Autism in Kids: Root Causes and Paths to Recovery Parents Need to Know
with Beth Lambert
Dr. Wendy Myers
Welcome to the Myers Detox podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and on this show, we talk about everything related to heavy mental and chemical toxicities, the health issues caused by toxins, and more advanced topics than you’ll hear on other shows. I love talking about emotional trauma and bioenergetics, advanced topics in biohacking, and things that really interest me, and I hope they interest you as well. On the show, we have my colleague Beth Lambert. She is the founder of Documenting Hope, and we’re gonna be talking about how the new childhood epidemics are being caused by the total load of modern living.
Of course, toxins are under that umbrella. We’re gonna talk about vaccines and the issues that they’re causing with children’s health as well. We talk about all the different health issues that children are dealing with, what is causing those, what you can do about them, and all the free resources that Beth provides, ’cause she has some children with developmental issues. I talk about my daughter’s autism diagnosis and what I did to reverse that, because for so many parents who have a child with chronic health issues, they’re not really getting good answers from their doctors and not addressing the underlying root causes. It can be really, really frustrating.
When my daughter was diagnosed, there were very few resources. This was 15 years ago, but now Beth provides a platform and support for parents and a clear roadmap to help parents of children with any kind of childhood health issue. So definitely go check out her website at documentinghope.com.
Our guest, Beth Lambert, is an author, educator, and former health consultant. She’s monitored and documented the escalating rates of childhood chronic conditions for 15 years. Her first book, A Compromised Generation, provides a thorough analysis of the origins of this modern health crisis and documents how modifications to environmental and lifestyle factors can profoundly influence health outcomes, including full disease reversal. Beth is also the co-author of Brain Under Attack, a resource for parents and caregivers of children with pandas pans and autoimmune encephalitis.
She’s also documenting hope. Beth’s Research Foundation also conducts independent research studies that examine the cumulative impact or total load of environmental stressors on children’s health and their mitigation through personalized and systems-based treatment approaches. You can learn more about Beth’s work at documentinghope.com. Beth, thank you so much for coming on the show.
Beth Lambert
So happy to be with you.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you started discovering hope?
Beth Lambert
I got into this work, like many people do, which was through my children. I was a young mom. I used to work in healthcare consulting. I worked for pharmaceutical companies, medical device companies, and hospital systems. When I had my first child, she had some symptoms, like gut issues, skin issues, and sensory issues. It was one of these things where I knocked on a lot of conventional medical doors and didn’t really get any answers. My gut instinct told me that there were root causes to symptoms, and yet all I got was symptom suppression, and that wasn’t really a solution I was looking for. So in that process, I ended up finding an integrated physician and using some holistic-type practitioners, and quickly reversed my own child’s issues.
But then, I started also meeting not just these types of practitioners who are helping families all the time, but the actual families who were reversing their kids’ conditions, so they were reversing autism, ADHD, and autoimmune diseases. All these things I thought were genetic and lifelong. So I kind of had my mind blown. I was actually in grad school at the time, and being a young parent, I was around tons of other young parents, and like all babies and toddlers and kids that were just getting diagnosis after diagnosis after diagnosis. Everybody’s kids seemed to be on some kind of medication. I just had this awakening that something is wrong with our kids. Something’s wrong with our kids.
I know the medical system is totally broken because all it’s doing is giving parents medications and band-aids, and nobody’s looking at root causes. So I took my graduate school program and did a 180 and redirected to really trying to understand what was going on with our kids. Why do we have so many sick kids? Why was our medical system so ill-equipped to deal with this? And why is no one talking about the fact that kids reverse these conditions by taking a root cause approach? So that became my life’s mission. That was like 18 years ago. I had been on that mission ever since I founded documenting Hope in 2010.
I have been trying to better understand and elucidate the environmental causes of what I call the new childhood epidemics, but also, and very importantly, provide a pathway for parents to follow so that they can both prevent these conditions and reverse them if their child already is showing signs and symptoms or has diagnoses. So that’s my origin story
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Dr. Wendy Myers
Why are we seeing such an epidemic of chronic illness and neurodevelopmental conditions in autism in children today?
Beth Lambert
I think everybody’s looking for the answer to that question of why there are so many kids with chronic conditions as if there’s a singular thing. That would be easy if we knew there was one thing, like, oh, it’s glyphosate for sure. Or, oh, it’s the overuse of pharmaceuticals, or whatever the answer is. But the truth is, if you really dig into it, it’s the cumulative and compounding effect of modern living. And I said, I know that sounds almost like a cop out.
Like, oh, it’s everything. Like, what kind of answer is that? But it’s true. In my undergrad, I was a history major. If you take the long view and you look at how humans lived, even just a hundred years ago, it is so different from how we live now. So everything that we do in terms of our daily habits and routines, in terms of the food we eat, how we spend our time, where we spend our time, is drastically different than a hundred years ago, even 75 years ago. And then you start looking at each individual input that we have in our lives. Basically, we don’t live in a way that is supportive of health. As an example, we spend most of our lives indoors under artificial light when our bodies need natural light, our bodies need outdoor spaces.
We eat food that is processed, synthetic, chemicalized, and loaded with toxins. Our bodies need whole foods, full of fiber, out of the ground with natural microbes on them, and nutrient density. This is the disconnect between how our bodies evolved over millennia or two, and how we’re actually living now. I think the biggest piece is that we have a massive toxic burden on our bodies. That’s because we’re exposed to heavy metals, plastics, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, cancer-causing chemicals in our food, in our air, in our water, in our skin products, in our cosmetics, and in our laundry detergent.
It’s like everything. If you think about it, it’s because in this post-World War II era, we shifted from a more agrarian, slower-paced life into a rapid industrial, synthetic, commercial kind of life where we are just surrounded by toxins, by health stressors, and we just live in a way that doesn’t support human health. So, the long answer to your question, that was the long answer, that it’s many, many, many things. But for each individual person, it may be specific to them and their journey, and what they’ve been exposed to and how they live their life. So when we’re trying to repair health or restore health, you have to look at what each individual does in their daily life, and then also look at what they’ve been exposed to in the past, and almost do that in a multi-generational way. So it’s modern living, that’s the answer.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What is the role of vaccines?
Beth Lambert
Vaccines are just one of the total load factors. We call this cumulative and compounding effect the total load. I even saw recently in a congressional hearing where there was a confirmation hearing where they’re looking to approve Casey Means as the Surgeon General. And they kept asking, do you believe that vaccines cause autism? And they wanted a yes or no answer from her. And she’s sitting there trying to navigate that question from a person who understands the role that vaccines may play in causing autism and other chronic conditions. It isn’t just autism, it’s life-threatening food allergies. It’s ADHD.
The answer is, does it contribute? Yes. Just the way, the same way that taking proton pump inhibitors when you’re an infant contributes, just the way that taking antibiotics contributes. Just the way that being exposed to heavy metals in your water contributes. It’s all part of the total load. And what happens with infants and our infant vaccine schedule is that they receive many, many, many vaccines early in life during their developmental timeline. So, from birth, they’re getting hepatitis B at birth all the way through to kindergarten. They’re getting dose after dose, after dose after dose, which some children have the capacity and resilience to handle that kind of immune burden.
They can handle the excipients that are in those vaccines, which are adjuvants that stimulate the immune system. Some children don’t have the capacity to deal with that. Why not? Well, they might have gut dysbiosis, which is sort of the imbalance of bacteria in your gut that regulates your immune function. They might not have enough nutrient stores, enough antioxidants on board to handle immune stimulation after immune stimulation, after immune stimulation. So when you have the total load of immune stressors during your critical developmental years, you better believe that’s gonna affect your neurodevelopment.
That’s why we see so many kids who have autism, learning disabilities, and sensory issues. These are developmental issues that are a result of their total load of health stressors being too great at a time when their bodies don’t have the resilience and the capacity. Handle it.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I agree with you a hundred percent on everything that you’re saying. My daughter had an MMR vaccine, and she had received about five or six vaccines prior to that before I had been educated. So, I thought I’d educated myself, and she very quickly regressed in her language and wasn’t progressing in her language at a blank stare. Eventually, my girlfriend, who worked with autistic children, said one day, she’s on the spectrum, you need to have her tested. And lo and behold, she got an autism diagnosis and went on an odyssey of getting her to a special school for autistic kids and to draw the language to occupational therapy.
Luckily, because I knew exactly what to do, I detoxed her. She had crazy high aluminum levels of vaccines. ‘Cause that’s what’s in the adjuvants in the vaccines, and those cause brain damage, brain cell death, brain inflammation, et cetera. I feel very lucky. After a couple of years of intense therapy, she came out of it. But, other people are not so fortunate. The level of damage that’s being caused by the vaccines and that additional total load, that total body burden of toxins and gut dysbiosis that you talk about, some parents catch it too late, and it’s just really unfortunate.
Beth Lambert
The thing that’s interesting about autism and why I think this is still so controversial is because you will have children who’ve never had vaccines or never had antibiotics, which may be big triggers for other kids. Like, you have a parent who says, my child had their vaccines, and then they regressed. They lost their language, they developed their autistic symptoms, or my child had a round of antibiotics after a round of antibiotics, and then regressed into autism. You hear these stories, and then you have families who never had those exposures. So how can one of those things cause autism?
That’s why this total load model is so important to understand, because there are many paths to autism. It doesn’t have to be the vaccine path or the antibiotic path or the chemical path. Nervous system dysregulation is a major factor for a lot of kids who develop autism, and that could come from a birth trauma. There are kids who have total gut dysbiosis when they’re born, but it comes from the maternal transfer of microbiota from mom to baby, like maybe mom had lots of things that disrupted her microbiome. So there are so many paths to autism, and this is why it makes it so difficult for us as a society to really wrap our heads around what causes it, because it’s not one thing, it’s a different set of variables for each child, but each child is experiencing a total load that’s too great during their developmental years.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Can you talk about the reversal of autism that you’ve documented? You work with so many families and see dramatic improvements in autism and reversals. Can you talk about that?
Beth Lambert
This is actually where I had my great awakening. It was the first meeting with parents in the offices of some of these integrative physicians who had kids with autism, who were telling me that their child used to have autism. And I was like, what are you even talking about? That’s genetic. How can you reverse that? And then I started asking questions and interviewing doctors and interviewing researchers. I learned that this kind of phenomenon had been going on for decades, where a child had been diagnosed, and then their parents did an intervention or series of interventions, which usually involve nutrition and detoxification. A lot of rehabilitative therapies have been employed, so things that help the brain and the body connect better. So for instance, if you missed a developmental milestone, like crawling, you go back and revisit that crawling milestone to rewire the brain and the way it wasn’t properly wired.
So I started paying attention to these parents and doctors who had these stories, and I started writing them down, and I started putting them on our website, like, here are stories of families who’ve gotten better. Let’s follow the breadcrumb trail here and figure out what these parents did, and let’s study it. Let’s better understand it because if we have this choice, where you can have a child who has autism, who’s gonna be severely affected and is gonna have this their whole life, and they’re gonna need 24/7 care or support. Or you could intervene in those early years when the kids are so malleable, you’ve got all that brain plasticity, and they could go on to live and become neurotypical and have a typical life and a full and rich life.
Why wouldn’t we just stop everything we’re doing and try to make sure that we intervene on behalf of that child as soon as we can? So I started through Documenting Hope some research studies to really facilitate that process of not only documenting these stories, but understanding what the families did to get their children better. So we now have two papers that we’ve published in peer-reviewed literature that document cases of kids who fully reverse their autism. And there are a few more that preceded us. We’re not the first ones to document this. We’re standing on the shoulders of other integrated physicians, in particular who’ve documented this phenomenon in the literature.
So we had a paper published in the Journal of personalized Medicine in 2024 that documented a case of twin girls who had level three or severe autism, and then did what you would call whole child intervention nutrition therapies, detoxification, and it was parent-led. This is the key I see across all of these stories. It’s parent-led. It’s just like you described. What did you do when you got your diagnosis for your child? You locked in, you understood what was going on. You tried to understand physiologically where the imbalances were, and you took care of it, and you addressed it. And that’s what we saw happening with these twin girls.
The parents led an intervention program where they basically just tried to support their health in as many ways as they could and remove as many of the health stressors from that child’s, from their children’s home as possible, and daily lives. I mean, we’re talking about things like getting them outdoors and playing in the natural sunlight and touching the ground and moving in natural ways. We’re talking about eating whole foods and really helping their guts become healthy again. We also have a second paper that just got published, and it’s gonna come out any day. That is a paper of a boy who was diagnosed with autism at age four, and his mother happens to be a nutrition professional.
Actually, she has her PhD in Nutrition and she did a specific carbohydrate diet primarily as her main intervention. And that’s one that’s basically eating nutrient-dense whole foods, restricting certain types of carbohydrates, and he recovered from his autism diagnosis, no longer has the symptoms anymore, and these stories abound. These are just the ones that are standing up to peer review and getting published in the literature. But I have been documenting these stories. We have a YouTube channel at Documenting Hope and we have a website, documentinghope.com where we have dozens and dozens of these stories that we haven’t published. It takes a lot of money to put a paper into peer review, but we have all these stories captured of families who’ve done different things to reverse their child’s condition.
And I’m not saying it’s easy to do. It requires changing your diet, changing your lifestyle. Sometimes it requires intensive therapy, but it can happen. And I think it’s a missed opportunity when a parent walks into their pediatrician’s office and says, okay, my child who has autism, what do you get for me? And the pediatrician says, well, there’s a VA, and there’s some medications, and that’s all they’re giving the parents. That is a missed opportunity when we put stuff in the medical literature that says these kids reverse their condition through diet and lifestyle, that’s evidence-based theory about what we could do to help these kids, but it’s not made its way to the pediatrician yet. So my goal is to get that information into the pediatrician’s office so that parents are given that information right from the beginning.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Is timing crucial, or like the younger you start, the better outcomes you have?
Beth Lambert
No doubt. It absolutely is because like we’re all on a developmental trajectory, right? Like the minute we are in utero and we come out of that womb, we are going through a developmental process that our human bodies have done over millions of years. And that’s when you’re learning to integrate vision and auditory to stimulus, and you’re learning how to control your motor planning, all these exquisitely complex human developmental processes we have to go through. So it’s a lot easier to unwind the beginnings of autism. If you start while the children are still going through those developmental milestones, it’s easier to catch up. That’s not to say you cannot reverse these symptoms at any age.
In fact, I have a friend whom I met more recently. When she was in her twenties, she was diagnosed with autism in her twenties, and then around 29 or so, she was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease. She was very sick and did some research. And this is somebody who had sort of what you would call higher functioning autism. She was verbal but she was still very affected. The sensory issues were severe for her. The GI issues were severe for her, but she did some research and found that she could actually do something to heal her Crohn’s disease. And she did, and she changed her diet, healed her gut, and as a byproduct of that gut healing, she actually started watching her symptoms of autism, the sensory things, the anxiety, the OCD all start to recede.
So she was like, I’m a 30-year-old woman who can reverse my symptoms of autism by deeply healing my gut. This should be available to everybody and anybody. If you have somebody who’s severely affected, let’s say, a non-speaker who is unable to care for themselves and has significant motor issues, and that they were really impacted during their developmental timeline, that’s gonna be harder to reverse when they’re in their adult years. But there’s always improvement to be made, always. Any human being can improve their health through lifestyle, diet changes, and mindset changes. There’s always room for improvement. So, can autism be reversed as an adult? Potentially, potentially. But it really depends on the specifics of that individual.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I love that. But would you say that even adults with autism can have significant improvements just by healing their gut? You know, adhering to diet and lifestyle and exercise, and detoxification, of course, we all have to do that. In your experience, what are some of the most important things that the body needs to heal from for children with chronic illness, such as kids with autism, et cetera?
Beth Lambert
When I started this work almost 20 years ago, I really thought the most, most, most important thing was healing the gut and microbiome. I was a little bit nerdy and obsessed with the microbiome because if you get into the research and what we know about the microbiome, it is mind-blowing what these little microbes in our gut do in terms of regulating our immune system, detoxifying us, and helping to produce neurotransmitters. So much is going on in the gut that affects the brain. That’s where I started. So I still to this very day believe the importance of the microbiome. That’s huge. You cannot overcome pretty much most chronic health conditions without addressing the gut.
As I’ve gotten deeper into documenting more and more stories, I feel like there’s another major piece that is directly connected to the gut, which I missed early on, which is the nervous system. And the nervous system and the gut are like the same thing. They’re not separate. You have an enteric nervous system. The gut and the brain are constantly talking to each other. You can do everything to have a healthy diet and change your microbiome. Like you could have the absolute most pristine, nutrient-dense, delicious, amazing diet to change your microbiome. But if your nervous system is on high alert, which so many people are today, like the state of stress that I would say especially Americans are in, you’re not really gonna do a good job at changing your microbiome because the microbiome is responding to your stress, is responding to your nervous system.
So if you’re in a state of sympathetic dominance, which is that fight or flight kind of feeling, which a lot of our kids are in constantly in sympathetic. And if you’re always in sympathetic, your body never flips over to the parasympathetic state, which is when your body heals. It’s the rest and digest and heal. So again, if you could totally do everything that’s great for your microbiome, but if your nervous system is dysregulated, if you’re stuck in a sympathetic state, fight or flight, the microbiome isn’t gonna do what you need it to do. The gut isn’t gonna heal.
So I feel like those two pieces are crucial. You’ve gotta focus on the gut. We also have to focus on regulating our nervous system. Even now, I can feel myself like I’m a passionate talker, as you can tell, and I can even feel how much my nervous system is activated when I’m talking about something I’m passionate about. We have to be very mindful of the things in our lives in the modern world that activate our nervous system. And if you think about the average kid’s life, like getting up at six in the morning and getting to school and doing this activity, being shuttle to this therapy and going over here and the parents are trying to get to work and everyone’s late, and the alarm clock’s blaring like these, it’s just such an intense rhythm of life and we need to address that because that’s part of the healing picture too.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Yeah, absolutely. Tell us about the CHIRP and FLIGHT studies. How do you think that they will improve outcomes for children with autism?
Beth Lambert
The CHIRP is a study we’ve had open since 2018. We’ve been collecting data, and we’ll continue to collect data. It’s essentially the most comprehensive environmental health survey that’s completed by parents. So we ask parents to sit down and take an online survey. We have a questionnaire that is over a thousand questions long. It asks about their health history multiple generations back. It asks about the child’s prenatal history, neonatal history, what kinds of exposures they had, what kind of medications they have taken, what kinds of infections they have, I mean, anything you can imagine, right down to what kind of toothpaste they’re using, is captured in this questionnaire.
We started that study because we wanted to get a better understanding of, are there particular things in our environment that are causing our kids to be sick? Like, is it glyphosate? Is it antibiotics? Is it heavy metals? What is it? But we also wanted to test this hypothesis about total load. And with our preliminary data, we don’t have enough to publish yet, but with our preliminary data, we can say that the more stressors a child has in their life, the more health stressors, whether there’s chemicals or whether it’s emotional stressors or what have you, we include things like the ACEs, like the adverse events that a child might have, the more of those they have, the worse their health outcomes. And by worse health outcomes, I mean more diagnoses, more complex conditions, more severe symptoms. So we have demonstrated through this study that the total load matters. So that’s a really important finding or validation of what we’ve already suspected to be true, and that study will continue for years.
We’ll continue to collect data there. We have another study, it’s called the FLIGHT Study, and that stands for Facilitated Longitudinal Intensive Investigation of Genuine Health Transformation, which is a mouthful. But what this study is aiming to do is to replicate what we’ve documented in real life in terms of people reversing their children’s conditions, and trying to see if we can recreate that in a controlled-ish setting. So we piloted this study with two children to see if we could help the parents become sort of the detectives for their kids and look at their root causes. We supported them through a whole child intervention program, which is, looking at changing their diet, looking at what might be an imbalance in their body, removing any toxins, any mold, anything in their environment.
And we just opened this study for 12 more children. This next iteration of the study is specific to autism only. We’re really narrowing in to see if we can help families who have a child with autism learn how to identify the things that are contributing to their child’s symptoms from a physiological perspective, from an environmental perspective, and from a developmental perspective.
So what does that all mean? It means we bring these families through a 12-month education and coaching program. For 12 months, families have to meet every week with their health coach, and we are giving them basically a drip of educational materials so that they can learn about all the things that might contribute to their child’s symptoms, but the things that also keep them healthy, and we’re gonna measure at the beginning and at the end, a variety of things. We’re gonna use validated instruments like the AEC and the ADOS, which are tools that determine this or can help you understand the sensitivity or the severity of your child’s autism symptoms. But we’re also measuring things in blood, urine, stool, and hair.
So we’re looking for toxicity, microbial imbalances, metabolic imbalances, and letting parents have that information so that they can decide if they would like to address those imbalances and teach them how to address those imbalances. So this FLIGHT study is really meant to be scaled eventually so that we can take our educational and coaching program and bring it out to the world. That’s our goal. We’re doing it for 12 children now, just to collect data. We’re gonna do another larger cohort to collect more data because again, conventional medicine isn’t going to integrate this without the evidence. But at the end of the day, we just wanna get this program out to parents so that they can participate, learn all the things they need to do to help make the diet lifestyle changes, understand what their children need, and do it in a group setting.
That’s an important part of our study design as we do group coaching, because it is really awful to be on this journey on your own, and we know how important community is. So we’ve designed a group coaching program that is part of this study. We’re enrolling Kurt with these participants right now.
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Dr. Wendy Myers
I love that you’re doing that ’cause when my daughter had an autism diagnosis, it’s devastating and you think you’re gonna have to give lifelong care to your child and they’re gonna miss out on their life and a full life. It’s really devastating and I love that you’re doing this to give people hope. When you go to your doctor, you don’t get any answers. It’s really criminal, almost to a point where you’re looking into your doctor for answers, and there’s just almost nothing when there is a world of things that you can do. I’m a huge proponent of bioenergetics and using bioenergetic software, which absolutely can make tremendous progress.
Using software like Spooky2 Rife for infections, biogenesis software and E4L software. These are things I use on a daily basis and that you can make huge strides in your child’s health, using these very sophisticated tools as well. Can you talk a little bit about how parents can work with you? Say, if they can’t get into the study, how can they work with you and with their child?
Beth Lambert
So we developed an online community called Healing Together, which is what we’re doing. We’re healing together, and parents, anybody can join. We have all kinds of resources for parents there. It’s meant to be a soft place for parents to land once they realize they wanna commit to this healing journey where we walk them through all the things that they need to know to help their child thrive. So we have live calls via Zoom twice a month. One of our calls is with integrated physicians. We have another call with health coaches. So you can come and ask questions like, let’s say, you wanna go get some functional lab testing done.
You don’t know where to start or what to do. You can come onto these calls and ask your questions like, which lab test should I do and how do I get them? And those kinds of things we have eBooks and resources and videos. We have like an entire library of resources that you can go in and just search and be like, I’m looking to learn how to make diet changes. Oh, we got an ebook for that. We got a video for that. So that’s just one of our resources. We also have an online forum there, so if parents have questions and before one of the calls, they can just throw their questions in the forum. And we have our health coaches who answer those questions.
It’s really great. I love this community. I have to tell you, just last week, we heard from a dad who joined our community in 2023 when it was brand new and we just launched it and he was there for like every call and he became a part of our community and we all loved this guy ’cause he was like going to the map for his kid. He was like, I’m ready to learn everything. And then, he was with us for a little while and then he disappeared and he just reached back out to me and his son, who was four at the time had been diagnosed with autism, basically has no autism symptoms anymore. He’s fully brought him through that healing journey, and the reason he disappeared is because he got what he needed and then he used that time to just buckle down, do the things he needed to do at home, and now his son is living his best life.
I was like, I’m literally getting chills about it because this is what I exist for. I mean, I love when a parent comes back to me and tells me that their child has overcome all their challenges, because that’s what I’m talking about, the difference between the child heading down this way, needing a lot of support versus the child heading down this way and having a full life. So that is what healing together is, and you can find that on documentinghope.com. It’s not just autism, this is for kids who have pandas pans, even we have families in there who have kids with type 1 diabetes and are trying to help their kids overcome the autoimmune part of type one diabetes, autoimmune conditions, severe eczema, constipation, like all these things that parents are struggling with. We cover it all in there, which is really great.
Dr. Wendy Myers
What would you tell anyone listening to this who’s concerned? Their child has some delays. They don’t seem to be developing properly because that was the case for me. I knew my daughter was not engaging in language the same way as other two-year-olds were, who were having conversations with their mother. My daughter spoke in maybe one or two-word sentences at best, and so I knew something was wrong, but I think deep down, people don’t address it. Or the doctor’s like, oh, they’re hitting all their milestones.
I think there can be a denial for some parents, like, oh, my child will develop eventually. I think it can be difficult for a parent to even recognize or acknowledge that something may be wrong, and they need to go to a specialist to do some investigating.
Beth Lambert
I think the biggest thing to remember in this moment is don’t panic, but don’t delay, in other words. If your child is delayed, you can almost get into analysis paralysis. Like, I don’t know where to do what, who to see, where to start. That feeling can be really common. But at the same time, you don’t want to, like you said, fall into that trap of denial and just waiting to see, because when they’re little, you have such an incredible opportunity to do profound healing in such a short amount of time. The neuroplasticity that exists for our babies and toddlers is so incredible that making even subtle changes when they’re little can have profound and lifelong consequences.
You can really change the trajectory the earlier you start. So I think what I often recommend for parents is if you’re curious, you wanna know where the imbalances are. So if your child’s delayed, something’s out of balance. It could be something going on with their gut, or it could be something going on with their toxic load. There are a number of places that you can look at. They might have missed a developmental milestone that’s resulting in other problems. I think the absolute best thing you can do is find a trusted practitioner who is experienced in this type of work. So on the Documenting Hope website, we have a practitioner directory with over 800 practitioners of all types.
You could find a health coach there, you could find an integrative physician, you could find a naturopath, a homeopath, lots of different types of practitioners. And it’s all sorted by geography. I think if you start there and check out the website of a practitioner that might be near you and be just committed to investigating, right? Because once you start looking under the hood and looking for root causes, that’s where you’re gonna find the path forward. So sometimes that’s doing a functional lapse, like a microbiome test or a hair toxin test or something like that. Sometimes it’s doing a clinical assessment, like you might go see a neurological chiropractor or somebody who assesses infant reflexes.
So I would say, the first step is to get help that way. Obviously Documenting Hope is here for parents with tons of resources. So you can go to our website and type in developmental delay. Let’s say that’s what you’re dealing with. We have a search bar right front and center. You’re gonna get like a bunch of resources, videos and articles that can tell you more. If your child has eczema, type that in. We’re gonna give you the resources, but also go get some professional help. There are tons of amazing, amazing practitioners out there who do this all day, every day and have great answers for parents.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Well, Beth, thank you so much for coming on the show. That was just so, so good. I’ve been in that position, and it’s really important to me to give parents some information and answers, and guidance on what to do if your child has a chronic illness or autism. I love the work that you’re doing and the passion that you have behind it, and the studies that you’re doing to give people answers, because the typical conventional medical research is just really, really lagging far behind when there are so many answers and so many modalities that you can employ to improve the health of your children. So yeah, thanks so much for the work that you’re doing.
Beth Lambert
Yeah, my pleasure. We have a lot of resources out there. It’s just that parents don’t know yet, so that’s the most important thing, just asking questions, asking why.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Tell everyone where they can find you on your website and social media.
Beth Lambert
You can go to documentinghope.com, and you can follow us on Instagram, YouTube, and X @documentinghope and Documenting Hope on Facebook. You can find us on your favorite platform. We have, again, so many resources on our website, and we’re always there for parents who need us.
Dr. Wendy Myers
Okay, fantastic. Well, everyone, thanks so much for tuning into the Myers Detox podcast. I’m Dr. Wendy Myers, and I love doing this show to bring you experts from all over the world to help you and give you those missing pieces of the puzzle in your health and your children’s health as well. So thanks for tuning in every week.
Disclaimer
The Myers Detox Podcast is created and hosted by Wendy Myers. This podcast is for information purposes only. Statements and views expressed on this podcast are not medical advice. This podcast, including Wendy Myers and the producers, disclaims responsibility for any possible adverse effects from the use of information contained herein. The opinions of guests are their own, and this podcast does not endorse or accept responsibility for statements made by guests. This podcast does not make any representations or warranties about guest qualifications or credibility. Individuals on this podcast may have a direct or indirect financial interest in products or services referred to herein. If you think you have a medical problem, consult a licensed physician.
