?Welcome to the Create Thriving Families Podcast. I'm your host, Lisa Peterson. I'm a doctor of chiropractic and I've been in private practice for 20 years seeing mostly women, babies, and children. The Create Thriving Families Podcast is a place for us to have a conversation about how we can help our children become the healthiest, most vibrant and aligned version of themselves.
The full expression of who they came here to be. The quality of our lives and the quality of our relationships is dependent on the quality of our health, and I believe that the greatest gift any of us could give to our children is the best start possible when it comes to their own health. I can't wait to see where this journey takes us.
Let's get started.
?Over the past 22 years, I have been in private practice as a doctor of chiropractic and I've worked with more babies and children and by default their mothers than I can even count. It isn't unusual that these mothers talk to me about overall experiences they've had within the world of healthcare for their children.
And it isn't unusual that there can be frustration over the spectrum of differences in both information that they're given and recommendations. And I can completely understand that frustration because it can be widely different depending on the sort of metaphorical glasses that the person we're seeing for help with our children is wearing.
Their perspective that determines how they think about health. And the human body has everything to say with how you know what they're going to recommend to us and the information they're gonna give us about whatever they think is going on. And if the person you are entrusting your child's health with believes that good health is a result of good genes and or good luck, um.
Then as soon as there's a loss of health, they will be looking for answers in the place that they think health comes from, which is outside the body and often within the pharmaceutical industry. If the person you're entrusting your child's health with believes that the human body's foundational principle is that it always expresses.
Full health, unless something is interfering with its ability to do so, then finding the cause of that interference becomes the focus. And there is no doubt that technology and innovation have brought us the ability to save lives through pharmaceutical and surgical interventions. There likely isn't anyone who isn't grateful for both of those.
The. Problem, in my opinion, is that the developers of those technologies and interventions have often seen it necessary to, in large part, downplay and even sometimes eradicate the natural way of looking at health and the human body in order to protect their interests and their profits. And in order to do that, to protect their profits and their interests, it became sometimes necessary to create a narrative of.
Discrediting any and every healing profession and tradition that has at its foundation, a deep respect for the body's inborn innate ability to do the best job of healing and regulating itself and to term those professions alternative, despite the fact that they were largely all around long before the medical profession.
And as long as this way of thinking remains alternative, they can make you feel small and they can make you feel doubtful of yourself. Anytime you question a recommendation that goes against your mother's intuition, because the intuition often whispers to us to give us information about what could be wrong and why it could have happened.
And those pieces of information are invaluable, but often when you ask your doctor, why did this thing happen? You don't really get a very good answer. It's genetic. These things just happen. It was bad luck. We don't really know, and it's usually followed up by a quick change of subject onto whatever the recommendation is for symptom relief.
And that way of treating mothers can make them feel less intelligent or less equipped because they think that they don't have the proper credentials. But the truth is that your whisper of intuition for what's true and what's right about whatever's going on with your child should be the most important piece of information we as health professionals should be interested in.
We should wanna know about that intuition with regards to how to improve your child's health, because it's infinitely more wise than any of our diplomas or our credentials. And when we listen carefully and are able to tune in, we can often see so much about the big picture and where a combination of.
Maybe it's events in our lives, relationship dynamics, chemical factors through our food or our environment, or whether we're moving our bodies enough and in a way that all animal species need to be doing have possibly set us astray from the path that we need to not really stray too far from throughout our lives in order for the human body to express health.
Because there is actually. A recipe, and we don't often get told that, but just like zookeepers know the recipe for keeping elephants healthy and thriving. There's one for human beings as well. You know, elephant keepers know how many elephants need to live together for thriving community, how much space they all need, how much they need to move during the day, how many hours of the day they need to see sunlight and exactly what they need to eat.
To stay healthy and happy and have the ability to produce offspring. And they know all of this about human beings too. Unfortunately, instead of analyzing our lifestyle to see how close we are to the path that creates health in humans, we're often given an intervention to relieve symptoms while making no change to the deviation from the path.
So we can just continue getting farther and farther and farther off course. And it's like giving fish in a very dirty tank. Antibiotics when they get sick, those fish might need antibiotics, but they also definitely need the tank cleaned. Otherwise, you can forget about the antibiotics only being a one time thing.
And in my practice, I've always thought that beyond any of my chiropractic or functional neurology treatments or protocols, my most important job, I think, is to remind mothers of the recipe and to help them navigate how to implement the recipe within the confines of a modern world where almost none of our institutions were built to support the recipe for human health.
Trying to do that well is really difficult. At least I think that it is, but it's also really, really important and I think that it is the greatest gift that we can give our children, and it's so much easier when we don't feel like we're alone during the journey. And it will obviously change based on how old our children are and what stage of development they're in, where they are socially.
But my experience is that mothers have a remarkable ability to see deep inside each other, all the complexities of what we thought motherhood would be like before we had kids. The hard lessons and the wisdom that we've all gained along the path of realizing that it was even better and even harder and even more full of tough choices.
For how to help our children navigate the world. Then we realized it would be, and we can see in each other's eyes that we had no idea the job was going to require so much of us, and that we would need to become the kind of person who would be able to handle the weight of that responsibility with absolutely no training.
And that it would be possible to love another human being in the way that a mother loves her children. With all the fear and all the vulnerability and the rawness that motherhood brings with it, we can see in each other's eyes that we wouldn't trade any of it for the world. Even if some days we dream about less laundry and no longer having to be bedtime, mealtime, screen time police.
There is a beautiful bond and a feeling of not being alone in a community of women who are trying to grow and support and teach the next generation how to have a happy, healthy life and thrive. And I know how much it has meant to me in my personal life to have those women and how important it's been to me to have those conversations and those connections.
With the women in my practice who have entrusted me with their babies and their children over the past 22 years, I think that no one on the planet has as much motivation and drive to implement positive change for future generations the way that mothers do. And my hope is that this podcast and this community can be a place where we can all come.
To find support and inspiration and energy and a reminder of why we are doing this on the
days that we need that reminder. 'cause we all know they're coming. Mine are often on Thursdays. So thank you for spending this time with me today. I look forward to the next time, and until then be well.
?Thank you again for joining me today for this episode. I hope you found something valuable in the time we spent together, and I hope you'll join me again next week on the Create Thriving Families Podcast. Until then, be well.
