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Hey, this is Dr. Drew Rubin. Welcome to another episode from of Disruptive Pediatrics, brought to you by ChiroSecure, the amazing malpractice insurance company. What I’m gonna do today is share with you some really groundbreaking stuff stuff that is un being uncovered in the last bunch of years regarding brain hemispheric and lateralization, and how important it’s in a pediatric practice.
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So let’s go to the slides. Thank you. First off, I, what I want you to understand is there’s been a controversy about hemisphericity and lateralization for a long time. People saying there’s no such thing as a left brain, no such thing as a right brain. It’s just one brain and blah, blah, blah. And what I’m telling you is after doing research, especially with Dr.
Mullo doing research, realizing there absolutely is. Left brain or right brain now. Now here’s where the problem is. The problem occurs when you start talking about I’m a left brain person. I’m a right brain person. That’s not exactly what’s happening, right? You might have more left brain traits, more right brain traits, et cetera.
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But there, there isn’t. I think this is where the, in the pop psychology it got all wrong, is they were thinking that you’re talking about, oh, this is. You are like my only my left brain’s working, or only my right brain’s working. That’s not how it works. Obviously both sides of the brain are working at the same time.
What we’re seeing though is there’s absolute lateralization, number one and number two is that asymetry in our brains has ama amazing function, makes us who we are. We have the most asymmetrical brains of all the animals on the planet, which is why we’re able to do the things that we can do. But herein lies the problem.
All that asymmetry can create a problem, and that’s what we’re seeing a lot with the kiddos on the spectrum. With autism, with A DHD, with learning disorders or a lot of these issues, I just had a person come in with a TIC disorder and it was really a lateralization kind of issue in her brain.
And there, there’s a lot of this sort of stuff. So what we need to do is understand what this is. So let me start talking about this. So I Dr. Mill mentioned this this concept of the lateralized brain and being a faculty member, life university. What am I gonna do? I’m gonna get a textbook that’s I hear something.
I’m either gonna get a research paper or a textbook. And usually my first thing is I love textbooks. I’m very intrigued by textbooks. And these two fellows from Europe are the kind of premier brain asymmetry people on the planet right now. And they wrote this textbook, which I highly recommend if you’re interested in.
Reading textbooks and it’s very readable, also called the Lateralized brain, and this is something I didn’t know. Did you know this? Did you know that eight day old embryos already are expressing asymmetry? I had no clue. No, I thought the assymetry was, something happened maybe towards the end of your gestation period, but it actually starts eight days in the embryo at the eighth day where there’s this sort of circular formation because of the cilia within the embryo, and it actually shunts more.
Like stuff onto, and you can see in the picture, in the PowerPoint, you can see the on under letter A, you can see there’s more like stuff on the left hand side than on the right hand side. Because this node which I don’t wanna go into but this node that from these genes are actually creating this left wise asymmetrical expression.
And this is interesting too. So I. Okay, only human beings have asymmetry. No, it’s actually started a zillion years ago. So from the same authors, they did a a retrospective study on all Ma milia and all animals that have ever existed. This is a trilobyte. I don’t know about you, but when I was a kiddo, I was super interested in dinosaurs and stuff, and I collected these things.
And here’s a trilobyte, a bazi from 500 million years ago that has a bite out of it. From the, its right side indicating that whatever was attacking it was actually coming from the left. So that, because that’s the left. So even 500 million years ago, there is a the, as the antecedent of this asymmetry that’s going on.
And then they also did a study not these guys, another author did a study of 50 Centuries of Hand Inness. So in other words this is a brave study. Probably done with ai. ’cause I don’t think you could just do this yourself. Looking at every, all art from like the hand prints on the walls and the caves and France and stuff all the way through to modern era and saying how many people in these particular pieces of art sculpture or paintings, or.
Cave art or whatever are using their right hands and they found 90% of were using right hands in. So in a depiction of using swords or painting or whatever else they’re doing they were using 90% of them were using their right hand. How interesting. Now, but this also is an interesting thing. ’cause most animals, excuse me, most animals have what they call near symmetry a around the sagittal plane.
‘Cause this is what people get confused about, obviously my two hands look relatively the same and my, if you split my face down, it looks relatively the same. You split everything down. It is relatively the same on the outside. On the outside it’s relatively the same. And now the bone structures might be relatively the same.
But when you start digging into the thorax and abdomen over here and the brain, not relatively the same anymore. So what happens is the external symmetry is very efficient for us to be mobile and us to maneuver around things, to walk around rocks and trees and what have you. But.
The internal stuff, the brain and the internal organs, they’re not very symmetric. And that’s because there’s this pressure, as the authors have said, towards asymmetry to, to package and make it more efficient, right? So if you think about what we look like on the inside, it’s not exactly reflective of what’s happening on the outside with our symmetry.
So what happens is when we add complexity. We add asymetry. So the more complex a being, whether you go from, a, a. Amoeba to a fish, to a lizard, to a mammal, to a human, you start adding complexity. You have to create more and more asymmetry because now in order for the brain forgetting about the rest of the organs, but for the brain to do what it has to do, it can’t have.
It must have two different areas to work on. So in other words, instead of everything just being, like having one area, you’re gonna have two different areas, A left side and a right side that relate to that area. For instance, bros. Bros might be more left sided, but if there is an area on the right hand side that relates to brokers two, and it’s it’s not that it doesn’t relate to the same language center, it just relates in a different way. So this way we have this part of brokers creates certain things and this part of brokers creates other things. And this is another interesting thing that I remember learning a bazillion years ago when I was in neuroanatomy, in chiropractic school.
But there’s this counterclockwise brain torque, so their brain does not actually, it’s not a circle. It is, it’s actually counterclockwise shifted a little bit like this. So the, if like it says over here, the right frontal lobe extends farther forward than the left. Occipital lobe extends further back.
So you have this shift like this. And why are all these things important? Because these three forms of brain asymmetry create different, have different functions. So some of the functions ought to create handedness, left versus right hand. Some of them ought to create lang language.
Lateralization, like obviously language is more lateralized to the left hand side. Some of them are for different structural things for protein distribution. Some of them are for connectivity, distribution issues. So there’s different reasons for this, asymmetry and so there’s more asymmetry on one side than another for certain things, for certain functions of what our body does.
But here’s the interesting thing, and this is what’s gonna, this is what’s gonna really get you and especially start doing some more research yourself, is that what they’ve done in studies is they’ve shown that 72% of people are right-handed neurotypical people, but with kiddos on the spectrum and adults on the spectrum, only 28% are right-handed, or they’re there are neither dominant left or right.
Wow. So that means that like most people, neurotypical people are right-handed, but kiddos who are on the spectrum either are left-handed or are, have a mixed dominance. Wow. What does that mean? I. And what that means is that hemisphere basically based care is very important. Most care in a chiropractic office especially, or OT or pt office is done very bilaterally.
And the suggestion that this is making is that is not exactly the way we want to go. So autism shows different dominance profiles, right? There’s several studies have shown that a SD autism inspection, so the typical left word dominance and language system is frequently reduced or even reversed so that the patients show no or actual right word, asymmetry.
Wow. So what that shows is that the left bros are supposed to be on the left hand dominant in a neurotypical person. In a kiddo who’s on the spectrum or adult on the spectrum. They might either have no symmetry or maybe right bros on the right may be dominant. Wow, this is big. This is really big. And one of the, so once again, the authors of that textbook, they wrote this particular article, clinical Implications of Brain Asymmetries, and this is what they said.
Neuromodulation has become a viable treatment option for a wide range array of brain related disorders, including mood disorders, chronic pain, neurodegenerative disease, and epilepsy. Let’s add autism and to that little list there. The working principle neuromodulation is to suppress or enhance activity within a targeted brain region or network to rectify dysfunctional neural activity.
Many established neuro modulation protocols are lateralized. Wow. Wow. This is huge. This is really big. What does this mean? This means that what we need to do in chiropractic and in physical therapy and in occupational therapy when we’re working with these kids is we need to a figure out what’s going on with that particular child.
Like where are they lateralized? Are they right dominant or left dominant? And then do something to affect the weaker side. As an example, if we have a kiddo who’s got a right deficiency, we’re gonna just left side and vice versa, we’re gonna give exercises, skewing things more to the weaker side, right?
We’ll, if they have parental reflex, primal reflexes that are retained and they’re retained on both sides. But if they have a left deficiency, then I’m going to adjust them on the right side and have them do more exercises on the right side to affect this. This is what we’re gonna talk about next time.
So it’s like a little teaser. Gets you excited about this. My, the next talk that we do on CCU is going to be the part two of this to explain how we look at this and how it can affect kids in a really huge way. You guys know hopefully that I speak for the ICPA, so I’m doing a lot of talks.
We’ve actually changed our. Talk to be much more brain-based focused for this particular year. I’ll be also speaking in two different virtual seminars in April and December of about tongue tie. There’s been a big controversy about that. So we’re trying to address it through the ICPA. So please join me in that.
Here’s the link in the QR code. We’ve just published our 600th episode of Chi Cast. So I’m super excited about that. Most podcasts hardly even last, 50 to a hundred episodes and 300 is episodes is less than 3% of all the podcasts out there. So 600 is really cool. And thank you so much for being great listeners out there.
As always, I want us to thank ChiroSecure for hosting disruptive Pediatrics. I think this is so important for us to constantly focus on what it is that we can do to help our kiddos. So thank you so much again, Kai Secure for being there for us, and I’ll see you next time.
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