Okay. Nutrition. Let's talk about nutrition. We experimented with various different supplements for Michelle and Benjamin. I won't go through all of them because I probably can't remember them all. But basically, these kids have a very sensitive stomach, so you really have to be careful with what you give them. And we ended up for a long time just not giving Benjamin anything because he really needed to just heal and recover. And all he could tolerate really truly was mother's milk. Michelle, we gave, we used Dr. Stillman's Vitality Plus for a while. She's been taking the vitamin C this whole time. She's been taking MSM for a long time. She's been taking iodine. I've got protocols for most of that on Substack. And I can't say you should use these in anyone, by the way, without appropriate clinical oversight. I think you all appreciate that, but that's what Michelle used and it worked quite well. I think we did notice moments where she was taking things and maybe Benjamin spit up more, and so we would stop this supplement or that supplement or give her a supplement holiday to kind of let things settle out. But that's what we did. And then recently Michelle started on a personalized supplement protocol with HTMA based on the HTMA testing that we do. And the results from that were just night and day. She just taking 3 of the 20-some capsules she's supposed to take a day. I gave her a very heavy protocol for reasons I won't get into here. She basically went from, we have a scoring system in the practice that we use to score severity of symptoms, and she went from like a 23 outta 28 to a 3 out of 28 in like 4 or 5 days. So I sort of kick myself for not doing that sooner, but between moving and Benjamin's stomach being very tender and responding a lot to what she's eating, it's like like you only make so many moves so fast, or you just kind of get lost and confused about what's really happening. So it is what it is. I will mention too that she saw that huge improvement, not just with the personalized supplement protocol, but with the vitamin C, MSM. I make a mocktail for her and I every night, which I'll just share the recipe now. It's an ounce and a half of lemon juice, ounce and a half of honey syrup, which if you don't know how to make it, it's 1:1 honey to water. So you just boil water on the stove. Glass jar of honey, half full, pour the water in, mix it up. You're done. 1.5 ounces of honey syrup, 1.5 ounces of lemon juice in a pint glass diluted all the way. We use generally like a silica-rich mineral water like Gerolsteiner, cuz it's yummy and delicious and effervescent. I like that. And then we add a teaspoon of vitamin C, a teaspoon of MSM, and I, I add a dropper full of our bitters. And I will also make a variation of this for my afternoon pick-me-up, which is SkinSips or SkinSips Plus, usually in sparkling water with some vitamin C. And the choline citrate that we also have in the store, by the way. Okay. So I think that's enough about that. Another thing we did with Michelle that was really, really, really helpful is we tested her for allergies. Allergy tests come and go and change names. So I'm not going to name the name here. If you join our online community, we'll have more data on that there. But basically we did the right allergy test for Michelle and we figured out what triggers were causing Benjamin to throw up. And when I tell you that was life-changing, I mean, it was life-changing. We went from projectile vomiting every single night, huge volumes of milk, like laundry, more laundry than I ever would've possibly imagined one could do outside of like a battlefield hospital to almost never throwing up in a matter of weeks. It was amazing. Of all things, she was reacting to oats, you know, which lots of people eat with no, no problems. Right. And, and there was a bunch of other stuff on there that I don't remember. We're retesting her now cuz you retest that test every 6 months or so for best results anyway. So those were all of the things that really come to mind that really helped us significantly. I gotta mention fish oil. Michelle's been taking fish oil the whole time and eating some fish at least. We haven't been as strict with that as I would like. And, you know, I think it was Larry Polesky who told me like, give her something like 3 or 4 times the usual dose of fish oil. Michelle started to have some bleeding and bruising, so we pulled that back. You can give kids fish oil, Dr. Green Mom. We have no relationship with their, that company, but they make a, I think a child's, like children's fish oil that we tried and used. And, and, you know, the problem is if you got a kid with a really tender stomach, all that fat is going to make them throw up. So you just have to do it with clinician supervision and you have to really think through what are you trying to achieve. In our case, obviously it's just get enough omega-3s into the system that Benjamin is, is, you know, properly developing his brain. But if you end up having lots of vomiting in response to trying to do that, it's arguably a wash. So we just tried to get mom's omega-3s to a good place and then have her provide that for baby Benjamin. That's the crash course. I'm hoping I'm not forgetting anything important or anyone I should really be thanking for, for helping us. Along the journey. There were so many people and it's been 18 months, so it's easy to sort of forget things. Okay. Second question. Any recommendations for the first weeks and months following NICU discharge? The number one thing would be try to establish as much as you can clear routines. I don't think anyone should go through this without blue blockers, low blue light bulbs all over the house. You've got to keep the light environment optimal for mom and baby because what we found was that Benjamin still doesn't sleep through the night. And so we're up and down all the time. Michelle will still have nights where she's up with him for so long that she ends up waking me up and asking me to take him for an hour here or there so that she can finally get some rest. You need to build nap time in for mom. If as much as you can have someone, anyone you can trust with the baby, come over and hold the baby while she gets a nap in, because, you know, if the child is awake as much as Benjamin was, mom is going to wind up running on 4 hours of sleep every day. And that's not sustainable because mom has to make milk, which means, you know, she's not just like a warm body in a seat. She has to make this very complex fluid for baby. So she's got to have adequate sleep. You know, our rhythm right now is, and this has been pretty consistent the last year and a half, we go to sleep at 9 or 10 o'clock, which is when Benjamin really tends to wind down almost no matter what we do. That is when he seems to want to go to sleep. Uh, usually it's closer to 10, sometimes it's 10:30, sometimes it's 11. It depends on how fussy he is, how hungry he is, et cetera. So then we sleep, usually Michelle sleeps for 3, 4 hours until Benjamin wakes up and wants to eat again. Then she, she feeds him, then she pumps. That's another thing about these kids. They often won't be able to feed fully on the breast. Because their suck swallow is so uncoordinated and weak. And so they'll end up having to transition to the bottle. We did that with Benjamin when we realized he wasn't gaining any weight and he was really, really, really fussy and unhappy. It was because he couldn't eat enough because his nursing was so weak by, because of the injury. So he's been bottle fed his whole life, but Michelle's pumped the whole time, which is a whole nother thing. 'Cause a woman who's gonna pump feed a, a baby is gonna pump like 4 hours a day, which is brutal. And he's only had breast milk. He's not been fed. He hasn't yet taken solid food or baby food, which is basically to be expected because he's still recovering. Okay. So where was I? Yeah, you may need to go bottle fed. That's for you and your lactation consultant and pediatrician to sort out, but it's very likely that you'll need to. And then you got to build in nap time for mom, ideally for baby. These kids often won't tolerate being put down. Like we basically couldn't put Benjamin down unless he was asleep until recently. And now we can put him down for a couple of minutes before he starts to really whine. And to give you guys a little bit more context there, like he doesn't crawl, he doesn't roll over, he doesn't, you know, he moves all of his arms and legs. And he's starting to roll over, but he's way behind his peers. And you can't lay them down because their first experience of life, generally speaking, is like being strapped down in a little NICU bed with people cutting them, you know, cutting them, poking them, prodding them, taking blood, inserting central lines, intubating them on the breathing machine. And they have no context for this. You can't explain it to them like an adult. So their whole first experience of life is just sheer terror and confusion. When it should be, you know, being on mom's breast. So these kids have this incredible fear of being off, off of people. They want to be on you. We sort of nicknamed it Velcro child syndrome. Be prepared for that and be, and understand that it's, it's going to take them time to recover from that. A lot of them will have this terrible, and Benjamin did have this terrible startle reflex, which is if you've ever had a baby or been around an infant for any time at all, you know, there's a startle reflex that can be activated by sudden noises, loud noises, scary things, right? Sudden movement of the baby or someone near them. And that startle reflex will cause the baby to basically put their arms back or, or lay, lay their arms out and throw their head back and scream. That can last for hours with these kids because their brain is not properly wired anymore. And that was one of the Quantum Reflex integration things we did that really helped with that. And then later with functional neurologists, we saw a lot of improvement with that as well. As they resolve that startle reflex and integrate that reflex, That's when they tend to get more, you can put them down. That took like 15 months for us. It was brutal. It did get better over time, but yeah. So what else in the weeks following NICU discharge? That's the main things. Make sure the baby's eating, do whatever you gotta do to figure that out. Order allergy tests if you need them, et cetera, et cetera. I guess I'll just mention it. We use the MRT, the mediator release test right now for that, which is the one that Michelle had and that we're repeating right now. Okay. Rehabilitation, developmental, nutritional, and neuroplasticity-focused approaches that would be worth discussing in these cases. So I think I pretty well covered that. I think I pretty well covered that. Emerging or investigational therapies that families affected by HIE should be aware of. So this is where we ended up going with our, our care. So my mother-in-law Peggy, thank you Peggy, found through YouTube this Dr. Brandon Crawford in Austin, Texas, who runs a clinic that's all about helping these kids with brain injury. And he's been doing it for basically as long as possible. He's about my age, so he's been at it for almost 20 years now, which is a long time when you're only 30, I think he's 37, 36, I don't remember. And he just basically started his career in this and he's never done anything else. So I would say he's put together the best clinic in the world for it. You know, I, I can't say that I've done like a totally exhaustive search, but let's just say we've put in some time trying to find good people. He's got a phenomenal YouTube channel, by the way, which is how Peggy, my mother-in-law, heard about him. And then she just like wouldn't stop watching his videos and just was like, you gotta go see him. You gotta go see him. You gotta go see him. So we booked an initial consult. We met Dr. Crawford. I really liked him. And trusted him. And I say that having like met a lot of practitioners who take advantage of patients, and I'm very, very sensitive to that. So, you know, I'm pretty hard to win over in that respect. And he was just really great. So we booked an intensive with him at his practice. What does an intensive look like? So because his practice is so niche and because he's so good at what he does, he tends to attract cases from all over the world, like Benjamin. And because of that, it doesn't make sense for him to work with them for like one consult or two. What you end up doing is you go to his practice for an intensive, and an intensive is an entire week of treatment, morning and afternoon. Right now I'm recording this alone in the house because Michelle is there with Benjamin in another intensive. We went for a 2-week intensive in December, had a great experience, saw huge improvement in Benjamin. And I think it was like the second or third day that I was— that we were there, I turned to Michelle and I said, you know, we could live here. And I'll just, I'll just share all this. So we looked at the numbers and we said, okay, we live in Naples, Florida, one of the most expensive zip codes in the country. We moved there because her parents are there and because it's a good place to run a like ours, because if you live in a zip code like that where people can pay a higher price, then you can afford to live there. You know, what doesn't make sense is if you're, you can't charge more for what you do in that zip code, then it just, the economics are upside down. So we looked at what we were paying in Naples and we looked at what we would be spending here in Texas and we said, wow, we save a lot of money moving to Texas. And so we can use that money to pay for people to help us, support us in this journey, nannies, babysitters, et cetera. So basically we're going to have the same cost of living and the same or better amount of help. Those are the kind of things you have to figure out behind the scenes— where to live, how to live your lifestyle— that actually matter a lot to the outcome of the baby. Because, you know, if you told me I had to do this in like New York City or downtown LA, I would be like, no, absolutely not. I need to do this because what you're going to find is that you're going to go a little bit nuts unavoidably because you're going to be stuck at home with this kid who hates the car seat, and you got to be willing to deal with that. You also got to get along with your spouse and your friends and your family and your your business or your whatever, you're going to want to be able to take a long walk in a nice neighborhood. You're going to want to be able to go to the pool. You're going to want to be able to walk to the pool. You're not going to want to have to get into the car to do anything because guess what? Baby is not going to tolerate the car seat for more than 20 minutes max while they're napping. And then they're going to wake up and then they're going to be upset that you want to put them back in the car seat to go home. Real talk. Okay. So we came here to Austin, moved here. It was a lateral in terms of cost of living for us. What else? Okay. What does Crawford's team do? It's really interesting. It's like a blend of physical occupational therapy with all kinds of different things that they'll use flashing lights to stimulate these kids. They'll use vibration, they'll use sound, they'll use percussion. They'll spin them in chairs. They'll put them on exercise balls. It's, it's this whole sort of bizarre, like you walk into their main therapy room and it's like, you're like, am I in a child's I think I'm in a child's playroom, but there's all this weird equipment around. And so that's what therapy consists of. Now Crawford's also very well known for light therapy because one of the things about these kids, right, I just covered how hard it is to get nutrition into them. Very hard. You know, light though, you can deploy light in these kids and it's really effective. Why? The brain hasn't fully, or the skull, I should say, hasn't fully developed. So the skull in an adult is thick and difficult for light to penetrate, but even in adults, light coming into the skull will be funneled into the deepest corners of the brain. To optimize physiologic functions. So the brain actually uses light to optimize itself. It's why transcranial photobiomodulation, photobiomodulation, light therapy, transcranial through the skull is becoming more and more a thing. They're using it particularly like the DOD is studying this. A lot of companies are looking into this with them and other organizations to treat brain injury, stroke, et cetera. So Crawford's been doing this in kids for a long time. He invented his own laser. There's other lasers out there we've used. We use some of them at Dr. Amadeus before we came to Crawford and we bought Dr. Crawford's laser. We bought the other therapy devices he recommended that we use with Benjamin regularly. And between all that, the therapy, et cetera, he's got a lot of other things at his office that I don't, I don't know the names of, but they're various devices. Between all that, we've seen really, really huge improvements. And I would have to say that if 0 is where Benjamin was when he started and 10 is where we'd like him to be, and let me explain where I would like him to be. I'd like him to be walking, talking, and taking care of himself. I would say that he's about 50% of the way there. Now, I want to be really clear. He still doesn't roll over. He doesn't walk. He doesn't crawl. He doesn't play with his hands and feet. He doesn't put things in his mouth. He's delayed. But from where we were, which was not able to put him down, screaming really, really, really loudly at the slightest noise or startle, barely able to eat, throwing up all the time, not really responsive. Like he just, he was, you know, it was heartbreaking. He would, it was like he would just sort of have this blank stare a lot of the time. Now he's like looking around, curious about his world, interacting with us more. I would say he's about 50% of where we want him to be. Now, I'd really like him to be able to play chess and do calculus, but you know, I'll be happy if I can have a conversation with him and he can take a walk with me. Let's just put it that way. And I would say he's about 50% of the way to that for whatever that's worth. Okay. Another thing at Crawford's that's worth mentioning, because a lot of people offer this. So you've also got therapies that are more sophisticated regenerative modalities, specifically two. VSEL and stem cells. So what's VSEL? VSEL stands for very small embryonic-like particles. In this procedure, the child has an IV started, their blood is drawn out, it is spun down, it is processed in a certain way that activates healing cofactors and factors that are very small embryonic-like particles. Those then home to the sites of injury in the brain where the regeneration is needed, and then you see this healing start to happen. Michelle was very impressed with the results of this procedure for Benjamin. I have to tell you that, like, as a clinician who works with a lot of things that work immediately or next week or 12 weeks from now, I got to tell you, it's very hard to know what's working, my opinion. But we've done VSEL now, I think twice. And I think we're doing it again this week. It's hard to keep track. I'm just working a lot so we can do all this. Stem cells, the hangup, VSEL is obviously your own body or the baby's own body stuff. So we didn't have any concerns about doing that. Stem cells, totally different kettle of fish, right? So stem cells, you know, You know, if you were really smart, you could get your stem cells from your cord blood and then use those in your kid. But guess what? No one's planning on having this happen. So the likelihood of you doing that is very low. Stem cells are derived from other people. And that is something that there's a concern about. Like, what does it mean that we're introducing these cells from other people into a little baby? So far, no one has seen a danger signal from doing this, which is good, of course, but the data is very early and these could be complications that emerge over decades. Not months or years. So how do you know? Michelle's been very wary of doing stem cells. I've been wary, but I'm more open to it than her. We still talk about it, but overwhelmingly what we've done is we've just, we were really candid with Crawford. Hey, you've seen cases like this before. What do you think's possible? He's seen kids like Benjamin make full recoveries. So we said, okay, great. We're just going to go all in towards that. In my own practice, what I'm paying attention to is what is the trajectory of the patient? If someone is getting worse and worse and worse, it tells me we haven't found the root causes and we're not working on them fast enough or hard enough to turn things around. But as soon as patients start to see traction and improvement, then the question is how much faster and harder can we push them? And do we need to push them faster or harder? And that is a very difficult thing to answer, particularly when you're dealing with a case like this where the stakes are very high. You know, it sort of haunts me to think, well, if we do stem cells, maybe it'll be the difference between him being able to do calculus and not being able to do even algebra. I don't know. I trust in Jesus. So we pray about it a lot. Maybe we should pray about it more, but pretty sure that that's always true. That's pretty much all of it. That's what we did. That's where we are. I can't think of anything else we've, we've got. I'm probably going to walk out of my office and see some box or some therapy that's sitting there that we haven't used in 6 weeks. And I'll think, oh, I should have mentioned that. But I really do think I got everything major. Yeah. Biggest lessons. Pray, definitely ask God for wisdom and pray with your spouse because you need to be a team and get help from everyone who's willing to help you. And I think that's about it. All right. We only have one question for today's Q&A other than these questions from John, from Christine. How do you handle circadian rhythm changes throughout different seasons of the year? Completely different topic. So basically I want people to think about how we slept historically. So historically we slept and let's talk about Northern Europe or Northern Asia, where there's a long day in the summer. And short day in the winter. So people in those latitudes slept in the winter for like 6 hours post-sundown. And then they would wake up and be active for a couple of hours doing whatever they could without much light or any light. And then they would go back to sleep early in the morning and they would sleep to, you know, a little bit before dawn. So there's actually this normal biphasic sleep routine in cold, dark places in the winter. That doesn't work for modern people with modern jobs. Just so you know, how do we handle it? Well, most people have handled it by recreating the long summer days. Which doesn't work well for your melatonin, right? It wrecks your melatonin. And so you want to use low blue lights after dark. But what I tell people who live in a cold dark place is, look, go to sleep around 10:00 PM and then wake up at 6:00 AM. And that's going to give you a nice solid 8-hour window for sleep. If you go to bed too early because you're trying to be really circadian or honor nature's rhythms, you can paradoxically worsen your sleep. Like if you go to sleep at 9:00, you may end up waking up at 2, 3, 4, 5 o'clock in the morning and not realize that it's actually because you're going to sleep too early. So you push your sleep back. And you sleep better through the night. I know that might sound surprising, but that's what I've seen. Now, on the other side, if you want to do the other thing, you could go to sleep at 4, 5, 6 o'clock, wake up in the middle of the night, be awake, then go back to sleep. I just don't find that most people want to do that. In the summer, what do you do? You just force your sleeping window into the natural darkness and you wake up or whenever you naturally wake up. And so that's how I deal with circadian rhythm changes through the different seasons of the year. It's bedtime's never later than 10:00 PM and waking up is never later than 6, but if I were to live in, say, Maine again, where I lived for 3 years for residency and say the sun was setting at 9 and it was getting up at 5, I'd sleep 9 to 5. And otherwise I just keep it to that 10 to 6 window, which is what's in the 14-Day Reset, by the way, in part because of that. So as always, thank you for being a member. If you're listening to this on Substack or somewhere that you listen to podcasts, you can join our community. It's coming out soon. Stay tuned for details. They'll be released first at drstillmanuncensored.com, which is my Substack personal blog and podcast, and I look forward to seeing many of you in our community. It's going to be really fun. We've already had a soft launch, so members of the practice and paid subscribers at Substack— paid subscribers at Substack get access this Friday, and then we'll be rolling it out in the coming weeks. And I don't know when this is going to air, so don't try to— don't worry about it. Just if you want access to the community, you want to be able to ask me questions like this and get a really thoughtful, detailed answer like these every week, go to drstillmanuncensored.com and find the link to our online community and join us. All right, everyone. Take care. Have a great day. Be well. Thank you for listening to Integrative Medicine with Dr. Leland Stillman. If this conversation felt uncomfortably familiar and you're ready for someone to take your story seriously, your next step is to book a call with myself or a member of my team. Go to stillmanmd.com and click book a call. Choose a time that works for you and confirm it. On that call, we'll look at your story in more detail and see whether our framework is a good fit for your situation. If it is, we'll outline what a realistic path forward could look like for you. This is not emergency care and it's not a guarantee of results. It's a calm, structured assessment where we'll create a plan to help you achieve your health goals. We have a limited number of calls available each month. So if you see a time that fits your schedule, book it right away. Again, the link is stillmanmd.com. If you find this podcast helpful, subscribe, leave a review, or share this episode with a friend or family member who needs help getting their health back. I'm Dr. Leland Stillman. Thank you for listening, and until next time, be well.