I would like to welcome everyone here today.
I'm so glad to see so many people, and I'd like to invite my distinguished panelists
to come up, Kat and Kim and Kurt, and I think that Jennifer is getting mic'd, so she'll
be here soon. So come on up and I'm going to have each of the panelists tell you just
a little bit about their expertise and their specific interests. So Kat, I think I'll start
with you and then by the time we get back, Jennifer will be here I think.
Again, good morning everyone. It's a pleasure to be up here again and an honor to be a part
of this distinguished panel.
So if you were here yesterday, you know, I'm a pediatrician.
I have my own direct primary care practice in Indianapolis.
I do have extensive history of serving abroad
for 22 years in medical missions.
A lot of that doing work in anti-human trafficking and have a broad
and various exposure to lots of different kinds of medical systems
and medicine around the world.
which the Milhoans also do in their work.
So, yeah, so I'm a, I do general pediatrics,
but I see some kids of all ages.
And so that's a little bit about me.
Thank you.
Kim.
So I'm Kim Milhoan.
I'm married to Kirsten Milhoan.
I'm a pediatric cardiac anesthesiologist by training.
So Kirk and I have a nonprofit called For Hearts and Souls
where we've been doing international pediatric cardiac
care for well over 20 years.
So I practice in, and we live in Maui, and Cook's a pastor in Maui.
So if you get confused about where we are and what we're doing,
everyone is confused about where we are and what we're doing.
So you're not alone.
So yeah, mainland practice, ministry, and a free medical clinic
in Maui, medical missions.
Yeah.
Her?
Kurt Mellon.
Before I got my MD, I got a PhD in Cardiovascular Physiology
and Pharmacology.
And went on to be an Air Force pediatric cardiologist
for 13 years before I left the Air Force
so I can do more of the international work
around the world helping children with heart defects.
And I got into, really, the COVID thing
through our free medical clinic
because we had a lot of time off and we started seeing things
and we had a church that we needed to keep open.
And we had a whole lot of people who were looking
for answers more than if you get really sick,
go to the hospital and we'll do nothing for you.
So I took care of around 700 COVID patients in Maui,
most of them in house visits.
And some of them, you know,
this pediatric cardiologist didn't know what to do
with the 80-year-old with diabetes and COVID.
So a lot of times it was really quite interesting.
But that's I think a lot of us were in that situation
because we were willing to do something and help them.
And through that, as I started learning more about COVID,
I realized that the pathways that the spike protein went
down was the exact dissertation I did 30 years ago.
So that's my.
Erin.
Thank you.
I'm Jennifer Hibbard.
I'm a pediatric dentist surgeon from Toronto, Canada, and I did my undergraduate training
in Toronto.
And then in New York City, I went to Albert Einstein College of Medicine, did a residency
in post-graduate training in pediatrics.
I run a private clinic.
I do hospital dentistry.
I do a lot of surgery at the hospital and chief of the service at one of the big hospital
centers in Toronto. I teach at the university, which I have continued doing because I know
as we're talking about education is so important. So I'm actually having the opportunity to teach
these students as they're launching into their clinical training and I'm trying to open their
minds and do exactly what we're doing here at IMA. And I'm a scientific editor when COVID started
very beginning of COVID.
I was approached by people regarding a nursing home
where they had an escapees outbreak before COVID
and the patients did or the residents did really well there.
I took this forward to the public on YouTube,
learned how to make videos, nothing I'd ever done before
and it went viral around the world
and I got drawn into this like a vortex and here I am today
And I am now speaking a lot more about dentistry
because I realize how nervous people are of everything
and I want to balance the scale here
and educate people about what's truly going on
because otherwise it's a Pandora's box
with everything medically
that you have to administer to people.
And so I'm here today.
And I, again, pediatric care,
I do a lot of nutrition now.
I've always done that with the children because, of course,
they come to me.
I get the extreme cases that are referred to me from everywhere.
And health is so important.
These children are suffering terribly.
And the rest of it, you'll learn about us
as we have our discussions.
Thank you.
So not too shabby, huh, my panel here.
I'm very proud of them.
I would like to start with a discussion
about informed consent.
One thing we know is that people did not get informed consent during
COVID as illustrated by the fact that the package inserts
for the vaccine were actually blank.
But I would argue that people haven't gotten informed consent
in my field in pediatrics for vaccines for quite a long time
because just handing out the CDC one pager is not enough.
So I'm going to ask Kim to comment about informed consent,
since she has to go through this every day in the OR.
Yeah, I do do it every day.
I appreciated, I'm going to forget names, but one of our colleagues
that spoke on the previous panel talking about humility.
I have never been more humble than in the last five years, right?
So we all have our area of expertise.
We have our area of comfort level that, you know,
a highly trained physician, I can take care of you.
I have so much more humility now in that informed consent process
than I ever did.
And, you know, I told Dr. Rump, or am I saying your name right?
See, I worry about names.
I kind of, I'm there as, I can give testimony.
I'm kind of in all these worlds.
I'm in the hospital world, so I can speak to how it is to be
in a hospital and I can speak to over 20 years of practice,
the changes that I'm seeing in the children,
the changes that I'm seeing in the parents.
And parents are much more combative
with me than they've ever been.
They're walking in not trusting.
And I think, I have to humbly admit, over five years ago
that would have offended me and now I understand it.
And so finding myself having to back up, okay,
tell me what your primary concern is and, you know,
how can I alleviate that concern?
But I agree with you, there's a lot of areas
that we haven't given informed consent.
And I'm on the next panel talking
about transitioning children for gender,
which unbelievably that's an area
where we're not doing informed consent.
But the part of the criteria,
they have to understand risk and benefit,
short and long term, it has to be voluntary,
it has to not be coerced.
But there is an art to it because, you know, I had some,
I had a family yesterday that they were so nervous that,
they were nervous about everything.
So how do I not coerce their child to have an elective surgery,
but how to put them at ease that I think your child will do okay
if you choose to have this elective surgery today.
So that brings up the issue that informed consent also involves informed dissent.
So you actually do have the ability to reject a recommendation, and that's something that's
very hard for many doctors to deal with.
And I think that's a change that we've seen in the last five years, right?
Yeah.
So I was taught that patients have autonomy and patients have a choice.
And in my profession, probably the thing that people are most, people think they're going
to die under anesthesia.
People think they're going to die under anesthesia, but probably the second thing that people
are afraid of are neuro-axial blots like spinal taps, spinal anesthesia, epidurals, coddles.
If you talk about putting a needle in someone's back, they're very concerned about that.
And you have to talk about potential neurologic complications of that.
And what I learned and was taught, if they're nervous, they get to say they don't want to
do it.
And it feels like a lot of what we did in medicine in the last five years is we didn't
give people autonomy and we didn't give people choice.
Yeah.
Okay.
I think we're going to cover four basic areas today and then we're going to open up for
your questions.
So please type your questions in.
I promise you we will answer as many as we can.
I'd like to talk about the things that people can do proactively to keep their children
healthy.
So we've arbitrarily decided to talk about nutrition, environmental factors, the importance
of exercise and nature, and the importance of nurturing relationships.
So I'd like to open with the nutrition piece and invite anyone that wants to start to give
me a signal.
Jennifer, do you want to actually start that one?
Well, the nutrition in our last panel was wonderful.
about nutrition, it's a vital part of health, mental health, physical health, unfortunately
and certainly talking with my patients and I've done a lot of extra training in nutrition
because as we all know, we get a pitiful amount of nutrition training in our professional
courses.
And I am encouraging families to go to farmers markets, a lot more of them have cropped up
around all of the cities.
The mainstream grocery stores now, I walk in there and all I see is cardboard and plastic.
And everything's got foreign names with the contents.
I'm teaching people and just recommending that they read contents.
If they don't understand what it says, don't buy it.
And then I walk them through how to go to a farmer's market and speak to the farmers.
They're really nice.
There's a lot more around.
Usually farmers going to these farmers' markets was more expensive.
I'm encouraging them to eat organic because of all the chemicals that are in our food
now.
I get families coming in and just Kim, as you said, they're very resistant at first.
They feel like it's genetic and it's like, no, no, this is nutrition.
epigenetics plays a factor because of all the toxins in our environment, but there is
a way out.
And I can heal your child physically, but I can't stop the process coming.
I mean, we don't want to treat just the symptoms.
We want to cure the problem as much as we can.
So changing your diet is vitally important.
And also I'm dealing with a lot of kids with emotional problems, and I have to say I've
seen a huge uprise in children with autism in particular. I do get, you know, a very detailed
medical history and I'm glad to say a lot of them are having done the COVID vaccine with their
children. They regret having done it themselves but there's something else going on too and it's
It's definitely the environment, it's the water, it's definitely the food.
Unfortunately also with the economy too, both parents are usually working and they don't
have a lot of time to make healthy food at home.
And these fast food places and the fast food that they buy is a lot cheaper now than shopping
at the grocery stores.
So it's a process to help them and it's very easy for us to tell them.
It's a very hard thing to change habits, so I gently walk them through all of this.
We've all lived this with our kids, and maybe, I mean, I didn't do the fast food with my
children, but I was unique amongst my peers, actually.
And I think all of us are here.
So that's just a vital part of helping our children forward and helping them deal with
some of the issues that they have that they're getting told is genetic, et cetera, and they
can really change it. And even if they are born with a predilection to having some of
these problems, the diet can change it. And again, we're talking epigenetics, right? We
can change it.
Thanks Jennifer.
So one of my mentors used to say, it's easier to get somebody to change their religion than
to change their eating habits. And it's probably true. Kat, from a general pediatrician standpoint,
could you expand a little bit more specifically maybe about some of the environmental contaminants
in foods and, you know, a lot of patients don't know about glyphosate, for example,
and GMO and anything else you want to throw in there.
Yeah.
And I want to say, as a general pediatrician and hearing the parents, and every week or
day there's some new toxin, there's some new thing, there's the chemtrails, there's glyphosate,
there's the fluoride, there's, you know, the medicines and things like that, and there's,
you know, unfortunately, you know, all that stuff is true.
does impact our health and children being smaller, you know, with a smaller surface
area, you know, and the higher metabolism, they absorb things, fortunately they can work
things out a little bit more quickly because their terrain and their physicality is younger
and it works a lot more efficiently, but, you know, you're talking about all the different
toxins in an EMF and things like that and they're like, well, just you can't do everything
And so I'm trying to really help parents just to mitigate.
And you can't live in a bubble.
We don't. We do have an ability to heal.
And we do have ability to deal with the toxins that are in.
Just because you're exposed doesn't mean that, you know,
you're doomed, right?
But it is about, you know, developing, you know, the terrain.
We talk about terrain.
But we talk about, you know, the influences upon that terrain
and building that up and doing what you can, right?
You know, because it, and also it doesn't, you know,
you can eat organic and you can eat everything,
but then when a kid is on their phone for 10 hours a day, right,
you know, then you're kind of canceling things out.
And, you know, one of the things that I want to talk to you
because it's nutrition, it's toxins, it's environment,
it's exercise movement and nurturing relationships.
But when, but I just have to say that, you know,
your 12-year-old's brain is no match for these AI algorithms
that are determining that.
And then, you know, it really is destroying not only mental health
but physical health, which then goes back into physical health, right?
You know, we learned all about that whole body health.
It's the physical and mental thing.
And it's just sapping, you know, that bone is this constant dopamine hit
that's just draining them of the boys
of their testosterone and things like that.
but it's also when you talk about nurturing relationships.
When they're in their online world and they're becoming more
and more detached from reality and then they become,
then they want to have hyper control over their environment
because online they can control, they can make their avatar,
they can live in a world that they can shut people off,
they can turn people on and then when it comes time to deal
with real reality, then they can't deal.
And then it becomes, then they get hyper emotional
because they can't deal with reality.
And then all of a sudden, and then they're really prone to being,
then they want to believe this.
You know, they want to believe they're online
and they're glitter family or whatever.
And then all of a sudden it's, you've got wolf mob, right?
And because it really does, it really does affect,
then you've got essentially an attachment disorder
when you can no longer cope with reality and things.
And so, but also that time away, it's destroying their nutrition.
They're not getting outside.
They're not moving.
And it's also us substituting nurturing relationships
for these online relationships.
And this is just one factor.
I mean, we can talk, I mean, there's pediatric conferences
that go on for days, you know, about these kinds of things.
But if I was going to highlight, you know,
the thing that is sort of covering all
of these different issues, that's the one thing
that I just wanted to highlight today is
that no child should have a phone.
I mean, you know, get a flip phone, a brick phone, something,
you know, where it's stripped down.
I mean, we do live in a world where, you know, kids are busy.
We've also got the school sports industrial complex that's,
you know, overtaking families and things like that,
not against school sports.
You know, I was an athlete myself, but, you know, we've just,
we're beginning to lose the plot about the family and the purpose
and establishing those nurturing relationships.
So, yeah, you can manage and, but, you know,
if there's one thing that you can control,
I think it would be that.
And I had a patient, you know, he's on Vyvanse,
and then I've got him on some special ADHD supplements,
brain food, and then he's still getting Ds and Fs,
and they're like, well, nothing's working,
and the kid's in the office like scrolling on the phone.
I'm like, well, there's that, right?
So, and it's not, and they're like, no, no, no, no, no.
He needs to do that.
I'm like, okay.
So, anyway, that's what I'm going to put in for now,
And yeah, we'll let Kirk, whatever you want to add.
Well, a couple of things.
I think it's trying to make it easy.
I agree that culture really is really hard to fight.
And we've moved from health and diet into a much different culture.
What do I tell people?
Eat real food.
Eat real food.
Try to eliminate boxes, plastic, whatever, eat real food.
The other thing is I would say our portion's eyes have gotten
out of control.
We've allowed gluttony to hit the children.
You can say no to your children.
It's okay.
You won't destroy them.
They'll be okay.
We are their protectors, right?
We are their nourishers, but we're also their protectors.
And a lot of times we have to say no, and that helps them.
I like your comment, Catherine, about causing too much anxiety.
Our side can have its own fear point.
We are now talking about femtomoles, which is beyond picomoles,
which is beyond nanomoles, right, of contamination.
One of the most sad families Kim and I know are the unvaccinated
organic family that is almost paralyzed of fear
of anything their child might receive.
And one of the things that I see is
that safe is not a scientific concept.
When we say safe and effective, safe is purely a subjective term.
And for someone one in a million chances safe,
for someone else it's one in a thousand, for someone else it's one
in a trillion, it's one in quadrillion.
I one time had a woman say to me as her child had chest pain
and I had done everything I could to reassure her, she looked to me and said,
I want you to guarantee me that my child will never die.
Well, don't drive on a freeway.
You know, but I think that part of we have to be careful as we're trying
to look at things that actually really impact kids.
Have we generated another beast that we have anxiety out of control?
So, but one of our main cultural changes is, as she said, is the phone.
You can take them away.
We did, for our son, when he was in a nightmare,
when he was around 9 and 10, we just suddenly turned off the TV
and the electronics.
We read books together.
We played games.
Everything became much more peaceful.
But I think with food and everything else, we need to be able to say,
we need to take back the control of our families from the culture.
So I'd like to talk just a little bit about feeding children
in the first year of life.
We, I, promote breastfeeding strongly,
and that means having lactation educators that can work with families
because almost every woman can breastfeed,
but it's not always easy for them.
And the latch is probably the most important thing.
If that goes awry from the beginning, they will have problems.
Also, the foods that you feed them when you introduce foods,
you know, whether it's four, five, six months,
are the foods that they are going to eat later.
So I'm very much an advocate for giving lots of vegetables initially.
Avocado is a great first food.
Both of my granddaughters name green vegetables as their favorite foods
because that's what they got.
and they didn't get a lot of sugar or crackers or cereal early on.
You may not be aware of what's going
on with the infant formula situation right now,
but not only are those formulas comprised,
usually the first ingredient is corn syrup,
which has its own host of problems, but they also have been shown
to have a wide variety of environmental contaminants.
And it turns out what the companies were doing was they were dutifully
writing down how much arsenic and lead and cadmium was in the formula
and just burying it in a spreadsheet somewhere and, you know,
hoping nobody would notice.
I'm going to give you one little tip for the kids that are picky eaters.
I've found that many times those kids are deficient in zinc,
which is part of what gives you smell and therefore
which contributes to your appetite.
And, you know, no self-respecting cover really eats a lot of oysters
and muscles, which is where zinc is found.
So even though you have to start low and go slow,
supplementing zinc will often broaden the child's diet.
So any last comments on nutrition before we talk a little more
about other topics?
Well, I'll touch a little bit on being in dentistry.
It was a dental profession that introduced fluoride into the water
and into the food system, and talking about infant formula,
Florida's in most over-the-counter infant formulas.
And for pregnant women, certain teas have it.
It's not listed on the ingredients,
and certainly the other drinks.
So it's something very important to start to be aware of and curtail,
you know, and talk with your families about this.
I don't promote fluoride.
Fluoride's a known toxin.
It has been since it was first identified in the early 1900s.
And we've always been reticent and concerned
about fluoride for children.
Because in the developing body, it's been focused
on developing teeth because it strengthens
and the studies have only been done on the teeth,
not on the rest of the body.
And now, of course, I think all of you know that last year there were some task forces
and they've now identified fluoride as a neurodevelopmental problem affecting children's IQ.
It's very serious.
And don't discount the effect that it has on adults, too.
So just wanted to add that.
Yeah.
Just one thing, Christina mentioned getting your kids involved in the shopping and preparation
and clean-up process and getting them involved, and I also have a handout, I didn't invent
it, didn't come up with it, but it's to gamify eating, and it's eating the rainbow, and you
have all the foods of the different colors, and you can see how many colors can get in
a day, and then you can, you know, it's sort of positive reinforcement, how many can get
in a day in a week, or something like that, say, you know, learning colors and foods and
things like that.
All right, let's move a little bit and talk more specifically if we could about EMS for
a moment in terms of recommendations, you know, considering the fact that we live in
the world we live in.
Are there things families can do like turning off Wi-Fi at night or not having the router
right next to their child's bedroom to try to realistically take care of that issue
or do you not perceive it as an issue?
I mean, yeah, I think it definitely can be.
I think there's some, you know, it's hard to, you know,
there's a lot of smart homes, right?
And it's getting smarter and smarter and then
that load of electrical stimulation.
And I think, you know, I think that everyone is different,
probably has different sensitivities.
I'm not an expert in this, but I think that sometimes, you know,
if you have a kid that's on the autism spectrum
and they're stimming in front of your dishwasher,
well, maybe, you know, you want to dumb down your dishwasher.
You know, that could be a clue.
I also, I don't have any data on this, just speaking from my head,
but it's also concerning about all the electronic and the monitors
and the cameras and everything, and they want to, you know,
watch their kids sleep and, you know, if they turn and, you know,
it might be counterproductive to their sleep.
And so if you find that maybe turning it off, I'm not suggesting
that it's 100% that way, but it's just, you know,
kind of think about what did you add and what could you take away
and how could we move to a more sort of natural way
of being in the world, that kind of thing.
I'm a strong advocate of no screen time at all
in the first years of life.
There have been some studies that show that it's difficult
for children to process these two-dimensional creatures
that are sort of disembodied on the screen as they're trying
to incorporate the data about their world.
So I think that's something that's really important.
Oh, go ahead.
I think this, I'm not sure about EMS.
I think that's going to be really hard to study,
to be able to study it well.
I'm really concerned though about screen time.
I'm really concerned about the early introduction
of screen time to children in terms of how they learn, how they process, what has led
to really a lack of attention when you go from blocks to a thousand different pictures
coming at you, the brain gets sort of used to that.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who've done a lot of work on how to sort of stimulate
the brain, to stimulate dopamine, and I think that data, those data are very clear.
The EMF, I'm not as concerned, but I would love to get this screen time out, and it's
okay to say no to your teenage child.
It's okay, right?
They need it more than the young children, right?
I often think about families often say, well, I'm going to stay at home for my younger children.
Then once they get teenagers off, probably the opposite is more important, right, because
the teenage kids can get into a lot of trouble.
But it's okay for us to say no to them and say, you know what, we're turning off the
router and you don't get your phone at night.
I think more than, and who knows what the Wi-Fi and everything else that's going through
us that can go through us is doing, I don't know, but I know that other stuff is really
having a harmful social, cultural impact on the anxiety and the mental health of our children.
Agreed.
Did you want to add to that, Kim?
You know, speaking to what I've seen over 20 years of practice, the kids are much more
anxious. The parents are much more anxious. So I have a lot of burden for the parents. This what. It's OK to be the bad guy. And who. We've stayed away from the elephant in the room. When you deal with pediatrics which is vaccines. So let me just plunge into
the element in the room. But what I get to see, I just get to see snapshots. Right. One
patient after another. They are in the hospital. They see me because they have they need surgery.
So I get to see their medical history and medical problems and what you know interventions
they've had. I know it's claimed there's no vaccinated unvaccinated children who have
of autism, not true.
Yesterday I took care of an unvaccinated child
who had autism.
So there is, I think that's when we talked about this panel
ahead of time, we kind of wanted to talk about that.
That's the big issue with children is vaccines.
And we've already talked about that.
There should be no mRNA vaccines.
That's easy, low-hanging fruit, done, right?
But because of the skepticism regarding that vaccine,
then that's opened the door to all the other vaccines.
And it's a huge issue.
It's what people want to talk about.
But what I'm seeing is the kids are more anxious.
They have more diagnoses.
They're taking more medicines.
And so what Kirk and I talk about
is all the other environmental factors,
the level of anxiety in the parents,
the level of anxiety in the children.
And I don't know how to say it
without sounding really judgmental and critical,
but the lack of parenting of the children,
that the children are in charge
and they don't have the capability to be in charge.
So how do we help parents be empowered
to know that they're in charge
for the benefit of their children?
I think what Kim is, part of what Kim has alluded to,
what we talked about as we put this together
is when we try to look at children's health,
there are so many confounders, right?
And all of the confounders we feel need to be on the table.
I think right now we can take off all vaccines
off the market and we would still have a crisis
of anxiety in our children, right?
We might solve a whole bunch of other things,
but to me, what I'm seeing is this crisis of anxiety
and mental illness.
I don't know about most of you,
but I remember never being stressed out in school.
I didn't come home and say,
I'm so stressed out in fourth grade over the homework I have.
I hear children using adult terms that I think puts them
in an inappropriate place in their development.
And so I think as we talk about children's health, what we've tried
to talk about is all the other confounders.
So when you look at a child's health, what are they eating?
What is their nourishment?
Are they homeschooled or not?
All these different things and then what are we doing to them medically?
What is their gut like?
All these different things are confounders.
And so we wanted to open it up to say, wow, what about prenatal ultrasounds?
That correlates really well with autism, does, right, really well.
So all these different things that we've done that we thought were completely maybe innocuous
to begin with, now as we start trying to look at what's going on with child's health, we
go, well, okay, is fluoride?
Is it food?
Is it EMF?
Is it phone time?
It's probably all of them.
Yeah.
Is it sleeping?
Is it sleep?
Yeah, it's like all the adults sleep.
Our children are not sleeping well, right?
So that's another huge factor.
I'd like to add something to this too,
because when we're trying to counsel parents
in guiding their children,
these parents are really nervous
about managing their children
and saying no to their children.
And I have to relate, even basic, brushing their kids' teeth.
It's like, you know, you need to be doing the brushing.
Oh, but he cries.
And I'll say to them, okay, let's relate this.
When you tell your little one it's time to go to bed,
and we're talking two, three, four, five-year-old.
I said, do they often cry?
They don't want to go to bed?
They went, yeah.
I said, so do you leave them up and say, oh, good night.
I'll go to bed, you know.
Try to remember to turn the light out when you go to sleep
or I'll find you on the couch in the morning, you know.
And they go, no, no, no.
I said that they usually cry, right?
They said, yeah.
I said, so when you tell them it's time to brush their teeth
or that they can't have their phone in the room
or something like this, but they're scared
because their parental empowerment they feel is getting
robbed from them.
They're following what they're getting told
in the school system.
I get very involved talking about just the fact
that they are their guardians.
The schools are leading them now to feel
that they are not at all.
And I said, you know what, you go on the federal side
at Ministry of Education, and you'll see,
you're still the guardian.
But on the community level, they're
led to believe that they aren't.
With everything going on in the schools,
even to come in for an appointment, these kids,
first of all, they've even had letters sent home saying
that they've got to go and see a dentist.
They've got some fulminating infection.
And I'll say, oh, I don't want to miss school.
I said, you know, your child's going to be fine.
You're probably with the little ones.
They're probably going to learn a lot more about staying home.
If I had my choice now, my kids are in their 20s now, and my kids are little, and when
they put the kids in the system, and if it was a system right now, I would hold my children
back and keep them at home, and I'd skip preschool.
I'd have them at home learning how to do a lot of things at home.
And you know, this is our job as pediatric caregivers, too, to re-empower the parent.
I know you're going to be going into talking more about that and speaking to us about all
of this too, but it's really broken.
And even my kids, when they were in school, when I told my son in particular, when I tell
him what to do when he was little, he said, I'm going to report you to child services.
This is what they're teaching them in school, right?
I said, oh, that's interesting.
I said, go right ahead.
I said, but I just want you to know when you report me
to child services they're going to take you away, not me.
And he went, okay, then shut that down right away.
So, that's true.
Yeah, I think all the panelists are referring to this rich literature
about child development that shows that children want boundaries.
One reason that they're anxious is that they don't have boundaries
and they feel like the adults that are supposed to be
in charge are letting their little two-year-old brain do whatever it
wants to do.
So setting boundaries for your children early
and consistently is probably one of the biggest take home messages.
I'm glad that Kim brought up the elephant in the room because many
of you may know that I was medical director
of the Autism Research Institute for five years.
And I am actually one of the pediatricians that says publicly
Vaccines may not be the cause of autism,
but they are certainly a contributing factor
as either an antecedent, a mediator, or a trigger.
So in other words, in the context of a child
who is genetically predisposed not to be able to handle aluminum,
if they get six aluminum-containing vaccines
in one day, they may not be able to detox that,
and aluminum is a known neurotoxin.
Similarly, if you've got a child who is chronically ill and it comes
into the doctor with a fever and an ear infection
and is prescribed antibiotics.
But, oh, by the way, while you're here, we'll get you caught
up on your vaccines and MMR and chickenpox are on the table now,
so we're going to give you two live viral vaccines at a time
when your immune system is already fighting.
That, to me, is a risk factor
for that child having a developmental regression.
So we talk about how our world is a world of nuances.
So I always fight against any definitive statement
that something never happens or can't possibly happen.
And I would encourage you all to do the same.
Does that make sense?
Yeah.
All righty.
So let's, I think that there are going to be a lot of questions.
Are you guys okay if we go ahead to questions?
We've got 21 minutes.
I'm going to start with what are your thoughts about sound machines for helping children
to sleep?
Who wants that one?
I think if it's not connected to the internet while they're asleep, like if it's just a
machine. I mean we talked about EMF like I got I don't know the science I mean if
it's fine but I think if it's not connected to the internet it's just a
machine. If it helps I mean I don't know I don't really have a strong opinion
about that but I do I don't want so I I don't have Wi-Fi in my room next to I
don't have my phone on next to my head and so I would not recommend that for
anyone else, if I could say about that.
I go back, I go back to the, why now?
What's changed now that children need sound machines, right?
I mean, it used to be like maybe there was a window
air conditioner or there were other things.
I mean, I think before I go around the world
where there aren't windows.
I go to places where they're pretty austere,
whether it's Tanzania or Yemen or Mongolia.
And they seem to do okay.
So maybe if we're having to use some adjuvant to help them to sleep,
we have to look at what we've done to these children that.
So that's how I look at it.
Resilience is a word that comes to my mind.
We all need resilience.
So teaching your children resilience.
I love the story that my parents told me that my mom intentionally vacuumed
under my crib because she wanted me
to be able to sleep deeply.
Thank you, mother.
Right? So she wanted me to sleep through sound and interruption.
So figuring out ways to teach our children resilience,
you don't need all these crutches and aids.
I mean, that's, yeah, yeah.
I think maybe the answer is you can't monetize an open window
with the crickets outside, you know, so you make sound machines.
All right, guys, get ready for this one.
Are any childhood vaccines safe?
I will answer that, but I will offer whoever else wants to go first.
I first ask, what's safe?
Yeah.
What's safe to you?
What's safe to you?
What's the risk factor that's okay?
And not that we know the risks purely because it's going to be genetic,
it's going to be nutritional, it's going to be environmental.
We don't know what the underlying milieu is of the child,
So the risk is going to be different, right?
So, but what's safe to you?
Is one in a million okay?
Because then probably if you're going to ask,
if we're going to talk, if they're going to say,
if you're going to say, well, if they are safe,
are they going to do anything, right?
What's the benefit?
They could be safe.
And why is the risk you're looking at?
Is it death?
Is it some other?
So there's a lot of talk right now about death as the outcome,
like MMR, what about deaths?
This vaccine, what about deaths?
As a pediatrician, actually, I'm looking really, for me, more morbidity.
I'm, you know, when I'm looking at things that I see,
I see congenital rebelling in kids in Africa.
If we have mumps, how many boys will be infertile, right?
These aren't necessarily death outcomes.
So I think that this, once again, is a very nuanced question,
And it's so complicated to try to answer.
What I would like to say though about vaccines is remember this isn't,
this isn't medical care.
It's public health.
It's public health.
It's not medical care per se.
That's not what's driving it.
It's not medical care.
It's public health.
Let me explain to you why that is.
So why do we give one, two, three, or four shots?
Is it because they need four shots to become immune?
No, because it increases the risk or the seroconversion of a patient.
So let's say hepatitis B, why do you give three?
Majority of kids actually convert with one.
Why do we give three?
Because it's easier to give another shot than draw levels.
That's public health.
It's not medical care, right?
So a lot of what we're doing is the bureaucrats are saying, well,
we can spend this much and it will be cheaper if we do give another dose
for seroconversion as opposed to test antibodies, right?
So that's where a lot of the debate goes in terms of how I look
at this is we're not talking down, we're not allowed to talk
to the parents and say, well, this is I think what your risks are,
this is what the perceived benefits are.
No, it's coming down as a mandate from public health government
to this is how we're going to keep our society safe.
Anybody else want to go before I do?
Perfect.
I think Kirk is exactly right.
Vaccine decisions are very different.
If I were practicing in Africa, I would do things very differently
than when I'm in Lynchburg, Virginia, taking care
of a breastfeeding baby who isn't going to go
to daycare until they're two.
I don't think there's any vaccine that is totally safe,
i.e. without any side effects or death for every kid.
I think it is a risk benefit decision and I think
that the public health people make the decisions they make
because they have this sort of underlying assumption
or viewpoint that there's no downside to vaccines.
And therefore, it's okay to say, you know,
we'll give Hep B to newborns so that we don't miss any
of the babies that were born to a prostitute
where we didn't know they had B status, for example.
My favorite vaccine is the Hib vaccine,
the meningitis vaccine for infants, because I do think
that the risk is relatively low with that particular vaccine,
assuming it's not given in combination with a lot
of other aluminum-containing vaccines.
And the first year that it came out,
it did decrease the prevalence of meningitis 50-fold,
5-0-fold, which was huge.
But, you know, not every kid is going to do great with Hib.
There may be kids that do have a problem.
So I think vaccine decisions need to be individualized,
taking into account, you know, the geography,
the social environment of the child,
the child's previous health.
I do not want you to vaccinate babies
when they're actively sick.
The AAP actually had a campaign back in the 90s.
It was called grab them and stab them.
And that's where this idea, you know, came that whenever you see a child
if they're behind on their immunizations, it doesn't matter
if they, you know, are there because their hemoglobin was seven
and they're, you know, need to get their iron drops.
That's a good chance to catch them up.
Or if they're, you know, acutely ill,
that's a good chance to catch them up.
I think that was a very foolish policy.
So use your clinical judgment and be an independent thinker
and don't feel compelled to follow government mandates
which I universally oppose in the field of vaccination.
Yeah, I agree with everything you said.
I would also say that a lot of times we're using this,
trying to use a modified schedule.
And as a pediatrician, there are a lot of these things,
if they didn't get them in the first year of life,
that I'm not concerned about it anymore.
Many of the things that are being delayed are actually,
they're really only pertinent to me in the first year of life.
Pertussis, if you get it as a teenager, really not that big a deal.
We get it as an infant, much bigger deal, right?
And so I think that what Liz said is very important is this one schedule
fits all I think is horrible medicine, horrible medicine.
and has no place to be mandated, right?
No place to be mandated.
And the idea of thoughtfully, and this is going to become a,
have to be a whole retraining of pediatricians
and family practice doctors of how they've been trained,
is to look at this and I'm not treating at the pleasure
of the U.S. government, I'm treating this baby
and family in front of me.
And we need to bring that back to medicine.
Just one more comment, and I don't intend to take us
down a deep other rabbit trail, but there's this issue of fetal cells
and in the vaccines that pose a very ethical dilemma to a lot of people.
So just another, just another thing there.
And, you know, as we look at the COVID vaccines with the issue
of DNA contamination, that's one of the things
that scares me the most,
because our immune systems are exquisitely primed
to separate self and non-self.
And imagine how screwed up our mitochondria
and our cellular messaging is
when it starts seeing these foreign contaminants.
So, yeah, let's do the one about public schools
who are still encouraging online learning, even after COVID,
And how do we address screen time when the kids are being told
that they're going to be on the computer in order
to do their schoolwork?
Who wants to take that easy dilemma?
First of all, I wish that they didn't allow computers
in schools at all.
These kids are no longer, they no longer learn how to write.
They have spelled correct, autocorrect.
Now they're having their homework getting done for them.
My kids started computers, the schools handed computers
to them in grade seven.
My son is ADHD.
How do you think he was on a computer?
When I'd be, I mean, I tried my best to be there with him.
As soon as I stepped out of the room, he was off on something else.
There'd be, you know, the influencing and the, again,
the emotional impact on these kids,
which also, they're going down so many rabbit holes,
we could go down regarding this,
but kids are quick learners.
We learned how to use computers,
and the computers started long past,
even when we finished university.
There, I'm getting my age away.
But we had no problem.
Unfortunately, it's really dumbing down the population,
and this is a big part, like we're talking about,
a big part of their stress,
because there's no question it's rewiring them.
I used to watch these little cartoons
that kids were watching.
I thought that was rewiring them.
They used to do test subjects
where these Japanese cartoons,
and I remember hearing there was a community
that they tested it on,
and these kids all started having seizures.
So they took away those particular cartoons
and thinking, our computers are really doing things
to our kids' minds, and the stress level is off charts.
So yeah, unfortunately though, this is a wish list, right?
So how do we deal with it?
Well, I think like you talked about is limiting screen time.
I never used to let my kids watch TV during the week.
They'd have limited time.
They had their homework time.
Computers never went into the bedroom.
No TVs in the bedroom.
And not personally, you know, at this point.
I think we're getting into a time with schooling that we're,
This is, to me, a very scary time, right?
There's going to be a push that we don't need school anymore
because we have AI and you can wear your little thing
and you can ask a question and it can answer it for you.
Right now they're already using it for writing essays
and taking tests and doing all that, right?
I think that's very concerning.
I think also in these disruptive times, these are times that we have
to look at things differently for the safety of our child.
If you look at, I have a large homeschool population
that's within my church that I talk to.
So I have a sort of a, I get to see lots of different cultures.
Very few homeschooled children get diagnosed with ADHD.
Very few homeschool.
Why is that?
Because parents know that it's wow.
If I just do some distractive learning and things like this, they do fine.
If I give them three recesses a day, the boys do fine.
That data, those data are out there, right?
So I think sometimes what we have to do, which is very hard
and often changes lifestyles in our own culture, is you have
to say the American education system is no longer working
for my family, I'm going to have to find an alternative way.
And that's very frustrating because we pay taxes.
But if we have choice to how we use our education money,
that gives us many more opportunities to come
up with unique opportunities such as co-ops
with part-time homeschooling, part-time teachers
and allow these children to be children without teachers sending
in and saying your child needs to be on Ritalin
or they don't get to come back, right?
So there's a question and I don't know much about Japanese schools
but somebody said how can we apply the lessons
from Japanese schools regarding healthier food and education?
Does anybody know what that culture does or maybe the person
that asked that question can stand up and shout it out?
There was a video, right, that showed how the natural foods
that Japanese children were getting
for their lunches versus ours.
I think this comes down to school lunch program and much of that
in terms of this is a federal program.
It was, I think it was under Department of Education
and now it's moving back to HHS if I have that correct.
But that's something that I think the government needs to decide
if they're going to spend this much money,
which I'm sure is a huge amount of money, per child, per lunch,
then that needs to be under the whole maha movement for children.
But on a community level, it's again parent empowerment.
They should be talking to other parents in the class.
You go to a meeting, and we've all done it, with the parents meeting
and the kids in their early years.
And they start to talk about the snacks they're giving your children.
And I spoke up at the school, and I said,
well, what snacks are you giving them?
And they said, cookies and juice.
I said, well, I said, you're going to have a problem with our kids
because you're wiring them.
I said, why don't we give them fruit and water or, you know,
it's like really basic.
Give them some healthy food.
So I talked with the parents in the class, and we all chipped in
and got a little fridge.
and then they supplied this for them.
That's not always possible in every school,
but again, it's parent empowerment.
I am constantly telling the parents to speak to their parents
in the class, because they're reaching out, asking me,
if they're asking all of you, it's like, how do I deal
with this problem in the school?
Or my child's being singled out, they're taking him into,
you know, some group, and they're indoctrinating him
with things, how do I deal with it?
So talk to the other parents in the class, come together,
because you will have an effect.
Again, it's the community, it's bottom up,
because we do need to change policy.
But that's going to take some time.
And in the meantime, you actually are your parents,
your children's guardian.
The parents are the children's guardian.
Where would you all direct parents to go
for nutrition education resources?
I'll just say not necessarily the American Dietetic Association
or the classic pyramid.
Pyramid's so broken.
I remember having those sheets,
and this goes decades back,
and I had them in my office,
and I'd pull it out and I'd go,
okay, we'll scratch that off,
and we'll scratch that off,
and we'll scratch that off,
and I got down to the point
that I was making it my own for them,
because I couldn't,
you couldn't get any from me,
from the Ministry of Health,
even though they're publishing this
for the public all the time,
the pyramid was not good.
I think also that when you, I don't have any good resources,
but I would recommend this is very much age appropriate.
What a child in the first year of life
and what the child in the first two years of life needs
for myelination of their brain is very important.
Fat is very important to children, right?
And so we need to look at this.
This is not just the one thing,
like this is what we wanna do.
And many adult opportunities that we have or we might take
are not appropriate for children.
And so I think that I don't have any specific,
like go to this website.
I don't, I'm not sure I have a good one
that I would trust, that I know of.
But I think we need to make sure
that you might have a very specified diet for you.
It's very probably not appropriate
for your one or two year old child
when you're winging them off breastfeeding to normal diet.
Cat mentioned they eat a rainbow every day.
You know, young kids can understand that.
Again, the dietary guidelines that I think are the best that I've seen are from the Institute
for Functional Medicine.
And they have, for example, if your child has a mitochondrial problem, these are specific
foods that is going to give you the vitamin C and B vitamins that you need to help that
child in riboflavin and niacin in particular.
The thing I can't remember is, is that accessible if you don't actually become a fellow or take
their courses or pay for that? Probably not. All right, what would be the top
three supplements for kids and can you just give them empirically, we hate
drawing XX labs? I agree that is hard. Anybody want to go? I'm going to say
magnesium is my favorite. I think I've cured more anxiety with magnesium than
with SSRIs. Now I don't love SSRIs, but really almost every kid is deficient in
magnesium because of the way we've over farmed the soil and the changes in the
potassium and the phosphate have depleted magnesium. So even if the kid is
eating vegetables, which not that many of them are, they're going to be low in
magnesium. And so that's my go-to first visit for anxiety in kids.
Vitamin D. Vitamin D. Vitamin D. D. Yeah. Yeah. Just because it's really hard to get that
in the diet. Yeah. It just needs to be in this. And then we slather kids up with all
this sunscreen and all that stuff. Plus, it's impossible to get in the winter months in
most of America. So that's a good thing. And adequate vitamin D is 60 to 80 nanograms per
deciliter, not just above 30, which is where they put the line for preventing rickets.
I want more than that from my Pittsburgh.
The dermatologists have won this battle, but they won in terms of, oh my gosh, scaring everybody
for melanoma.
But we have now a vitamin D deficiency epidemic.
And I wasn't on the last panel, but if someone could give me one pill, and that's all I had
for the rest of my life, it would be vitamin D. It would be with K2, obviously, but it
It would be that one pill.
And I think because of how we're so over, I watch these kids,
I live in Maui, we live in Maui.
So I watch these kids come in, they're fully covered, I mean zinc oxide
to where they're like geisha girls.
And they're getting no sun, no sun at all.
And they're probably removed off any vitamin D milk or anything
like that very quickly.
So I think that's a real concern.
Here's a fun one.
Quality food sourcing is vital, but can we address the toxins
in clothing and textiles that we come in contact
with and how this impacts health?
So I'll start with one and then I'll open it to the rest.
You know, flame retardants were a good idea because they, you know,
would theoretically help kids if they were in a burning building.
But when they wet those clothing, it did release the toxins.
And I believe it was arsenic that was a toxin,
but don't quote me on that.
So there are lots of things that happen for a good reason
that have unintended consequences.
Anybody else want to talk about textiles?
I think it all goes back to the society, right?
There are so many factors.
And, right, we can't control everything.
I think we have to go back to,
and our assays are getting so much better, right?
We have to go back to true toxicology.
One of my favorite illustrations is, you know,
a whole nutmeg will kill you.
Right.
One whole nutmeg will kill you.
But we don't mind grating that on top of our lattes.
We don't mind putting that in our rate.
And so I think sometimes maybe we are willing to trade off some toxins
because nutmeg is truly toxic.
And we don't mind having to, I mean I love pumpkin pie
so I'm going to take my risks.
But I think the balance of the true toxicology,
And I'm not sure, I know there's concerns about forever plastics
and lululemon and things like that, and that's a discussion.
But I'm not sure we really have the toxicology to raise that
up to the level of fear that maybe it's inducing.
So our clock just turned over, so with the prospect of Kirk dying
from pumpkin pie and nutmeg poisoning,
I'm going to close off the panel.
And thank you so much.
Thank you very much.
