S2 Episode 9: Toxic Overload in Kids, Why They Can't Sleep, Calm Down or Heal — and What You Can Do About It with Dr Lauren Lee Stone

Welcome to My Mighty Quinn

In this powerful and deeply personal episode, I’m joined by the extraordinary Dr Lauren Lee Stone — functional medicine practitioner, homotoxicologist, and mother of two boys once diagnosed with autism and PANS — neither of whom holds those diagnoses today.

Together, we expose the hidden toxic load affecting every modern child — from food, water, air and medications to birth trauma, stress, and emotional overwhelm — and how these silent stressors are inflaming young brains and bodies.

Dr Lauren shares her family’s remarkable recovery story and explains why so many children today struggle with sleep, anxiety, aggression, gut issues, tics and learning challenges — and what parents can do to start clearing the path to healing.

She breaks down complex science into compassionate, practical steps any family can take right now — showing that true detox is not deprivation or “kill protocols,” but a gentle, bio-individual process of strengthening and re-educating the body to heal itself.

Key Takeaways include:

• Children today are born with their mothers’ accumulated toxic load — from heavy metals and chemicals to emotional stress and infections.
• Chronic symptoms like anxiety, sleep problems, tics, gut issues, and meltdowns often point to an inflamed brain, not a behavioural disorder.
• The “whole toxic load” includes environmental, dietary and emotional stressors.
• Birth trauma and early medical interventions can disrupt development and nervous-system regulation.
• Gentle detoxification begins only after opening drainage pathways and fortifying the organs of elimination.
• Aggressive “kill” detoxes can backfire, causing regression and inflammation.
• Parents can start today by reducing household toxins, nourishing with real food, and prioritising restorative sleep.
• Above all, parents are the magic — when you heal, your child heals.

Listen now to understand why your child’s body may be too burdened to heal — and how you can begin lifting that load, one gentle step at a time.

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Transcript

Lucia Silver (00:00)
Welcome to today's episode. This episode is super important. We've called it Toxic Overload in Kids, Why They Can't Sleep, Calm Down or Heal, and What You Can Do About It. Welcome to My Mighty Quinn, a mother's conversations with world leading experts. I'm Lucia Silva, founder of the Brain Health Movement and mother to the Mighty Quinn. This podcast exists to help parents.

overwhelmed parents like you make sense of your child's and to show you that real healing is possible when we start asking the right questions. Today I'm bringing you someone I trust with my heart and my very own child's health. Dr. Lauren Lee Stone is not only one of the most respected experts in functional detox, homotoxicology and chronic childhood illness. And don't worry, we'll come on and explain what all of that means shortly.

but she is also the mother of two boys who were once given the diagnosis of autism and PANS. Neither holds these diagnoses anymore. And if that doesn't speak volumes, maybe this will. She is the person I turned to when my son Quinn needed help with his PANS journey. I have a little black book filled with world leading experts and I chose Dr. Lauren.

She holds a PhD, a master's in human nutrition, and multiple certifications in advanced healing modalities. I won't list them all because there's just too many, but what truly sets her apart is her gift for making complex science actionable and her fierce heart and compassion for the families she supports. In today's conversations, we're going to talk about something that affects every child in today's world, whether we know it or not, the whole toxic load.

Lauren Lee Stone (01:33)
you

Lucia Silver (01:54)
This is the burden of stressors from food, water, air, medications, emotional trauma, birth trauma that the body is carrying. And when a child is struggling with behavior, sleep, anxiety, aggression, tics, gut issues, or even just a general sense of being unwell, the toxic load is often the hidden roadblock that's rarely addressed. Dr. Lauren believes that healing starts at home.

that parents when properly supported and educated are the most powerful healers their children could ever have. So if you're lost, overwhelmed and wondering where to even begin, this episode will help you understand why your child is struggling and what steps you can take right now to start clearing the path to healing. So let's get into it. Welcome Dr. Lauren.

Lauren Lee Stone (02:45)
thank you so much for having me. Such a pleasure.

Lucia Silver (02:48)
Well, it's our honor to have you join us on My Mighty Quinn. So, Dr. Lauren, most of all, I'd like to begin with your personal story, if we may, because I think it speaks to the hearts of our mothers and parents and everyone listening. You have two sons, one who was diagnosed with autism, your first born, and your second born with PANS, and that's deeply relevant to many of our listeners.

Can I ask you to take us back to the beginning of your journey and share what happened with each of your boys, what you did, healing and so forth.

Lauren Lee Stone (03:22)
Yeah, absolutely.

So, you know, with my first born, I was in graduate school when I got pregnant and I was, you know, young and I thought very healthy. You know, I did everything right according to the books, right? I had a great diet. At least I thought I had a great diet. I learned a little bit more later on, but, you know, I took my prenatal vitamins. I exercised every day. You know, it was just, and it was, you know, ostensibly a healthy, you know,

a healthy nine months. And ⁓ my firstborn, Aiden, was also born without any medications. I had a natural birth. ⁓ And all was good until I took him home from the hospital. And all of a sudden, he started to manifest with what we now understand are those soft signs that something is really not OK in the background, right?

So first and foremost, he manifested with really severe colic, right? So he would writhe and scream in so much pain from basically 3 p.m. till well after midnight. And it was horrifying. was just, you know, horrible to watch, horrible for him. I didn't know what to do, you know, to ease that pain.

And alongside that, his stools were loose and burning. I mean, if I didn't change the diaper right away, he would end up with welts on his skin, something that is just unimaginable, really.

You know, and actually, as an aside, he didn't have a form stool until he was about four years old, which is also remarkable, right? When we think about that. He then started having chronic ear infections, which meant rounds of antibiotics. ⁓ You know, he had he was acutely sensitive to his world. ⁓

He had all of those kinds of sensitivities to fabric, to light, but most important it was to sound. That was really, really, really difficult for us because the world was just not a hospitable place for him. It hurt him literally. Loud noises were just so painful. We couldn't...

do like a normal classroom for example. We couldn't go to a birthday party. It was just overwhelming and too much for him, which was hard, right?

He started hand flapping, you know, doing this at three months old. ⁓ He had seizures at 18 months old and he was diagnosed with autism at the age of four. I was told by both my pediatrician and the Yale Child Study Center that there was absolutely nothing I could do, that he would continue to regress and eventually be institutionalized. you know,

Thankfully, I did not follow that advice ⁓ and instead I quit my job. I went back to school. I studied biochemistry. I studied nutrition. I studied homotoxicology, which is a form of homeopathy. Anything that, you know, I took his lead and anything that I thought could help him, you know, I knew that the...

The medical professionals at large were not helping me. And so I had to become his medical professional. There was no one else out there doing the work, right? So that's what I

Lucia Silver (06:58)
for the moment.

Lauren Lee Stone (07:01)
And long story.

Lucia Silver (07:02)
did you

know at that stage? I'm just going to interject because I have a hundred questions. I'm not going to ask you a hundred, but how did you know what you didn't know? Because for parents listening, they have a blank slate, they see all the symptoms, their doctors will be telling them, here's the name for what it is and here's some drugs or there's nothing you can do as you were told. And how did you know to go to homotoxicology when you say that you were led by?

Lauren Lee Stone (07:05)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (07:29)
by your son, how did you know that that was what you needed to know?

Lauren Lee Stone (07:33)
So what happened was, I I just intuitively started with nutrition and biochemistry because I knew that there was something off neurochemically with his brain, right? And so, and I knew that there was something off digestively because of the colic in the stool, right? ⁓ So that's where I began. And just by changing his diet and healing his gut and learning about

Lucia Silver (07:48)
as if it's stool.

Lauren Lee Stone (08:00)
you know, biochemistry and what the body needs in order to function. That food is medicine, that food is, you know, broken down into these chemical components that our body uses to function, right? That already took him from, you know, a place of total non-functionality really to, you know, a point where he could actually

you know, go to school, attend V in a classroom, like all of these things. But what I ended up realizing was that there was more to the story. You know, that he was actually holding on to a load of toxicity. We'll get into that soon. But in his case, it was he was actually ⁓ mercury toxic and the, you know,

The back story to that is that, you know, I, as his mom...

had a bunch of silver fillings in my mouth and silver fillings are actually, you know, mercury amalgams and those leached into my blood, right? Because they don't stay inert despite what, you know, dentists for a century have been telling us. Anytime you chew, anytime you have a hot liquid, they, you know, those, those vapors leach into the body and they ended up, you know, taking up residence in my son, you know, as he was developing and he was, so he

was

born mercury toxic, which was only exacerbated by the world in which he, you know, ended up being born into. ⁓ So, so why homotoxicology? I needed a way to encourage his body to detoxify, right? I knew that he was holding on to mercury and other things as well. ⁓ And I needed to figure out how to get his body to release.

those things so that he could actually function.

Lucia Silver (09:59)
And did you test him for that? Were those tests available at that stage? In fact, mean, were there you are in chew it in, there's mercury. How did you test and then detox?

Lauren Lee Stone (10:07)
Yeah,

yeah. there was hair samples. did. We actually, you know, did some urine toxic metal testing where we used a chelating agent to, you know, to provoke and see what came out. So high mercury, high lead, high aluminum, you know, metals were through the roof. Yeah, 100 percent.

Lucia Silver (10:30)
And just

as a sideline, that means yours are too, or yours were as well.

Lauren Lee Stone (10:34)
100 % oh

yeah, I mean in addition to my Mercury in the Albums, actually grew up in an older house and my mom was an avid decorator and she would constantly be having the painters come in and like I remember sanding the walls and the lead was just everywhere. So yeah, definitely high mercury, high lead. We all have high aluminum.

because of the world we live in. And if you couple that with genetically having slower detoxification pathways, which we do in our family, it's just a recipe for disaster, right?

Lucia Silver (11:11)
Yeah.

So those, the way the body might naturally, one child may live in that painted house, may have a mother with mercury fillings, but may have less issues with the detoxification. You've got that compounding it as well. So it also is nice, not nice, but important to hear it as a whole family, because we talk about it all the time at the Brain Health Movement, that it's not just your child. So often what you find has been

Lauren Lee Stone (11:22)
Mm-hmm.

Exactly.

Lucia Silver (11:37)
has begun with you. If it's stress, it could have began with you. If it was metals, it could have begun with you. And this toxic load begins in vitro or begins in conception. So it's a journey we can take together with our children.

Lauren Lee Stone (11:38)
Exactly.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly, Yeah,

and I think that it's super empowering to do so because what's reflected in you is reflected in your child and vice versa. And if you are healing, they are necessarily healing as well.

Lucia Silver (12:01)
Yeah, it's wonderfully symbiotic, but it also means we've got to take care of ourselves as mothers ⁓ emotionally, spiritually and physically, you know, and we forget that. think we focus externally all the time on our children and forget that this is a very symbiotic process, isn't it?

Lauren Lee Stone (12:07)
yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, 100%.

Lucia Silver (12:20)
So what happened next? mean, what were the doctors in your community and other people in your community saying as you were carving your own trajectory, educating yourself? It's extraordinary.

Lauren Lee Stone (12:31)
So

yeah, so I was lucky in that, you know, ⁓ the doctors I chose were very, very supportive of what I was doing. They would say things like, I don't understand it. I don't necessarily condone it, but as long as it's not hurting, then, you know, go ahead. ⁓ And, you know, actually,

One of the more beautiful experiences I had was when Aidan turned eight and he went to his pediatrician and she was, you know...

doing his whole physical and part of that physical was, you know, asking him a set of questions and going through, you know, the punch list for autism or anything else. And literally, you know, she was having this conversation with him on and on and on. ⁓ And she, you know, she had the file in front of her and I was standing next to her and she showed me the file. Then she went and she took her pen and she crossed out autism, you know, and it was like,

We both started crying. So, yeah.

Lucia Silver (13:38)
Yeah, that really just

got me just then as well.

Yeah, extraordinary. But it shouldn't be extraordinary is the point. It shouldn't be extraordinary. And it's not a miracle. It is because you followed a very specific trajectory and understood exactly what your child was struggling with and what he needed. So the predominant thing was around detoxing these metals and pathways and so on, and then diet using food. Is there anything else that you want to share that was very particular to Aidan's journey before we move on to your

Lauren Lee Stone (13:45)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lucia Silver (14:13)
second lovely little boy.

Lauren Lee Stone (14:15)
Yeah, well, I have to say that food sensitivities ⁓ were a big issue. You know, he had a really very ⁓ significant ⁓ sensitivity to both gluten and to dairy. I had already taken dairy out when he was young because he got so congested and that was a pretty obvious thing to do, but I didn't understand the larger picture with gluten. ⁓

But once we took that out, the inflammation started to really, really reduce and it was, you know, the stools were better. Everything was working. So for him, many of his nutrient deficiencies were because he had so many, you know, he had some serious sensitivities and his body was just too inflamed. The digestion wasn't working. He wasn't absorbing his nutrients. So that was a big part of the puzzle too.

Lucia Silver (15:09)
And how about his immunity generally because they're often happening together hand in hand and of course we'll talk about this with your second son but you've got inflammation and you've got sort of misdirected autoimmune responses as well. Was that part of the picture for him as well?

Lauren Lee Stone (15:16)
Yeah.

Yeah, so he expressed neurologically with his, you know, his immune issues. ⁓ And because of that, it's interesting, you know, some kids, you know, get sick all the time and they're like that hyper reactivity. Other kids don't get sick at all. And that's like a hypoimmune reaction. He was the hypo. He never got sick.

He never, you know, I remember actually, it's funny when he was around seven or eight, when we started to, he started to really, you know, be well, he for the first time had a cold and he had a runny nose and he just, didn't even know what to do with it. Cause he never had had that, you know, he didn't know how to blow his nose, nothing, you know? And the point I want to make on this though is that, you know, you, when your child,

Lucia Silver (16:03)
Mmm.

Lauren Lee Stone (16:11)
When your child's exposed, because they are exposed to all of this, right, to viruses, bacteria, whatever, and everyone else is getting sick and they're not getting sick, it's something to worry about. It doesn't mean that they have a super strong immune system. It means that the immune system more than likely is not able to react because it's so overwhelmed that it just shut down. And so they're being exposed, but they're just collecting. They're not getting rid of anything, right? So. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (16:35)
Yeah, that's super scary. And I think that speaks to a lot of us, Lauren. And I want to speak

to that with Quinn as well, because I was exactly that parent. I used to show off about the fact that all these kids were falling down sick at nursery and Quinn never had a day off. was like, how come he, you know, it's fantastic. He's got such a great, I thought a great immune system. And I have to put my hand up. I don't get the common colds going around either. So who knows what that says about what's going on there. But the point is,

Lauren Lee Stone (16:48)
Yeah. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (17:03)
those bugs are in the environment, therefore they're coming in, therefore what's happening? There's a bottleneck there somewhere, right?

Lauren Lee Stone (17:08)
Exactly,

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I always say if your child spikes a fever and can spike and maintain a fever, you know, that is a really great sign. That means your immune system is strong and hearty, has the energy to do the work, right?

Lucia Silver (17:27)
Yeah. So moving to your second born for our parents listening with children like Quinn who have pans. What happened there?

Lauren Lee Stone (17:39)
Yeah. So it's actually an interesting trajectory that I see in many of the families I work with that a first born will express with like an autism kind of thing. And the second will have more immunological and do have a PANS, FANDAS expression. So my second guy, right around the time that Aidan was getting better, he just sort of overnight...

had a major and terrifying personality change. ⁓ He went from this loving, sunny child to one who was just really driven by uncontrollable rage and violence towards himself, towards his siblings. ⁓ It was really terrifying. was was like darkness took over, right? ⁓ He was also

You know, it was also hard for him to even live in the world because he was so overwhelmed with ritualistic and obsessive kind of behaviors. This was post 9-11 and he, for example, had this obsession that whenever he saw a plane flying overhead, he had to use his mind to, you know, to save it from crashing, to hold it in his...

in mine and safety. like, like he couldn't even walk outside because he was constantly trying to save every plane that was overhead. It was really scary. ⁓ things got, you know, things progressed because this was a time when pandas wasn't considered a diagnosis. no, no, mm hmm.

Lucia Silver (19:22)
wasn't even recognised really, was it, at all? And how old was

this? Where are we in his journey when this particular presentation?

Lauren Lee Stone (19:30)
Well, it started

when he was about six and then it got, but it was, kept, because we didn't know what was going on, it just progressed. yeah, so by the time he was eight or so, it got really, really bad. Yeah. And so there was actually a time when he, you know, he had, oh, he had tons of facial tics and motor tics. it's hard to even look at him because his eyes were constantly going and then...

Lucia Silver (19:40)
Exacerbated, ⁓

Lauren Lee Stone (19:59)
He began getting hand tremors like a Parkinsonian patient. And they were so bad that he couldn't even dress himself. He couldn't button a button or do a zipper. ⁓ So it was totally terrifying. Thankfully, I did stumble upon some papers that were making that connection between strep and this kind of symptom.

Lucia Silver (20:22)
Expression.

Lauren Lee Stone (20:23)
symptom expression.

And I had what I realized is that he had had the year prior to him starting to express in this way, he had had eight strep infections. Yeah, eight, So, you know, then I read the papers and I began to make the connections and it took some time, but I finally found an immunologist who was amazing and

Lucia Silver (20:34)
Wow. Wow.

Lauren Lee Stone (20:50)
who really understood what was going on and, you know, helped us to get to the other side of this because once it's at this phase, you know, you have to do things like antibiotics and whatever else to, uh-huh, yeah, and then rebuild the immune system after that. So it's interesting. It took a while because we didn't know what we were doing and nobody knew what they were doing. And...

Lucia Silver (21:03)
⁓ To help the body out of it.

Lauren Lee Stone (21:17)
I have to say it was a very scary journey, but the good news is he's amazing now. And there was a time when he was in high school where he would coach boys who had this kind pansy-pansy expression. And it's so sweet and lovely because he was showing them that there is another side. You will heal and you'll be great. Just really beautiful.

Lucia Silver (21:44)
I realized that I didn't fit for any of our parents listening, that PANS is pediatric acute onset neuropsychiatric disorder. And then PANDAS is the same, if you like, but specifically related to a strep infection. So PANS is the sort of kind of very crudely say the slightly more unfortunate manifestation in that very many different stresses will create these.

Lauren Lee Stone (21:54)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lucia Silver (22:11)
this misdirected autoimmune response with PANS, whereas PANDAS is quite specifically related to strep. But ultimately, this is once again, not so different from some of the driving forces behind autism. And we're gonna come to the difference that we seem to drive between symptoms and labels and so on, and how some of it can be helpful and some of it can actually be a little bit distracting because ultimately, we're talking about inflammation, we're talking about...

Lauren Lee Stone (22:37)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (22:37)
misdirected

autoimmune responses or immune responses. So we'll come onto that in a minute. But with your second, ⁓ how did you navigate what most parents will be dealing with, is institutions in the medical environment wanting to diagnose us? Sometimes it's autism, sometimes it's bipolar, but it's largely behavioral or psychiatric.

Lauren Lee Stone (22:56)
Ahem.

Lucia Silver (23:04)
medication and protocols that are thrown at children who express this way and you must have been, hey listen I've just been through this with my firstborn, I kind of know this is biological, I know this is neurobiological, ⁓ how did you contend with that?

Lauren Lee Stone (23:18)
Mm-hmm.

Well, you know, thankfully I had some tools in my toolkit that were helpful in keeping him in a place where we didn't necessarily have to be hospitalized, you know, whereas a lot of kids, they are, they immediately go in that direction and I can understand that fear, you know, the need to.

get your child a certain specific kind of help. ⁓ I'm thankful that I didn't, wasn't, I wasn't led with fear at that point. At that point I was, but not in a different way. And so I think as well, ⁓ let me back up a second. Finding symptom relief is always okay, right? And if there's a medication that helps in the short run,

to give you peace and to give your child peace, that is fine. That is great. The only argument I have is that, you're getting that symptom relief, then maybe dig in and try to find out what's behind, you know, what's lurking behind that actual expression. Why is your child having panic, aggression, OCD, anxiety, depression? What's going on there?

Right? And more often than not, it is, you know, an inflamed brain. you know, we need to dig in and find out where is that inflammation coming from? What's sitting at the root? And begin to really gently peel away those layers so that, you know, you can come back to a place of your baseline of health and vibrancy and homeostasis with all of the systems, right? And not need.

the medication anymore, hopefully.

Lucia Silver (25:07)
Absolutely. at the moment, you know, I know that mainstream medicines hands are tied. They certainly are in this country and I know to a large extent they are in the US and that's why some pediatric doctors are actually relinquishing their licenses so that they can practice off the mainstream diagnosis. I've had so many parents calling within our parent, you know, that the one-to-one parent coaching support that I offer saying, I just don't understand the doctor keeps prescribing antibiotics, but

but we know it's a misdirected autoimmune response. So why do we keep just treating? Why aren't they giving me anything else? And I have to say, because they can't, they're not licensed to operate in the area that you, Dr. Lauren, operate in. We've got to, of course, deal with the infections, but you can't just keep waiting for each infection to come along and have this dreadful neuroinflammatory response and do nothing.

We have to start to train the body to stop having that response and help it detoxify and help it deal with it better. I'm always at a loss and I'm on my soap box. I don't know what these doctors are actually saying when they're asked that question because I threw it back at my doctor in London who I was very thankful to because he gave me the diagnosis and I needed the diagnosis of PANS from a conventional doctor to be able and there's only about two in the UK that can give it.

Lauren Lee Stone (26:09)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (26:31)
But then when I said to him, refused to keep giving Quinn antibiotics. isn't, there wasn't, there was silence. There was nothing. There was just, this is all I can do. But I wonder how those doctors go to bed at night and sleep on this, knowing that they're treating a third, if they're lucky, of the problem, a third part of the problem, you know? So.

Lauren Lee Stone (26:53)
Yeah, I

think that speaks to the medical institution at large and the way doctors are, at least in this country, and I think it's the same in the UK. They're not, they are trained specifically in a way that is, know, they don't look at the body as a whole. They don't look at ⁓ the disease process as a bigger picture. ⁓

they're all laser focused in their teeny tiny little place. yeah, so it's really hard to actually treat something that's chronic. That's great for acute situations, right? know, somebody who is ⁓ really, really well versed in something very specific like an infection, knows the antibiotics, knows this, knows that, that's great. But when...

Lucia Silver (27:22)
silos, yeah.

Sean.

Lauren Lee Stone (27:47)
the expression is more chronic in nature, that's not going to be helpful because you need to take into account the whole picture, you know, the whole, all the systems working together, but also, you know, what's going on in the background, what's going on with food, with lifestyle, environmental, you know, exposures, all of that are contributing factors when we're talking about a chronic condition, especially

one that is so immunologically based, right? So.

Lucia Silver (28:16)
Yeah,

yeah, 100%. And unfortunately, they are are trained to operate or prescribe that is allopathic Western medicine. So they are doing what they're supposed to be doing. But I think the world is waking up to the fact that we need so much more. ⁓ And we do deep dive much more into this with with Dr. Lauren on our whole child multidisciplinary roadmap to healing therein there lies the point.

Lauren Lee Stone (28:24)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (28:42)
But for parents listening who are in the thick of it, whose children are struggling, Lauren, with meltdowns, with school refusal, anxiety, tics, aggression, picky eating, bad sleep, tummy problems and more. And I like to list them all because I think parents then go, wow, has someone else got all that too? What do you want them to understand about these symptoms and why their child might be feeling this way?

Lauren Lee Stone (28:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I mean, I think that parents need to know that the body is hardwired to heal and we just need to give it the tools right and parents are the perfect people to provide those tools right so there is a light at the end of the tunnel and this you know these kind of symptoms or diagnoses is not the destiny for your child right and the

The real work comes in trying to figure out, again, what are the elements that are sitting behind the symptom expression? And from my perspective, in most instances, you know, it is this, an inflamed brain, you know? So we think about symptoms of brain inflammation, we usually think in terms of the acute, you know, the acute expression. So,

like something like post-concussion, what do you get? You get dizziness, nausea, balance issues, things like that, right? But what people have to understand is that when this inflammation moves into a more chronic place, the symptoms are very wide and varied. And they're not necessarily the symptoms that we would think of off the top of our heads, right? So things like personality changes, anxiety, depression, focus issues.

All of these things are really tied to an inflamed brain, right? So the good news is, you know, you reduce that inflammation and the symptoms will abate as well. So the work really is to figure out what, again, is sitting behind that inflammation so that we can, you know, quell the fire and, you know, go back to a place of, you know, again, a vibrant health of calm.

yeah, of, of all of that.

Lucia Silver (30:49)
So this is coming back to the whole toxic load which some parents may be hearing for the first time and I'd love you to break that down for us but I want to say and lead up to that that what we're really saying here is that many of these symptoms can seem random, can seem disconnected but they really aren't and this is further confused by the way the medical institutions are rounding up so many children under singular diagnosis so thousands of children you know, autism.

Lauren Lee Stone (30:54)
Pfft.

Lucia Silver (31:18)
ADHD and sometimes this is helpful of course it's helpful when you can access support within school and facilities and so forth but it sometimes can also be a distraction because ultimately the neurobiological reasons for many of the responses that we're seeing in children are the same but the expressions may be marginally different but that is also why we see these comorbid you know you see meltdowns with

I'm picking eating or you see OCD and anxiety or you see you know autism and stimming and you see you so that they are grouped and they groups because collectively the body is struggling the brain is inflamed issue saying these the many multifaceted ways in which it's expressing its inability to manage the whole toxic load is that a reasonable summation without oversimplifying.

Lauren Lee Stone (32:14)
Yeah, no, that's not oversimplifying at all. That's great. I think that, you know, and before we can really understand what's going on, we have to put everything in context of the multifactorial disease model. ⁓ And this is a model that helps us to see that with these kinds of chronic conditions, there are so many things at play.

age, genetics, epigenetics, you know, environmental exposures, ⁓ infections, all fight role. There's, know, even though it seems like for something like a, a pan's, pandas kind of expression that it's the infection that caused the symptom expression. Yeah, that might be the straw that broke the camel's back, but there are so many other things sitting beneath that, right? That caused the immune.

dysregulation that precipitated this whole process, right? So it's the, you know, really the understanding comes in when we know, when we realize that it's the accumulation of these stressors over time. And those stressors are all bio individual, right? Whether, you know, it might look like you have the same disorder. You might express with, you know, focus issues, right? But

The reason one child is diagnosed with ADHD and the reason another child is diagnosed with ADHD is entirely individual. you know, so, you know, these broad categories of, you know, diagnoses, they can be helpful, you know, for school, for whatever, for understanding some things, but they also can be very limiting because they give you, they give, I think they give parents a false hope that

Lucia Silver (33:44)
Yeah.

Lauren Lee Stone (34:04)
there's either a magic pill or one thing that they need to do or one remedy, but it's not like that because, know, the, yeah, what's going on beneath the surface is super, super, super different for each person, right?

Lucia Silver (34:13)
Absolutely.

And the chronology, not just of the stresses can be extremely relevant as well as can the chronology and is the chronology of the healing, which again is why our course really drills down into looking at what has caused it in the first place from going back to even before a baby's born, but certainly birth, modern birth interventions and that what happened at that stage right the way through to what then creates this perfect storm of

more and more issues that then develop and that we then realize we need to, we then don't develop as we're supposed to. So then we end up looking at primitive reflex integration and we look at body work and we look at the vagus tone and lots of things that parents may have heard a little bit about. Some of you may have heard nothing, but the point is if we start on the wrong foot, quite often, if not all the time, a lot of parents are told it'll go away. Well, it doesn't go away, you know, fundamental

trauma has been caused or there's really deep toxicity or a child's, know, abilities to detoxify are compromised. These things don't go away. They do need to be addressed. So this is why we look at it. We must look at it from a whole child point of view. And we need to look at it from a sequencing point of view as well, even within your, your area of functional medicine, where you're looking at, you know, detoxification, you can't just detox. You've got to also do that very carefully.

So let's just wind back Lauren and look at, so we've got the whole toxic load. We're starting to understand that there's a buildup of stresses in lots of different areas. ⁓ Let's start with, know, what can affect a baby before they're We've talked about your mercury in your mouth and, but also how can those shape a child's brain behavior or health later on? And then we can talk a little bit about birth as well, because we've got to look at it.

Lauren Lee Stone (35:47)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (36:10)
We do need to look at it when you sit down with a parent you're going to look at the chronology of the whole you know how were you born how were you as a parent when you were pregnant where do we start with this and what questions we need to ask.

Lauren Lee Stone (36:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so we have to understand that, you know, children today are not born with a clean slate, right? They're not, you know, they're not born just, you know, as what we would think that a baby would be, you know, just totally healthy and vibrant and, yeah, and clean, right? They're born with their mother's total toxic load, right? Because everything passes.

in utero, right? We think about nourishment passing through the blood, through the foods we eat, through oxygenation, all of that good stuff. But everything else passes as well. So we have these transgenerational toxins, you know, from heavy metals to chemicals, to emotional stress, to infections like Lyme, right? Which can and do actually pass

through the placenta and take up residence in the child. So if you think about it, our kids are born at an incredible disadvantage, right? They're born already toxic and then into a world that is really not conducive to health at all. So there's that to begin with, right? And we really have to understand that that lays the groundwork.

for whatever happens later on. So as far as how does it impact? Well, it impacts, again, like for example, in my son's case, know, mercury is a neurotoxin. It's one of the most lethal neurotoxins known to humankind, right? And the fact that he had high, high levels as an infant that impacted

the way his brain developed, right? And, it could have been ⁓ something that...

Well, he could have ended up as was forecast in an institution, if it was allowed that kind of toxic impact on the brain and the rest of the body was allowed to continue. And if we're able to actually encourage the body to recognize that there are, you know, that these toxic elements are there and begin to detoxify and unwind.

those stressors, then we have hope for a better future, if that makes sense.

Lucia Silver (38:38)
Yeah, and we can,

and so much of this is also speaks to preventative approach, you know, so how healthy are you as a mom as you're conceiving and as you are pregnant, you know, through those months, what are you eating? All the stuff that kind of seems obvious, but somehow isn't taught to us. wasn't taught to me. I thought I had a, like you did a pretty healthy diet. I don't have any fillings in my mouth, but there was so many things that I was doing during my pregnancy that I had no understanding of that I would do differently now.

Lauren Lee Stone (38:43)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (39:08)
⁓ And further to that, we've done a piece specifically with Dr. Tony Ebel, ⁓ both in the course and on our podcast about birth trauma, because once again, parents think that unless they were literally wheeled into emergency ward and half dead, that they had a good birth. That parents think that if they booked in for cesarean, that that means everything was fine, or other parents, like I did.

Lauren Lee Stone (39:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lucia Silver (39:32)
You know, we had a, von twos and forceps and it was just the most awful, you know, then Quinn and I were separated for a while and, know, his nervous system was shot on arrival. ⁓ and so there is this very, very important for me, sweet spot between the birth trauma and the way that we arrived and then what will happen with colic and ear infections and all the cascades that we see following the birth trauma.

Lauren Lee Stone (39:43)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (40:00)
And a lot of parents go, wow, yeah, that was me. Yeah, I had that birth and then we had infections and then we had more. And then we had antibiotics and then his tummy was never okay. And then he didn't crawl properly. And then he didn't, you know, there's a very, there's always a trajectory that you can spot. It's very, very unusual that a parent doesn't say to me, this happened. go, well, did that happen? Yes. How did you know? You know, so this is, this is really the more that we can know before the better, obviously.

But these are steps that we can absolutely reverse once we understand what is happening. So we've alluded to the health of mum. We've alluded to birth delivery itself. Let's walk through some of the stresses within this toxic load that you see adding up in children. Let's explore each one for those that are going, wow, this is amazing. Tell me more, tell me more.

Lauren Lee Stone (40:39)
Ahem.

Lucia Silver (40:56)
So let's start with environmental stresses. what in our homes and our environments might be adding to the load in the first instance that parents might not even realize?

Lauren Lee Stone (41:05)
Yeah, so much. I just want to say one thing on the birth stress that is just a story from from our my family. when Simon was about my second born, when he was about 18 months old, he started having night terrors, screaming, waking up in middle of night, just absolutely ⁓ unable to settle terrified. Right. And I couldn't figure out what was going on.

Lucia Silver (41:08)
Yeah.

Lauren Lee Stone (41:30)
And so I ended up bringing him to one of my beloved practitioners who I just so rely on. And she was, she's a craniosacral practitioner, body work. ⁓ And she's also highly intuitive because you have to be intuitive to do that work. Anyway, she was working on it and then I told, was telling her what was going on. And she said, did he have birth trauma? And I said, ⁓ yeah. I mean, he was born, he was born vaginally, but the cord was around his neck and he was blue.

when he came out and he actually aspirated a lung trying to breathe. And she said, she's like, ⁓ he is absolutely reliving that trauma at night. That's why he's waking up. ⁓ And she said, let me fix that. And so she did what she did, she did. And he never woke up again. He never had any night terrors again. So just to say that, you know, of course the trauma lives in the body, right?

Lucia Silver (41:59)
well.

Lauren Lee Stone (42:26)
it will be expressed in one way or another because that's what trauma does, you know? So, yeah.

Lucia Silver (42:31)
Yeah, yeah.

And I feel that so acutely. know, Quinn doesn't like anyone going anywhere near his neck. And he was pulled and pulled and pulled and pulled. And then I believe that created problems in the, you know, in the rest of his system. But I also believe that he's this movement of his is still related to this, to this birth trauma. And we are doing the neurologically focused chiropractic work. And Quinn's dad does a little bit of cranial sacral. So we are very invested in that. And it's the obvious place to begin.

Lauren Lee Stone (42:38)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (43:01)
Just start at the beginning. Just start at the beginning. Yeah, that's a beautiful story. Wow. ⁓ Really beautiful story. So let's forwards then. So yeah, yeah. Homes and environments. Give us some goodies here.

Lauren Lee Stone (43:01)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah

Back to environmental stress, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, ⁓ you know, clean. Yeah. So clean. So cleaning up the home is the most important thing, you know, the parent can do. And that includes what's going on environmentally in the house, also with food, et cetera. So as far as like typical, toxic stressors that I see in homes all the time, ⁓

Lucia Silver (43:20)
baddies I should say, tell us about the baddies not the goodies.

Lauren Lee Stone (43:40)
you know, I like to first start with, you know, personal care products because I think most of us don't understand that the skin, you know, we think of it as being protective, but it's really highly, highly absorptive. And so anything that's put on the skin, it's going to have a direct pathway to the blood, which means it goes systemic pretty quickly. you know, toxic personal care products, you know, especially

the stuff they sell out there for babies, I can't believe it. Like they have toxic fragrances and all kinds of chemicals and parabens and all of this that you think, I know, I know, it's awful, it's awful. So imagine all that on this little system, right? Put it directly on their skin, directly into their respiratory system, really, really dangerous, I think.

Lucia Silver (44:15)
Fragrance wipes, everything's fragrance, fragrance wipes, everything.

Lauren Lee Stone (44:31)
begin with personal care products ⁓ and then you know move into the products that we use in our house for laundry detergent, know cleaning products, all kinds of things again fragrances, aerosols, yeah, they're just it's just ubiquitous and until you actually take a bit of a deep dive and start reading the labels you know I don't think people even understand.

Lucia Silver (44:43)
aerosols.

Lauren Lee Stone (44:56)
⁓ And the other thing that I find as well, ⁓ so many of the kids that I see ⁓ come in with things like flame retardants in their bodies. And where do we get this? Well, from clothing for one, mattresses, even sofas, right? So we have to be really, really careful about how we are populating, not only what we're putting on our skin or how we're cleaning, but how we're

We're populating our child's right?

Lucia Silver (45:24)
And it's the accumulated effect of all of these things. Quinn will go, ⁓ mommy, what's a tomato's gonna make a difference? I'm like, it's not the tomato that Dr. Lauren wants you to, it's the tomato and the, and the, and the, and then this, and then this, and then this. No one thing is the thing. We're just trying to take away the number of things that are stressing out your system, inflaming your system. okay. But it is that. I often think, God, if you just,

Lauren Lee Stone (45:26)
Mm-hmm.

You

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (45:53)
think of a baby or your kid, you throw them in the bath, the bath is full of chlorine and nasty chemicals, they get out the bath, then you know, you've lathered them in all the, sorry before that, in the soap and the bubble bath and that's got all the sulfates and the nasties and the fragrance, then they get out the bath, you get the towel which has been washed in fabric conditioner everybody, that's just been invented to sell you something else, you don't need a fabric conditioner.

Lauren Lee Stone (46:06)
Yeah

Mm-hmm.

you

Lucia Silver (46:21)
That's just another layer of fragrance on top of the biological

washing stuff you've already used. So then you wipe that all over their body on the towel. Then you put creams on that are fragranced if you cream your babies and tell compounder with more, excuse me, crap in them. Then they get into bed in sheets that are also covered in and their pajamas that have been washed in it. So all over their skin, they've been lathered that and then, and then they sleep on a.

mattress that's probably got lots of nasties in it and on pillows that have got lots of nasties in it. So that gives you a picture of just bath to bed bedtime. ⁓ know, then then what else we've got in our environment, Lauren, we've got our EMS, ⁓ you know, right, are they sleep? Yeah. So are they sleeping next to their Alexa? I pull, I pull that out. ⁓ You know, that's right next to them or they're going to bed with their phones and their little we've got these in, but I don't use these normally ever.

Lauren Lee Stone (46:57)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, electromagnetics, Wi-Fi, electricity.

Yeah.

Lucia Silver (47:18)
⁓ You know right into the break. There's just it's it's just to become aware and see what you can peel back Right from your from your environment

Lauren Lee Stone (47:21)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. Exactly.

in and of itself is really detrimental to the body and to the immune system and especially to our ability to sleep deeply, which we need to do in order to to heal. Right. And then when we talk about mold, which is something that I'm seeing

constantly these days. literally, I feel like every year there are more mold cases with children than I see in my practice. You know, it wasn't really like this 20 years ago. It's much more prevalent and significant today. And the reason I believe is because, you know, there have been studies that show that Wi-Fi frequencies actually

potentiate the virility of mold species, while at the same time degrading our immune response, know, weakening us. Yeah, so I think that there's a real correlation there.

Lucia Silver (48:24)
Yeah, mean, I mulled is something we hadn't we hadn't touched on particularly. It's a huge issue for neuro inflammation for brain inflammation. certainly it was it was the straw that broke the camel's back for Quinn in the summer that he had his first flare. But I've wondered that for a long time, Lauren, why why are we seeing so much more because we can answer to why, you people say, well, you can't blame it on the toxins of a mother passing on to a baby because

Lauren Lee Stone (48:36)
Yeah.

Lucia Silver (48:50)
We've always been giving birth to babies. Well, we didn't have as many toxins as we did, you know, 10 years ago. We've got more toxins that we're passing on and the same here. Why have we got more? There isn't there is an answer to most of this. It's not a mystery, ⁓ but I think people are quite keen to always come back and go, no, it's just genetics. There's nothing you can do about it. It's not these. There are absolutely directed answers as to what is happening, you know, biochemically at the moment in our atmosphere and so forth.

Lauren Lee Stone (48:54)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Lucia Silver (49:19)
So yes, EMF, super important, moulds, super important. How about dietary stresses? What common foods and food additives that you find with your patients are most problematic?

Lauren Lee Stone (49:28)
Hmm.

So, I mean, in the US, it's a little bit different from in Europe, but in the US, the biggest, biggest and most problematic stressor that I see is glyphosate. Glyphosate is an herbicide that's just ubiquitous over here. I read studies that say that it is sprayed on 98 % of conventional foods in the US, which is crazy. So why is glyphosate a problem? Well,

Glyphosate was first patented as an antibiotic, right? So anytime we eat anything that's been sprayed with glyphosate, which is everything in the United States, we are necessarily killing off the good bacteria in our gut. So we are, you know, creating a situation wherein we are not going to be digesting, absorbing our foods. We are creating, you know, dysfunction in the terrain, et cetera, et cetera. And more ominously, glyphosate actually

preferentially kills off the bacteria that help us to make our really feel-good neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine, right? So they target this bacteria, which is...

Absolutely astounding. So no wonder we have focus issues. We have anxiety. We have depression. We have the gamut of mood disorders in this country. And then thirdly, glyphosate is what's called a glycine analog. So glycine is an amino acid, the most abundant amino acid in the body. But importantly, it's also the major component of our collagen matrix, right, our structure. So what glyphosate does is whenever we eat it,

it ends up replacing glycine in our collagen matrix, which causes structural instability, causes systemic inflammation and is from my perspective, the point of departure for all the POTS kind of expression that we're seeing right now. You know, it's that, the causes that kind of real systemic hardcore inflammation, autoimmunity, the body attacking its own matrix, right? Cause it knows that,

there's something amiss, right? So, you know, really, really damaging across the board. So that's not a particular food. That's all conventional foods in the U.S. And you guys thankfully don't have glyphosate in as big quantities because I think, you you guys have been smart enough to ban it over there, but you do get stuff that, you know, foods that come in from our very, very toxic environment to you.

Lucia Silver (51:55)
Yeah, I mean,

that that's just poison. Essentially, it's poison. I mean, it's crazy. But ⁓ at a lower at a lower tier, there are more things in foods that are ubiquitous. And by that, I mean, everywhere in the world, you know, that even things packaged confusingly, as we talk about on the course, like natural flavorings.

Lauren Lee Stone (51:58)
Yeah,

yeah.

Lucia Silver (52:16)
and you know all these these things like the sugar freeze and the fat freeze and stuff that's been reconstituted and unfortunately even when we think we're doing really well and we go to the gluten-free counter the gluten-free food is full of I noticed the other day how long these gluten-free wraps I very rarely give Quinn any form of bread in any form obviously certainly not gluten but even gluten-free because it just looks it's just not food anything outside of a packet you know basically we try and avoid

Lauren Lee Stone (52:21)
Mm-hmm.

yeah.

Lucia Silver (52:43)
But I was curious that a couple of weeks back, I bought these wraps for him. I thought, they're thin and it's a bit more interesting and I'll wrap the food. But I went and got them out of the fridge and I realized it had got trapped behind some food in the fridge, ⁓ Dr. Lauren. And when I pulled it out, it was immaculate. And I thought, that's been there for nearly three weeks. So, you know, even the things that are, you know, supposed to be presenting as, you know, clean foods.

Lauren Lee Stone (53:01)
I was in there.

Lucia Silver (53:12)
or not. this is a vertical educational journey, isn't it, to really get our heads around things. But again, it's more and more and more of these dietary stresses, the additives, the sugars, the colors, the preservatives, the flavorings. I feel desperate when you talk about the glyphosates, the glutamates, because we're encouraging parents to go buy the vegetables and the things that aren't in the packets.

Lauren Lee Stone (53:13)
Uh-huh.

Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (53:40)
I shouldn't laugh, but I'm laughing nervously. It's like, where are you supposed to go to actually feed yourself? ⁓

Lauren Lee Stone (53:45)
No, Yeah, you

have to grow it yourself or else you don't know where it's been, you know? Yeah.

Lucia Silver (53:50)
Yeah, yeah. But

for many parents listening, they may be on, you know, processed foods every night, or they may be going and getting McDonald's and whatever. And this is a little bit of wake up call. And I can't tell you the transformation in Quinn. He was a very healthy eater anyway. But since I've taken out a lot of these inflammatory foods and followed much of your advice so far, you know, we are seeing improvements all the time, all the time. So it's just little by little, little by little. ⁓

Lauren Lee Stone (54:18)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (54:19)
And then, and I know we'll offer some downloadable bits and pieces after this to list some of these things that we can look out for, but I just want to keep going, getting through more information that's helpful to our parents who gone environmental stresses, dietary stresses, and then of course, emotional stresses, Dr. Lauren. Talk to us a little bit about that because with, I just want to speak to it with Quinn because, you know, getting stressed at school is inflammatory. Getting stressed and even upsets at home with me.

Lauren Lee Stone (54:34)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (54:48)
Those can cause a flare. Those can cause some of the issues. It's all linked, isn't it? It's all linked. So if you wouldn't mind just speaking to this area that's a little bit less obvious, perhaps.

Lauren Lee Stone (54:52)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah, well, you, you know, you just, you can't separate the emotional body from the physical body. You just can't. And that's one of the big, you know, mistakes, I think that many practitioners of the Western model make, right? You know, the whole idea that it's all in your head or what is that? You know, first and foremost, we have to understand that the body does not heal when it's in fight or flight.

Right? When there's stress or trauma, the body does not heal. You have got to move, you know, out of that stress stance and into, you know, the rest repair stance, which is, you know, calming, right? In order to facilitate healing. So that's first and foremost, right? We're not gonna, you're not gonna really get anywhere until you're able to modulate that stress response. And,

many things I want to say on this score, but kids who have had any kind of chronic illness necessarily have experienced trauma, right? It is traumatic to be ill. It just is. So we need to recognize that and we need to support them, not just physiologically, but also emotionally, right?

So some really interesting insights into this that that, you know, in my research I found. So we always think about, how that, you know, we think that we're just all about our brain and like the way we feel, we feel through our thoughts. But actually, if you dig into the science, the heart is the source of our emotions, which the ancients knew that, right? We don't know that. The heart has actually

40,000 sensory neurites, which are in direct communication with the brain. And 80 % of the messaging between the heart and the brain comes from the heart. So it's just, you know, an interesting way to flip things. You know, our bodies are the seed of our emotions, right? Not the brain. So we need to really integrate that and understand that in order to heal,

holistically, we need to address, more of the emotional side, if that makes sense.

Lucia Silver (57:11)
It 100 % does and I think if parents are throwing everything at their kiddo from know supplements and maybe primitive reflex integration if they've started that or speech and language then they're just seeing no improvements at that stage. It could very well be that we need to go back a little bit further and just see what state their bodies are in, birth trauma or any trauma as you've said from from having been ill or indeed

you yourself and parents will have heard me say time and time again that this journey took me right back to me with Quinn and you know the trauma that I definitely underwent when he had his first and thankfully only big PANS flare that really just knocked me sideways and when I started his healing journey I realized it was almost like PTSD that I was struggling with you know I was totally dysregulated.

Lauren Lee Stone (57:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (58:07)
So when I realized that I was seeing a child's body in fight or flight, I saw that mine was as well. So this journey is once again, collective. And there are many wonderful things from neurologically focused chiropractic, craniosacral, tapping, breathing, meditations. There are ⁓ many healing modalities and therapies that again, we have on the course and we have through our podcasts, but.

Lauren Lee Stone (58:14)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (58:34)
For me, really begins there because once the system is receptive and ready, there's so much that is possible in terms of healing. So let's now talk about your modality, which is homotoxicology, this gentle detoxification. I think many parents worry about the word detox. Some feel it sounds extreme. sounds like deprivation. It sounds like withdrawing and...

Lauren Lee Stone (58:42)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (58:59)
But your approach, and I can absolutely testify to this with my journey with Quinn and yourself, is so gentle and so much about preparing the body for strengthening it and garnering what it has to do this job eventually by itself. Supplements are not meant to be a substitution forever, unless there really is a chronic issue. We are trying to teach the body to get itself back on path. ⁓

Lauren Lee Stone (59:25)
Mm-hmm.

Lucia Silver (59:26)
So gentle detox, why is it especially important and especially important for sensitive or complex illnesses, complex children? Yeah.

Lauren Lee Stone (59:34)
Yeah, well, because they are already so reactive, right? You don't want to add, again, more stress to the system. The idea of detox is to unwind those stressors. And so when I say gentle detox, as my methodology, it really is all about working with the body, listening to the body.

Fortifying the body and reeducating the body to do the work that it should already be doing But hasn't been doing because it's been in a state of overwhelm, right? So yeah, it's about gently peeling away those stressors and moving slowly and in step with you know with the with with the processes of the body as they continually

express themselves. it's like it is it's all about listening. It's all about understanding that when your child has a symptom, the symptom is the expression of the body doing its work. So we just have to try to figure out what that symptom is and, and reverse engineer it basically, right? So with my methodology, you know, I think the reason it works is because

A, I'm listening to the body, I'm paying attention to the body. There's no one size fits all protocol. It's about the actual needs of the individual, right? Do you need to fortify the mitochondria? Do you need more liver support? Like what is it that this particular beautiful body needs? And then before we begin any detoxification, we want to be sure that

all the pathways of elimination are open, right? Not only are we fortifying, all of the nutritionally, but we are opening the lymph, the liver, the kidney. We're opening the pathways of elimination from the brain, that glymphatic system, right? And once all of that is open and functioning, then you can begin the work of gentle dedosification and...

I do like to use homeopathics or bioenergetics remedies because they are such a beautiful way to again,

reeducate the body and to ask the body to do the work rather than imposing something on the body. you know, for a good example is, know, if you take antibiotics and again, there's nothing wrong with antibiotics when they are called for, but they come in and like say you have a strep infection, they'll come in and kill the strep, right?

And you know, that's great sometimes, but over time it can be disempowering to the immune system because the immune system loses track of what it means to kill the strep, right? If you use a homeopathic that is directed at helping the body to get rid of strep, what it's going to do is it's going to come in and basically shine a flashlight on strep in the body and say, hey, this is here, go get it, right?

It's essentially very empowering because it's teaching the immune system to do the work it should already be doing,

And, you know, again, when you're asking the body to do the work, the body is infinitely intelligent, so you're not imposing your timeline, right? You are allowing the work to happen as it should, if that makes sense.

Lucia Silver (1:02:53)
Absolutely, the readiness is all in preparing the body and as you say strengthening the organs that should be doing the work, opening the pathways that should be eliminating and are we then ready for detox once we've done that? How do we know we're ready for detox? What's that point? What are you looking for to know?

Lauren Lee Stone (1:03:01)
Mm-hmm.

Well, I think that

body knows, I don't necessarily know, right? You'll start to see that things are functioning better. And if you, well, I like to prepare the body for several months before I start adding any detoxifiers into the system. You don't even need to add in the detoxifiers though, because the body will do the work it needs to do in its own timeline. And so you don't really even need to know.

that whether when it's ready, because it will do it. You'll know though, when it's not ready, if you're pushing too hard, because then you're going to have exacerbation of symptoms, you're going to have, you know, like this typical Herxheimer reactions, and then you know that you need to back off, right? Maybe you need more support, maybe you need to go more slowly, ⁓ you know, any number of things.

Lucia Silver (1:03:56)
Right.

So that also takes us to what are some of the things you shouldn't do with detox. Clearly go too fast, overwhelm the system. But what are the signs that a child may not be detoxing properly? Because there's an awful lot of stuff out there on the internet, Dr. Lauren, now, which says, you know, get rid of these heavy metals and take this zeolite to get rid of XYZ and make sure you kill the parasites first or they'll give birth again and then you'll be left with this and this in the body.

Lauren Lee Stone (1:04:09)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Lucia Silver (1:04:29)
And there's a lot that it's cheap, it's cheerful. Parents may think they can't afford to go via a proper avenue like yourself, you know, but what can go wrong and what, you know, what are the don't dos, just don't do this.

Lauren Lee Stone (1:04:41)
Yeah, I I take issue with the idea that you go in and kill, kill, kill, because, you know, things like parasites and ⁓ candida can be protective in the body. actually hold two to three times their weight in toxic elements, including heavy metals, mold, infection, all of that. And so sometimes when the body is overloaded, as it is often with our children and with ourselves.

the body will invite in these organisms as a safety mechanism. And so if you go and kill off, you know, just without really considering the consequences, you know, when you do kill, you know, these, these organisms off, they're going to be releasing all of their toxic load back into the system, which can cause, you know, not just an exacerbation, but you can have, I've seen, well, I have seen personally,

regression, right? Kids who have gotten to a certain point, you know, they do this protocol that is too aggressive, not appropriate, not considering the whole body and they end up regressing, especially in our PANS PANDAS or autism, children, they can...

they can go, they could backslide, you know, several months or years because you're doing something ⁓ that is too aggressive and not appropriate. So, so don't, don't, yeah, don't be lured into the, that kill mechanism. Make sure that the body is properly supported. Make sure if you're going to be doing any kind of detox work that you have drainage on board, binders on board, you're.

you're nutritionally sound, all of the above.

Lucia Silver (1:06:23)
Sounds like there's an awful lot that can go wrong. ⁓ It's a delicate journey. And while the body knows what it needs to do, I think there's many ways of really interfering in getting this wrong.

So we hear a lot of big words, Dr. Lauren, leaky gut, methylation, inflammation, mitochondria. For the overwhelmed parent,

I don't believe they need to understand all of these and that the micro detail of it, of everything. ⁓ Is there a way to start helping their children without getting lost in the science? You know, what in your view is important to know and understand to begin this journey for those parents are like, I just can't, I'm not sciencey or this is too much or, and there are, and I get it. You know, I'm a bit nerdy and I'm loving learning with you and with the other.

incredible world practitioners, world leading practitioners, but it's not easy, some of the science, to get your head around. So what's important? What's the basic stuff to get a handle on here?

Lauren Lee Stone (1:07:25)
Yeah. So, so you don't need to know the science to know, to know how to facilitate health, healing and detoxification in your child. I mean, first and foremost, you need to figure out what stressors are present in the house, in the environment and begin to feel those away. So reduce, right? Reduce the environmental stressors, reduce all the stressors coming from food, right?

Give your child a space to live and breathe, right? And once you unburden the immune system, it will necessarily start to function more appropriately. The second step I would say is to, at the same time that you are taking away

nasty foods, toxic foods, try to nourish the child's system with food. Food is medicine, right? It should be medicine. It shouldn't be a toxic stressor. So focus in on that. Focus in on trying to support your child with an amazing nutritious diet.

And one that's appropriate to the child because we have to within that you have to understand if there are foods that I mean there are foods that are are quote unquote healthy but maybe not great for your child. Maybe they're reactive to or whatever. ⁓ So so yeah so the first is to reduce the second would be to nourish right. ⁓ And the third really important part of this equation is sleep like you know our kids are chronically

overwrought, they don't sleep enough, they're exhausted. There's a lot of literature on this that they're not getting enough sleep. It's important to know that the brain only detoxes at night when you're in deep sleep. If your child is not getting deep sleep, they are not detoxing. So, you know, sleep is where we heal. It's where the body is able to, do the work that it needs to do.

If your child is not sleeping, they're not going to heal, right? So that's the third component, I think, that any parent can take home and try to incorporate. clean up the home environment, reduce the toxic stressors, nourish, right, with real food, real water, grounding outside in the sunshine, all of those things, and then foster sleep. So important.

Lucia Silver (1:10:01)
Brilliant, three really great places to start and not feel overwhelmed. Those are bite-size, manageable beginnings to just take a step into the healing journey. Two areas I'd like to touch on, Dr. Lauren, ⁓ and get your view. Lab tests and supplements. They're both a big subject, once again, in the same way that with...

detox, there are some cheap and cheerful ways of doing it. with lab tests, there are also some very expensive and good ways. there are lab tests that are, you know, some clinicians will have you doing 25 lab tests where three would do with a better clinician who knows what they're doing and so forth. Have you got some guidelines for us in both of those areas? You know, why and what lab tests might be important and any any guidelines on buying supplements and what we should be looking out for?

Lauren Lee Stone (1:10:52)
Yeah, so I mean...

Labs can be like a gold mine. can, depending on the situation, is also individualized. There's not really a one size fits all for lab testing. Although I have to say that I think doing a comprehensive stool analysis is super important because our digestive tract is the basis for our health, really. If we're not digesting and absorbing our nutrients, we are starving at a cellular level.

And, you know, given the fact that our soils are so incredibly depleted in this day and age that, you know, we are already starving. You know what mean? So it's a compounding effect. So if you're going to do one lab, I would make sure that you do a stool test to get that digestive tract in good shape and working

to its best ability, fix that terrain. Well, so there are different ones. Yeah, yeah. I I tend to like ⁓ the GI map, but there are others. There are plenty of them. A lot of different companies make different ones and they're all pretty good. ⁓ We just want to get a sense of the microbiome. We want to get a sense of digestive capacity, whether or not you are...

Lucia Silver (1:11:54)
And that's called the GI test, Lauren, just for those parents looking for it. How would they search for it? Okay.

I'm Matt.

Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Lauren Lee Stone (1:12:18)
making your enzymes, your pancreatic enzymes, whether or not your, your digestifier in the stomach is, is vibrant the way it should be. Are you riddled with parasites? Do you have Candida overgrowth? Is your, you know, or do you have really good commensal bacteria, those good bacteria, you know, is your gut leaky? You know, is, that gut lining healthy? There's so many things that we need to understand in order to, to heal.

in an appropriate way and then, you know, and then once the gut is healed, food really can be medicine, right? But if it's, if you're not digesting and absorbing again, like you can be eating a great diet and you still are not getting the nutrients you need.

Lucia Silver (1:13:02)
That's very clear. And with supplements, is there anything that we should also be looking out for or avoiding? I'm told a lot about coatings on certain types of supplements and that sort of thing.

Lauren Lee Stone (1:13:10)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there are so many fillers in supplements that ⁓ it's really unfortunate because they can end up being, you know, they just have these toxic tag alongs, right? ⁓ So you have to be careful that, you know, that you have to know the company, you have to do your research. There are companies that are, that do not use those fillers, magnesium, stearate, all those things that you see ubiquitously in most supplements.

I personally, you know, if I have a choice, think using a really, using a liposomal formula is a great way to go. Those come, they come in like a pump kind of thing usually, or a liquid. And the reason I like liposomes is because they're much more bioavailable. You don't have the issue with all the toxic tagalongs and they're easily absorbed into the system. So less is more. You don't have to take so much.

⁓ and they're actually more effective.

Lucia Silver (1:14:12)
very useful, thank you. So finally, what would you say to our lovely parents listening right now who are tired and overwhelmed and maybe even hopeless but still hoping there's a way through?

Lauren Lee Stone (1:14:27)
Yeah, I

that they are the magic, right, in the healing process. mean, as important as it is to find a practitioner you love and trust, you know, just know that parents are the magic. Parents are, you know, they know their child the best. They are intuitive when they allow themselves to be. And, they are the ones who create the space for healing. And without them, nothing can happen. So...

You know, just trust your intuition, trust your love for your child, trust, you know, that, the universe has your back and you're doing a good job, an excellent job.

Lucia Silver (1:15:06)
Lauren, thank you. It's so good to hear that because I think that the power of the parent is so missing. We're so disempowered within the medical establishment anyway. We're sort of...

get a little bit gaslit for doing our own research when they haven't offered us any answers anyway. And then we get burnt out and we lose hope and we get tired and frustrated and angry and the whole gamut of emotions. But we forget that the power is with us, even if we're just taking gentle strokes. And one of the reasons why I love working with you is that I feel held and understood as well as knowing that you're holding Quinn and...

I'm going to say it again, I think I've said it twice before, third time lucky, we are doing this journey together with our children. It is not a separate journey. So the more that we are held, the more that there is self care, the more that we are educated if we can, if we feel to lean into the learning, the more that we can do this together with our little ones, the more benefit and positive outcome we're going to see. So thank you so much.

This conversation has brought clarity and hope and obviously practical wisdom to a topic that is so often overwhelming. I think the functional medical field, I'm thrilled that it's getting the attention that it is, but I think it's also confusing. And I think there are a lot of practitioners in the space that are not necessarily as wholesome and operating with the extraordinary integrity that you are. And it's a confusing territory and we can spend a lot of money and time in it, not really understanding what we're doing. And this is for everyone listening, if you've ever felt confused.

by your child's symptoms or unsure where to begin, I hope that today has given you a sense of what's really possible. This is why we created the Roadmap to Healing course. So you can access this kind of clarity and listen to Dr. Lauren, deep dive more into these topics. And for this podcast as a special gift, Dr. Lauren has shared a few brilliant resources to help you take the next step. So we've got her stressor assessment guide to help you.

identify for yourself what your child may be reacting to ⁓ and dealing with. We've got her food swap list to help you start to make some low-tox transitions with ease and a few yummy healing recipes that kids will also love because sometimes we get a bit stuck if we've been in a routine of cooking certain things and maybe they're not so healthy. Where do I go? Where can I start? So we're going to give you some of those as well and you can download them all for free.

just click on the link in the show notes where we'll also be giving you a lot more information on Dr. Lauren and where you can access her incredible Althea Health and Wellness Clinics. because healing is possible and you do not have to figure it out all alone. So thank you again, Dr. Lauren, for today.

Lauren Lee Stone (1:17:55)
Thank so much, it was really great to be here.

Lucia Silver (1:17:58)
We'll see you next time on My Mighty Quinn.