Rethinking Childhood Chronic Illness: Root-Cause Healing and the Essential Role of Health Coaches

On Tuesday, August 11th, FMCA hosted a special Ask the Expert webinar featuring Beth Lambert, author, educator, and Founder and Executive Director of Documenting Hope. For nearly two decades, Beth has researched the dramatic rise in childhood chronic illness and neurodevelopmental conditions while documenting how personalized, root-cause approaches can help children experience meaningful improvements in health. Through her nonprofit, Documenting Hope, Beth leads independent research exploring the cumulative impact of environmental stressors on children’s health and the role of lifestyle, nutrition, and systems-based care in supporting healing.

In this conversation, hosted by Dr. Sandra Scheinbaum, Beth discusses why childhood chronic conditions continue to rise, the concept of “total load,” and how addressing foundational contributors, including nutrition, the microbiome, environmental exposures, nervous system regulation, and family lifestyle, can create new opportunities for healing. She also shares insights from the Documenting Hope FLIGHT Study, which examines how education, health coaching, and personalized lifestyle interventions support families navigating autism and other complex chronic conditions.

For current students, incoming students, and FMCA alumni, this webinar offers valuable insight into the growing need for health coaches in pediatric and family-centered care. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of root-cause health, learn how health coaches can help families implement sustainable lifestyle changes, and explore how compassionate coaching can become an essential part of helping children and caregivers thrive.

In this webinar replay, you will learn:

• Why childhood chronic illness and neurodevelopmental conditions continue to rise
• How the concept of total load helps explain the complex factors influencing children’s health
• The role of nutrition, environmental health, nervous system regulation, and personalized lifestyle interventions in supporting healing
• What the Documenting Hope FLIGHT Study is teaching us about education, health coaching, and family-centered care
• How health coaches can effectively support parents and caregivers through sustainable behavior change and root-cause lifestyle approaches
• Practical strategies for partnering with families while staying within the health coach scope of practice

Watch the Replay

Rethinking Childhood Chronic Illness: Root-Cause Healing and the Essential Role of Health Coaches, With Beth Lambert:

Listen to Beth’s Episode of Health Coach Talk here: Healing Childhood Chronic Illness, With Beth Lambert

Transcript

Transcript coming sDr. Sandi: This is going to be, as I said, a really amazing presentation. I have known Beth for many years, and she is the founder of Documenting Hope. And truly, this is hope. This is hope for children. This is hope for families who are suffering. And I firmly believe that health coaches can be key to helping families thrive. And so, this might be an area that you want to focus on. So, consider that as you’re listening to Beth’s presentation. So, without further ado, I’m going to turn it over to our presenter today, Beth Lambert.

Beth: Thank you, Sandi. So, I am a children’s health advocate, and I’ve been working in this area for almost 20 years. And I’m going to be talking about the epidemic of chronic illness in our kids and how we need to start thinking more from a root cause perspective to heal this generation of kids, and importantly, the role that health coaches play, because so much of this epidemic has to do with the way we’re living. And there’s nobody better suited for teaching and guiding people into changing the way that they’re living than health coaches. So, somebody who’s a big advocate for that work.

Just a little bit about me. Like I said, I’ve been doing this work for almost 20 years. I’ve published a couple of books on the subject of the chronic illness epidemic, and one specifically on PANS and PANDAS. I’m working on a new book right now on autism. So, that’s something that I feel very passionate about, is the epidemic of autism, because there’s so much we can do to help support these kids.

I also founded Documenting Hope, which is a nonprofit organization, which is dedicated to helping understand the root causes of these chronic health conditions, and also giving parents and practitioners solutions for prevention and reversal of these conditions. We also have a whole research arm that I’ll share.

So, the reason I do this work is because of this massive, massive epidemic that people tend to think is specific to one diagnosis. They’ll say, oh, well, maybe there is an autism epidemic, or maybe there’s an allergy epidemic, or maybe there’s an obesity epidemic. My perspective is it’s all one epidemic. It’s just that the labels that we give to these conditions vary according to everyone’s bio-individuality and what they’ve been exposed to and what their history is. But the point is that we are all…every single one of us on planet Earth, but especially in the modern industrial countries especially, we’re all watching this really incredible decline of health and autism in adults, but in children who are supposed to be healthy because they haven’t even had time to do all the things that require chronic illness to develop or, typically, I would say, in adults.

So, these are just some of the statistics that you can look at. You can see everything, kind of looks like a hockey stick. One of the things that is, like I said before, most concerning to me is the autism epidemic because this isn’t just something like an allergy or asthma that you could sort of manage and get through the day. This is a…for many kids, as many as 40% of children diagnosed with autism may be considered either moderate to severely affected. They cannot live on their own. Some of them require 24/7 care. We don’t have a system set up to manage that.

The statistics in the U.S., the last CDC number that came out was 1 in 31 children in the U.S. But you start looking deeper into the numbers, and it’s higher in some localities. Like California, it’s 1 in 20. In Northern Ireland, it’s 1 in 16. So, this isn’t unique to the United States. This is something, again, that’s affecting modern industrial countries.

So, this is part of…there’s the physical health. There’s the diagnoses like autism and autoimmune diseases. But I also think, one of the things that’s such a significant crisis for us is the mental health of young adults. And we’re talking about people who are going to be the adults leading the world very soon. And we have almost half of young adults between 16 and 19 either overweight or obese. So, metabolic health feeds right into mental health. And we have an epidemic of psychiatric conditions where half or more of young adults meet the criteria for psychiatric diagnoses. And when you start thinking about what that means, it’s not just a little anxiety. We’re talking about young adults who are talking about killing themselves, that are actually experiencing suicidal ideation regularly. People who are getting diagnosed with clinical anxiety, clinical depression are being medicated for it.

And I think some of these statistics are really just so concerning, especially this last one, where 12% of young adults, according to the American College Health Association’s health assessment that they had done in 2022, 12% had intentionally injured themselves within that year. So, this is something that is a crisis for most families. And I think a lot of them are dealing with this on their own. People tend to hide mental health issues and don’t necessarily talk about it outrightly. But this is something that is brewing under the surface that I think we need to put our attention on.

And this isn’t just about the cost to our healthcare system. This has broad and really incredible implications for what’s happening to our country and our ability to thrive. The economic impact is huge. Of course, we all know the spiraling costs of healthcare. And remember, the costs in healthcare are about managing symptoms. They’re not about the cost we’re spending to cure or reverse these conditions. We’re talking about spending billions and even trillions of dollars on managing symptoms with pharmaceuticals, mostly.

But there’s also a national security issue here, too. And I always talk about this report that was put out in 2017 because I think it is just illustrative of how close we are to a major tipping point here. There was this report put out by some retired military leaders, generals, admirals, who were very concerned about the future and our ability to actually fill the armed services with fit and competent young people.

In this report — it was literally called Too Fat to Fight — they had indicated that 71% of Americans aged 17 to 24 did not meet the criteria for eligibility to serve in the military due to either mental or physical health challenges. And a third of those new recruits were ineligible just due to obesity. So, a lot of these new recruits had criminal records who were mentally unstable. But when you’re talking about the vast majority of young adults who want to serve in the military, are trying to, but are rejected because they’re not mentally or physically well enough to, the alarm bells should be ringing, and we should really be paying attention to what’s going on.

So, I just wanted to set the stage a little bit to give a sense of how urgent this whole health situation in our country is. And I would say, most of the people that are dealing with mental and physical health issues are just managing. So, it’s kind of like a simmering crisis, but I do believe we’re hitting a tipping point soon that we really need to get on top of.

So, one of the things that I hear a lot, especially with regard to the autism epidemic, but also when you’re talking about autoimmune diseases or mental health issues, people always go to this line that it’s somehow caused by genetics. We’re stuck in this idea of genetic determinism that somehow if you have cardiovascular disease or if you have a bipolar diagnosis or if you have a depression diagnosis, that somebody in your genetic line had it, too, like somehow it was your genes that are the reason you have this condition.

That’s this conception that we’ve had for decades that really needs to be challenged because we know that health is so much more than just genetics. Genetics are, of course, important, but we know it’s really about the gene environment interaction. It’s about our genes, yes, but it’s also what is turning our genes on, what is turning them off, what are the choices we’re making every day, what’s in our environment, what does our mindset look like? All of those things can influence genetic expression.

So, I think we need to really start thinking about not just our predisposition to health issues, it’s what is it in our daily lives that is resulting in symptoms and diagnoses at the breathtaking rate that we’re seeing.

So, of course, my focus is on children and why we’re seeing so many sick kids. It’s worth repeating. Children are not supposed to be sick. They’re just not. They’re the ones that are supposed to be healthy, and out running around, and living their best lives. And over time, people develop chronic illnesses as life wears them down, and maybe they’re stressed out or eat poor diets. Maybe, sure, in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people start developing chronic illnesses, but we’re seeing this in our children. So, that should be a red blaring alarm that something is wrong with our environment, something is affecting their health.

And if you start looking around for what does science say about why our kids are so sick? What is it? Is it toxins and chemicals? Is it all of the antibiotics that kids have been on? Is it the fast…stressful lives, fast-paced, stressful lives? What is it that is causing our kids to be so sick? And the answer to that is you could go into PubMed, into the NIH database of medical literature, and find thousands, literally thousands of variables that are correlated with worse health outcomes for kids, or correlated with specific diseases or conditions or symptoms.

So, as an example, you can find tons of medical literature pointing to glyphosate, herbicides, or other kinds of pesticides or chemicals that are sprayed agriculturally as a major contributor to health problems. You could go into the medical literature and find out that artificial blue light, staying inside all the time under synthetic lighting actually has negative health effects. You could find literature supporting the fact that cellphones are an exposure for kids that are causing health problems.

So, my point is that this is an endless list of exposures and experiences that children have today that are linked to health issues. So, what the net result of that is…because there’s no one smoking gun, people kind of don’t take these things as seriously as they should. Because they’ll say, well, correlation is not causation.

So, where I like to push back on this is to say, well, maybe it isn’t about the specific individual things. Maybe it isn’t the proton pump inhibitors that the baby had neonatally. Maybe it isn’t the mercury and the air pollution. Maybe it isn’t the cellphone exposure that’s a one-to-one cause and effect kind of relationship. It’s more about this concept of total load.

So, the Total Load Theory is something that I’ve been talking about for a very long time because I think it synthesizes what we’re facing with why people are so sick today, but it also gives us a path forward in how to address it. The Total Load Theory is something that’s been talked about in environmental medicine for a very long time. It was Patricia Lemer, who was one of the kind of thought leaders in autism, who, years ago, applied this concept of total load or total body burden to autism and to children’s neurodevelopment.

And what this concept essentially is, is that it isn’t about one specific health stressor like antibiotics or acetaminophen or highly processed foods. It’s about the cumulative and compounding effect of all of them. And each individual stressor is made worse by being combined with other stressors. So, the analogy we always use is that if your body was a barrel and you only had so much capacity in this barrel and each health stressor… Again, these are all things that are documented in the medical literature to be harmful to health. If each health stressor were a drop of water being put into that barrel, at some point, the barrel will fill up and you have no more capacity to tolerate stressors. And this is the Total Load Theory.

The other thing about the Total Load Theory, which is important to think through, is that this isn’t just about a child’s body and their specific capacity to handle health stressors. What we’re witnessing happening here is a multigenerational effect, where anything that affected a grandmother or a great-grandmother can have an influence several generations down the road.

So, as an example, we had the miracle of antibiotics. And starting in the 1930s with the sulfa drugs and then in World War II, we had these, essentially, miracle pills that could treat something like tuberculosis that would have otherwise killed people. The problem is these miracle drugs also came with consequences. When you take an antibiotic, it wipes out your microbiome, which is the seat of your immune system. It’s where you manufacture your neurotransmitters. It’s how you digest your food and extract nutrients. And so, there’s consequences for taking antibiotics.

And if you think about this, we’ve had now three, four, or potentially going into even five generations of humans who have routinely taken antibiotics going back from 1930s on. So, if you had a grandmother who took antibiotics, she altered her microbiome, and some would argue, even irrevocably. And then she hands her microbiome down to her children. And those children might have taken a couple of rounds of antibiotics, further causing disruptions to the microbiome. And then that microbiome is handed down to the next generation because the microbiome is transferred vaginally at birth from mother to baby.

So, this is just one illustration of how this is a multigenerational effect of living in a toxic industrial world. And it passes from one generation to the next. And if anybody’s ever studied Weston Price…and he talks about Pottenger’s cats. That’s the concept of each subsequent generation gets weaker and weaker over time. So, it’s really multigenerational, and we need to start recognizing that.

So, the thing that’s really wonderful about this Total Load Theory, too, is there is a corollary to this theory that I really like, which isn’t so much just about the stressors going into the barrel. It is also about the things that you can do to build the size and shape of your barrel to increase your overall resilience. So, there are so many wonderful things that we can shift. And this is why I believe health coaches are the key to this whole epidemic is because the things that we have control over in our daily lives can actually increase our resilience, and increase our ability to handle the toxins and the stressors and all the things associated with the modern world.

So, getting into natural circadian rhythms, like getting up with the sun and winding down when the sun goes down, getting outside into sunlight, and getting out into nature, and especially into fully natural environments like forests and beaches, etc. Having access to clean water, and clean air, and nutrient-dense whole foods, doing things like breathing techniques to manage your stress, and moving, getting exercise, and sleeping, and touching the earth, and having wonderful, loving, supporting relationships. These are examples of things that can help support our health and build our overall resilience.

So, you think that this all makes sense for conditions like asthma or autoimmune diseases, where you can see the body kind of having an inflammatory response. But you might be wondering, why are we seeing so many neurodevelopmental conditions? The total load is too great on our children, but why is it resulting in things like autism, and ADHD, and sensory processing disorder, which are a very distinct group of inflammatory conditions, but they affect the brain in development.

So, the reason why is because this total load of stressors is impacting our children during critical developmental windows. So, that’s really…if you think about it, preconception all the way through their life cycle, but really in utero, in the neonatal period, and in the first couple of years of life, as these children are developing things like vision, visual processing capabilities, auditory processing capabilities, they’re learning to feel their way through the environment. They’re developing social relationships.

So, all of this stuff happens when a child is growing and developing. And if they have too many stressors on their bodies during these critical times of development, too many toxins, too many infections, too much emotional stress, what happens is that their body is going to always prioritize survival over development.

So, there’s a baby sitting there, being like, okay, I can either deal with the inflammation from this infection I have, I can deal with the strain on my liver trying to get rid of this toxin that is circulating in my body, or I can take that energy and focus on vision. And the body’s going to always pick survival. So, this is what our babies are stuck with today. Their bodies have to choose on a moment-to-moment basis whether they’re going to handle the threats and the stressors in the environment, or whether they’re going to focus on vision, and crawling, and developing relationships, and having their brains grow in a typical way. So, this is why we see so many neurodevelopmental conditions in our children.

And so, essentially, what this means is that they have too many stressors, not enough health supports, say, good nutrition, getting outside, getting movement, natural movement. They have too many stressors, not enough supports during critical times of development. And if this is not addressed, that can last them the rest of their lifetime. Those developmental impairments will stick.

So, one of the things we have to do as we’re thinking about how do we help these kids, not only do we have to reduce their total load, we also have to sometimes think about what happened to them during those developmental windows when they should have been crawling, when they should have been learning to walk, when they should have been learning to bond with their caregivers, and what got in the way and prevented that from happening, because those milestones can actually be revisited.

So, we’re not going to be able to do that, though, until we shift our paradigm and the way we think about health in this country and as a culture. Right now, the way we think about health, and I know you all understand this, is that we’re set up in this sort of symptom-suppressive model, where you go to the doctor, you have a headache. Well, what can we use to suppress the symptom, to stop the pain? So, you get a medication. Well, that isn’t actually getting to the root cause. And so, all you’re doing is kicking the can down the road and basically forcing the body to deal with whatever it’s dealing with. But you’re not curing it, you’re not healing it, you’re not addressing the reasons for it.

We need to shift into a different mindset where we ask questions. Well, you have a headache. Why do you have a headache? What might be contributing to that? What is underneath the surface? What are the root causes of your headache? And we need to be thinking about our bodies and the supports they need. We need to be nourishing our bodies. We need to be doing things that our bodies know to do and have developed over thousands of years to do, moving naturally, being outside, being in social relationships, being in community. In order for us to have health and wellness, we need to address the root causes. And the root causes, I believe, are largely about how we are living in the modern world.

So, I just want to take a moment very briefly, and then we can get to some questions that you may have. I want to talk about what Documenting Hope is and what we do because I…once I understood what was happening to this generation of kids, and I also understood that many of these conditions are reversible. I had met people who had fully reversed autism in their children, who had fully reversed autoimmune diseases in their children. Once I knew that was possible, I knew we needed to do more to make this the standard of care because that is not the standard of care right now. The standard of care is just managing symptoms.

So, I’m really working every day through our organization to try and shift that paradigm towards the nourish, and the heal, and the thrive, and really get people to move away from that symptom-suppressive model.

So, what Documenting Hope does, we’re a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, been around since 2009. Again, we focus on root causes. And so, we’re helping parents and practitioners learn how to identify the root causes. We have educational programming, both for families and for practitioners, including a pediatric-focused health coach training program, which I’ll talk about in a second. We have a couple of research studies that test models of healing. So, we want to collect evidence to prove that this type of approach to health and wellness is superior to the systems that we’re using right now. And we want to really understand, through research and science, this concept of total load and how it is meaningful for our health.

And then we also spend a lot of time documenting cases of people who have fully healed, children who have fully healed. So, I’ve been documenting these stories of kids who have overcome all kinds of conditions, like I said, for almost 20 years. And you can see a lot of our stories on YouTube or on our website. These are stories of kids who have overcome the most incredible odds, like level three, non-speaking autism, who grew up to be PhDs, and get married, and have families, and incredible healing stories. So, you can go to YouTube and watch some of our stories there.

We’ve also, through our research program, published several papers documenting cases of full reversal of autism in particular. Although we’re always looking to publish more on the reversal of condition through diet and lifestyle changes. These two papers you can find in PubMed. So, we had a set of twin girls who lost their autism diagnosis by using a total load approach, addressing the root causes and bio-individually healing the children. And then the second paper we have here was the documented case of the reversal of autism in a boy whose mother used the specific carbohydrate diet to help him overcome his autism symptoms and eventually lose his diagnosis. We continue to do that.

So, as I’ve been documenting all these stories of people who have overcome these conditions, there’s learnings, there’s teachings, there’s things that you can extract from all of these stories. And what I will say is that probably the most important part on all of these recovery stories or success stories is parent-led intervention. In other words, time and time again, parents will come to me and say, “Who’s the doctor that I should take my child to for their autoimmune condition? Who’s the doctor that will show me what I need to do?” And that is never what results in a success story. What results in a success story is the parents who rolled up their sleeves and took what they knew about their individual child and made changes in their daily life and what they did every single day to help their child’s body heal and help them overcome whatever their challenges were.

So, this is usually involving an integrative approach, a total load approach. And essentially, that means leaning into things that are natural and eliminating things from their life that are synthetic. And that’s from synthetic things like artificial light to synthetic foods to synthetic chemicals, and really start doing everything that you can naturally. And that’s with regard to what they’re eating, what’s in the environment, what kind of medical care they’re getting. I mean, people are stopping going to conventional medicine and they’re going to naturopaths, functional medicine doctors, and looking differently at their health that way. And then of course, the families who overcome neurodevelopmental things like autism usually had to do some rehabilitation work. They had to go back in and address some of those milestones.

So, this isn’t about just healing the gut or just going after infections. It’s never about one lane. It’s about the whole child and addressing the gut, the immune, the endocrine, the nervous system. It’s the whole system that needs to be supported and given what it needs to heal.

So, just very briefly, we have a research program. I mentioned the papers that we’ve published. These are actually some research studies that we’re running, again, to better understand total load and also how to help these kids heal. We’re really just interested in accelerating the timeline here for kids so that they have an opportunity to grow up to live full lives.

So, the CHIRP Study and the FLIGHT Study are our two signature research programs. The CHIRP Study, we started in 2018, started collecting data. And what it has… We’ve learned a lot from this study. It’s a massive questionnaire where we ask parents to tell us everything they could tell us about their child’s health history, but also what kinds of things they’re eating, what are they putting on their skin, how did they spend their time every day. Anything that you could imagine that would influence a child’s health positively or negatively, we capture data on that.

And what we’ve learned is that the total load is a real thing. I mean, this is just summarizing a lot that we’ve learned. But probably the most important thing we’ve learned is that total load is measurable, and it correlates with worse health outcomes. So, what you’re looking at here is, on the bottom, there’s the illness index, and going straight up, there’s the stressor index. And what this tells us, if you know sort of the curvilinear relationship, the more stressors a child has, the worse their health outcomes are. It sounds like common sense, but that’s not actually how we treat children when they have chronic illness. We should be telling everybody, as a rule, if your child has a chronic illness, reduce their total load of health stressors, increase their supports, but that’s not the advice we’re giving our families unless they’re working with a Functional Medicine Coaching Academy coach, then they’re probably getting that advice. That needs to be universal.

I’ll also mention very briefly the other study that we’re running right now. This is the FLIGHT Study. This is a intervention study. It stands for Facilitated Longitudinal Investigation of Genuine Health Transformation. This is a 12-month-long clinical pilot study of children who are diagnosed with autism. And we are essentially assessing what happens when you empower the parents with knowledge and with coaching support, what happens to their child’s health when you teach them about nutrition, when you teach the parents about nervous system regulation and mindfulness, when you teach the parents about environmental chemicals and the danger they pose to children. And you teach the parents about all the things that they can proactively do to help their children heal.

So, right now, we have 12 children, 12 families enrolled in this study. They’re all over the country. They come from nine different states. We’ve put them into three cohorts, and each cohort is led by a coach. These are coaches that we have trained in our program. So, they have sort of that holistic kind of viewpoint that natural health, the root causes, the total load perspective. And what the coaches are doing is they’re guiding a family through a structured curriculum. So, that is basically 12 months of material. And every week, they get a read, a watch, and a do. So, it’s kind of like you join a program, you’re getting educated. And then every week, the cohort meets in a group coaching environment. And they’re there for support, they’re there for education, and they’re there to guide the families through the program.

So, this study is just underway, and it will conclude next summer. And we’ll be able to hopefully share back with you the results from this study.

So, the other thing is just to familiarize you with what Documenting Hope offers, because if you’re out in the world working with families and they need support and they want to learn how to do this healing work for their children, we have a health coach training course, which I’ll tell you about in a second.

We have a massive online library. You could go into our website, documentinghope.com, you could type into the search bar, eczema, or pathological demand avoidance, or alopecia, or ADHD, or whatever you want to learn about. And we have so much information in that library. We have a practitioner directory and a health coach directory. We also have a membership and community program called Healing Together, which I’ll talk about in a second. We have our documented success stories, which I mentioned. We also have an annual conference we do, and we do educational events. We do free expert webinars and book reviews and so much more.

So, I just want to share with you, this health coach training program is meant for people who have gone through FMCA, IIN, NTA, any of these nutrition or wellness or health coaching programs, who want to specialize in pediatrics. We have an online self-directed program. We do meet once a month with our health coaches, and it’s a wonderful community of people who are really just looking to help support families.

And one thing that’s really great about this program is we are in the process of updating our coaching program into a much more robust program that incorporates things that we’ve learned over the last 10 years. And we’ll be relaunching that program in about two months’ time. So, October probably is when it will be re-released.

And anyone who’s in our existing health coach program now or anyone who’s already graduated from our health coach program will get free access to the new program. So, it’s a tremendous value. It’s a two-for-one. You get two programs for the price of one, which is really great. And we love our community of health coaches.

I also wanted to share with you a resource for parents. It’s called Healing Together. And so, parents can come on and self-serve information from our website. They can find a practitioner, they can listen to our webinars, they can get all the articles and information that they might need, but sometimes parents need a little more support.

So, we’ve created this online community. We meet twice a month. We have integrative physicians and our health coaches who host these calls, and are basically there for Q&A. So, if you have a child who’s got ADHD and you want to know what functional lab testing to do, you can come on and ask questions of our integrative doctor, like, should I do a note test? Should I do a sensitivity test? What’s in standard blood work? Or maybe you just want to talk about constipation and how hard it is to overcome constipation.

So, our program is there to answer questions, but we also have parents there who talk to each other. And it’s kind of this wonderful community of parents who are all supporting one another. I love that part. I’m usually on every call twice a month. And we also have an online forum and tons of other resources inside that community.

And finally, the last thing I’ll mention is what I call our family reunion. I love this event so much. We do this every year in Orlando. This is our Health and Healing Expo. So, it’s a two-day in-person conference. We bring together experts from microbiome, mitochondria, nutrition, and we even have some interesting new topics around photobiomodulation, nervous system regulation, high phenolic olive oil. We’ve got all these interesting topics. This year, we have Garry Lineham, who is our keynote. He’s talking about fascia and the role that fascia plays in our health.

And for two days of lectures, we also have a big expo hall with the health and wellness companies exhibiting. I love this event because, like I said, it’s like a family reunion. So, all of our health coaches and our families who we sort of see remotely online in our online programs, we get to see everybody in person. And everyone’s there giving hugs and supporting one another. And it’s kind of like just being around other people who get it. And so, I’m excited for this event. It’s November 21st and 22nd at the Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando. So, just wanted to mention that.

And with that, that was very fast talking and a lot of information, but I wanted to give a full overview of the work that we do, the perspective that I have. And happy to answer any questions.

Dr. Sandi: Well, that was wonderful. And I have been such a supporter of you and your organization. And you are offering hope to these families. So, we have a question that has come in from Antonio. What would be your top actionable recommendations for parents who want to minimize the toxic load of children, particularly most…concerning most of the modern world…yes, living with…the toxic soup, basically.

Beth: Yeah. I mean, I think the lowest-hanging fruit that you’re going to get the most bang for your buck on is thinking about your home environment and what in the home environment is synthetic. So, that can be food. Is the food in the pantry or refrigerated? Is it fresh fruits and vegetables and pastured meats and healthy fats, or is it processed food? So, that’s, of course, a major source of your load is what you’re eating every day.

But also start thinking about your home environment in terms of what chemicals you might be exposed to. And a lot of times people get caught up and be like, is this product safe, or is this toxic chemical dangerous? And that’s not the right question to ask. It’s how natural is this product? So, if you think about that as your lens for which you see everything, and you think about, all right, I’ve got shampoo, I’ve got soap, I’ve got toothpaste, you can turn it over and see if you recognize things. Does it say baking soda, or does it say some chemical compound you can’t even pronounce? If it has some kind of chemical compound you can’t even pronounce, that’s where you make those decisions.

It doesn’t have to be all at once. But I always tell families, over time, what you want to do is start trading out the synthetic things that you have, anything that’s chemical, anything that’s processed, and start adding in everything that’s as close to nature as possible. That’s like your mattresses. Are they made of cotton and wool, or are they polyester? Is your paint giving off the smell when you paint your walls at home? Does it smell chemically? Well, then, you probably don’t want to do.

So, it’s all that kind of… There’s a million decisions of things that you can add or subtract from your home. But if you always use that lens of is this as close to nature as possible, that’s going to be your North Star, your guiding light. So, that, I feel like, is the best synthesized low-hanging fruit. Go natural as much as possible. That means also spend as much time outside in nature as possible.

Dr. Sandi: How do you begin? How do you support parents who are just overwhelmed by this? What, I have to consider everything in my home, my mattress? They’re already stressed with the demands of having a child with special needs. And then they’re being told or they read that they have to make all these changes. They’re expensive. It’s very stressful. So, what would you say, and how can a coach help people to start small?

Beth: So, I actually think the very first step is not necessarily like running through your house and throwing things away. I don’t actually think that’s the first step. The first step is actually to find another person. Find another person who is interested in doing the same thing as you. If you’re like, you know what? I’m gonna get healthier again. Or I really want to learn more about how to make my home a safe environment. Find another person who wants to do that with you. So, for instance, it could be a sister or a brother who’s interested in going on a health journey or a friend who could be like an accountability partner.

This is why I love health coaching, too, because that health coaching person can be there as your sounding board, as your, like, tell me I’m not crazy that I’m thinking about doing this. Just somebody who’s there to talk to. Because what I always say about this health and healing journey is that in order for somebody to embark on a healing journey and change all the things in their lives, the things that are in their home, the things that they’re eating, you basically have to live counterculture. You have to live opposite from what everybody else is doing.

Everybody else has got the pink and blue cupcakes at the birthday parties and everybody else has got the fingernail polish and the perfumes and all of these things that are normal. But those things are…because they’re part of our culture, it feels very hard to be outside of that normal. So, when you find somebody else who wants to get holistic with you, who is a little bit more crunchy, who wants to embark on this healing journey with you, it feels safer, and you don’t feel so alone. And I think that’s the most important thing you can do, is find your person.

Dr. Sandi: I love that. Absolutely, the power of community. So, Dianne wants to know where to find the Healing Together group and information to share with parents.

Beth: So, if you go to documentinghope.com/community. And so, if you just go onto our website and there’s the tab for resources, you’ll see…just follow the link to our community. It has its own website. It’s healing.documentinghope.com. But you can just go to documentinghope.com and look for community, and you can access the membership program there.

Dr. Sandi: Right. Okay. How about an adult who has ADHD? Would the online info that you have on ADHD apply to them as well?

Beth: Absolutely. So, one of the things that I think we do is we think that children and adults need something totally different, which they do. Developmentally, children do. But the principles of healthy living are universal. So, if you’re talking about something, like a child is going through a developmental trajectory, they are going to need different information. But the principles of diet, of exercise, of lifestyle, of getting outside, that is universal for all humans. So, if you have an adult with ADHD, the same things that we talk about on our website about diet changes, about reducing the total load, they’re going to work for an adult with ADHD, too.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. Absolutely. Which reminds me, I have dear friends, and they have a grandchild with autism, and the family…the grandchild and parents are moving in with the grandparents. And the granddad just diagnosed with Parkinson’s. And this would be such an opportune time for getting healthy together, moving the toxic load, everything that applies to neurodevelopmental disorders degenerative. And yet, these people would look at me like I’m some weirdo, like, what is she talking about? This is crazy. Which leads into my next question from…which is there’s credibility in healthcare providers, particularly conventional healthcare providers, which are my friends’ situation. How receptive are parents to working with health coaches? What’s been your experience?

Beth: I think that a lot of the conventional medical doctors are the people who want to help you. They have every best intention for you as their patients. But they weren’t trained on sort of the functional medicine model. They weren’t trained to think holistically. Most of them didn’t even receive nutrition in their medical school. So, they can’t be expected to know this stuff.

So, I do see a lot of conventional medical doctors kind of being more interested in partnering with health coaches because they didn’t learn the nutrition, but this health coach did. They didn’t learn the lifestyle stuff, but the health coach did. So, that’s an interesting trend I see happening.

But the other thing that we do at Documenting Hope, which is to address this issue, is that, a lot of times, people are like, well, if it’s holistic, it isn’t really backed in science. They have that kind of mentality. But we’re very intentional on every resource on our website. If you go to the bottom of an article…so, let’s say we have an article on ADHD. You go all the way to the bottom. There’s a little tab at the bottom that says sources and references. And you click it open. And it just is a list of all the medical literature that is supporting what’s in that article. Because we know that, time and time again, parents will go to their pediatrician and say, I’ve heard that diet is important for children with autism. And should I try gluten-free, casein-free diet? Or have you heard about the GAPS diet? They’ll go to their pediatrician. And the pediatrician will say, no, I’m sorry, there’s no evidence for that. That’s actually not true. That’s not true.

And so, we want to make sure that parents and practitioners who go to our website, they know, when we say something on the website, it is backed by evidence. And we have all of it listed, and all the PubMed literature is linked right there. So, if you’re a parent or a practitioner who wants to get a conventionally trained practitioner on board, all you have to do is click that toggle to open that little button and then print out the medical literature and bring it into your partner practitioner, your pediatrician or whatever, and be like, here’s all the evidence.

It’s why we published the specific carbohydrate diet paper. This mother used a specific carbohydrate diet to reverse autism in her child. And we do these papers because if it’s in the medical literature, all of a sudden, the conventional medical doctor would be like, “Oh, I didn’t learn this in medical school.” It’s interesting as opposed to being dismissive.

Dr. Sandi: Yes. This is my stance, exactly. There’s so much evidence of the efficacy of health coaching. These are randomized controlled trials in respectable medical journals. So, you share that. And also, the fact that there will be reimbursement. This is on the horizon starting with Medicare. The private insurers will lead. And so, this will gain respectability. And so, those doctors will take notice. And as far as parents accepting working with a health coach because it will be covered under insurance, most likely. All right.

Beth: And the other thing is also there isn’t time in the… This is not about the doctors. It’s a system. The system gives you five minutes to meet with your doctor. How is your doctor going to talk about exercise, home environment? And so, a lot of these doctors want to talk about nutrition, but they don’t have time. But that’s why I think you’re right, Sandi, the shift to the reimbursement and getting health coaches covered. Now, the health coach can take that conversation offline and work directly with the family, which is very exciting.

Dr. Sandi: Yep. Okay. Is it necessary to use advanced testing like organic acid, GI-MAP, food allergies?

Beth: We talk about this all the time internally at Documenting Hope. Our medical director, Dr. Heather Tallman Ruhm, is one of those wonderful practitioners who does a lot more on working with the families on their mindset and getting their nervous system regulated and starting there. Because what can happen is you can go down a rabbit hole of endless testing. You can do your genomics, you can do your organic acids, you can do your heavy metal burden. There are so many rabbit holes that you can go down and spend tons of money if you haven’t addressed the basics and the free stuff. Are you getting sunlight? Are you moving your body every day? Are you going outdoors? Are you getting whole nutritious foods? Once you’ve covered those and you’re not making any progress, then you can go to the functional tests, and you can find stuff that’s incredibly important.

So, for instance, let’s say you have mold in your home environment, toxic mold exposure. You might not know that or find that unless you do some testing. But if you haven’t addressed the basics first, no amount of testing is going to get you over the finish line. You’ve got to do the basics or the foundations first.

Dr. Sandi: Oh, absolutely. Cynthia wants to know the cost to the in-person or virtual attendance. Will there be virtual?

Beth: Yep. Our Health and Healing Expo is…I think it’s $389 is the in-person. And that comes with…your food is covered, and you got two days of the programming, and you get access to the expo. The virtual, which is you get access to basically a virtual environment where you’ll have some exhibitors, but you can see all the lectures, that’s $149. And that’s all on our conference website. You can go to conference.documentinghope.com or go to the Documenting Hope website and then you’ll see right on the front page, there’s a link to the conference.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you. An issue that I saw repeatedly…my original background was working with children with learning disabilities, and I taught in classrooms and in a college preparatory program for people who were learning to be teachers, and then in private practice. And so often, working with families, I would see where…and worked with ADD or at an ADD clinic. And the typical story was there was often one parent who bought in and really wanted to use this approach. The other parent was so skeptical. It was even worse if there was a separation or divorce. Often there were in-laws, family members who were…either they were pushing for it and the family…the parents didn’t agree or the opposite. They were sabotaging when they spent time with grandma and grandpa. So, can you address those schisms that happen within a family system and how this often even lead to severe relationship issues?

Beth: Yeah. I think this is such a common issue. And thank you for bringing it up. We have actually…it’s such a big issue that in our membership community Healing Together, we had one of our health coaches that we work with and collaborate with. His name is Len Arcuri. He did a whole module, a whole learning module on how to get your spouse on board because it is complex and it varies from family to family. So, there’s a wonderful module that we have there. But what I will say that’s been really helpful for families is…remember we were talking about lab testing and do you really need it?

Dr. Sandi: Yes.

Beth: If you don’t have a spouse or a parent or somebody who’s not supportive of the healing journey for your child, sometimes doing lab testing will move the needle because they’ll actually see on paper like, oh my gosh, this child…inflamed. Their inflammation markers are off the chart. Or they’ll do a heavy metal test and see that they’re filled with cadmium or lead or something, or a gut test. A microbiome test can be really great because you can see just how out of balance things are.

Sometimes, if you see it on paper, it influences people in a way that…just trying to convince them doesn’t do. You know the value of a gluten-free diet, let’s say, but that’s a major change for a family. You’re saying we can’t eat a food I’ve eaten for 40 years or whatever it is. That’s hard. But if you see on a paper that that child has inflammation off the charts and all the markers for celiac or food sensitivity or something like that, that sometimes is enough to move the needle for a grandparent or spouse who isn’t on board.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. The power of group and group coaching where maybe the hesitant spouse or the grandparent can come with just one time just to observe, no pressure. And maybe then there’s some buy-in or maybe you dial down enough. And the magic of coaching is that you’re really asking those open-ended questions about what really matters. And so, then the parents, the family realize that they share the same values. They have the same goal. And then perhaps then they’re willing to do it, maybe do an experiment and do something on a trial basis, make one small step. And that could be how change… It doesn’t have to be overnight, as we talked about earlier, that everything changes. But maybe it’s, oh, we’re going to go outside and take a family walk or something more nature. There might be something that that reluctant parent buys into.

Sorry about that. I don’t know if you heard that call come in. Yeah. Let’s see. We’ve got another question. Where should you start with improving autism symptoms such as sensory overload?

Beth: I mean, it’s so different for every child. That’s the one thing I will say is that if you know one child with autism, you know one child with autism. There’s nothing that is standard across all these kids. It’s so bio-individual. Having said that, I think that…going back to this idea of lab testing with kids with autism in particular, because their bodies are typically so dysregulated, it can be helpful to do some lab testing.

And the two that I like the most for just getting a gauge on what’s going on physiologically in their body are a Tiny Health test because that’s very easy to do and it’s very affordable. Tiny Health is a microbiome test. There’s other microbiome tests. There’s the GI-MAP. There’s tons that you can do. A lot of them are oriented towards practitioners. But for parents, I think the Tiny Health test is nice because you sort of see what the microbiome looks like and then you get a consultation with somebody who can explain what is going on in the microbiome. And the recommendations that usually come out of that are diet, like how to tweak the diet to help restore balance.

The other one is an organic acid test. An organic acid test, you can do through urine, and you can get a lot of information about what’s going on in terms of oxidative stress and mitochondria and detoxification and the whole microbiome. You get a picture of what’s going on there, too.

So, those are two tests. In the organic acid test, you can actually even order yourself. A lot of times people go to functional medicine practitioners to get them, but they’re actually something you can order on your own. But it is better when you work with somebody who has a solid understanding of how to interpret it. So, I think those are good foundations for kids with autism.

One other avenue…if you’re not interested in doing some of the functional testing, one other avenue that I think can be profoundly helpful for kids with autism is to work with a pediatric chiropractor who can help regulate the nervous system because it is…the vast majority of kids with autism are stuck in what I would say is a sympathetic dominant state, which is that they’re kind of stuck in revved up fight or flight all the time. When you are on fight or flight, you do not have the capacity to shift into that healing or parasympathetic state. So, your body isn’t going to do what it needs to do to heal and repair, let alone go back and address some of the developmental stuff.

So, there’s a practice throughout the country called PX Docs, and they’re pediatric chiropractic, and they do very gentle manipulations to help regulate the nervous system. And they teach parents about the importance of the nervous system. They’re very educationally oriented. So, they have a directory where you can find a pediatric chiropractor.

So, for kids with autism, I think nervous system regulation is incredibly important, and can have profound benefits because once you get your body calm and regulated, that’s when your body can attend to the chronic infections, the gut dysbiosis, the toxicity, all the things that are layer upon layer upon layer in kids with autism.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. I think that is wonderful to look at the pediatric chiropractors. And so, the idea of a whole family intervention, we touched on this earlier, but nervous system regulation for the parents, for those stressed out parents. And I often think about the sibling, the sibling who is so-called normal and what is that doing when they are dealing with a sibling with a neurodevelopmental condition? And I’m wondering if you have resources for siblings.

Beth: The family dynamic is so important. You mentioned it before. You were talking about Parkinson’s and as a grandparent and the autism. When the family does the feeling together, everybody benefits. So, I’ll give a great example.

I have a very good friend and neighbor who has a child with type 1 diabetes. All three of these children in this family were diagnosed with ADHD, having difficulties in school, all on ADHD medications. When the youngest child was diagnosed at age 9 with type 1 diabetes, the family decided they needed to lock in on diet and nutrition to support their youngest child who had the type 1 diagnosis. So, they all decided to do a ketogenic diet, which essentially became a whole foods diet. They did ketogenic to help…just keep the blood sugar stable. This is so important in type 1 diabetes. What happened, though, is they took the sugar and processed foods out of their diet. The entire family’s health improved. All the ADHD symptoms went away. These kids all went off their medications, and the whole family improved. And I feel like this is something you see time and time again is when the whole family decides to make the diet changes for a specific child, when they do it together, everybody benefits.

Dr. Sandi: Yes. Cara, can you…wants to know about the website for pediatric chiropractors.

Beth: Oh, that’s PX Docs. P-X D-O-C-S. Px Docs.

Dr. Sandi: Okay. Thanks. And… the microbiome, that was Tiny Health. And we have a link in the chat. And final question from Magdalena. When you have complex cases, a child with autism, also tick-borne infections, and then they’re diagnosed with PANS, where would you start?

Beth: So, we actually wrote a book on PANS and PANDAS because that is a very complex and overwhelming condition. You’re dealing with neuropsychiatric symptoms. When this PANS and PANDAS are emerging, people would describe their child as going suddenly crazy because oftentimes it’s acute onset and it’s psychiatric. And so, those kids would end up in the hospital and psychiatric wards because no one knew what was going on. It’s neuroinflammation.

What they now understand is about two-thirds or more of kids with autism have PANS and PANDAS. And all that really means is that they have neuroinflammation. So, it is very overwhelming and very complicated. And there are so many wonderful practitioners out there who are experienced in treating kids with PANS and PANDAS, and chronic Lyme. In our practitioner directory on documentinghope.com, you can search for people who have the expertise in autism and PANS and PANDAS if you’re dealing with very chronic conditions and you want help with the functional labs and identifying those imbalances so you can address them. Those kinds of people are out there. And there’s many of them. They’re just typically not covered by insurance and you have to find them. But definitely hit our website directory because we have a lot of those practitioners listed there.

Dr. Sandi: That would be a great resource. Well, thank you so much, Beth. This has been so enlightening. And I hope that those who attended today are inspired, what can be done, the wonderful work that you can do as a health coach to support this community. And Beth, we are all in for supporting you, the wonderful work you do with Documenting Hope.

Beth: Thank you, Sandi. Appreciate it. Thanks, everybody.

Dr. Sandi: Thank you. Bye, everybody.oon.