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Hello, everybody. Welcome to ChiroSecure show. Look to the Children. I am your host today, Dr. Monika Buerger, and I am pumped up to share with you. Our first in series, I’m thinking we’re going to do like a, maybe five or six week series on understanding primitive reflexes. So today we are going to just start with the foundations of what these little puppies are.
Unfortunately, Elizabeth is napping at this time, so she can’t be live with us, but she does say hello to everybody. And hopefully you’re all doing well. So with that said, we are going to rock and roll to our slide show and have some fun again. First of all as always ChiroSecure has been such a phenomenal part of our profession.
And has really been first on the forefront of supporting us. So thank you, Kairos superior for giving us this platform and being able to share our message with the world. So what are primitive reflexes? Okay. Here’s the daily wall. What happens in utero, first of all, the way these guys warm is the experience of the little fiddle part in your area in.
Causes synopsis to form. These are primitive in nature. That’s what we call them. Primitive reflexes. They’re brainstem oriented, they’re automatic. They don’t have cortical involvement and they should have a limited lifespan provided that little fiddle Bart gets the right experience in their environment when they are in the postnatal.
Okay. So the synopsis form any utero, and what happens is we should have this experience, an example in utero, that’s anti-gravity little bit of heart Sporn. They should have the experience. They will have the experience of gravity on their nervous system. They should be experiencing things in tummy time and these different milestones, which we’re going to actually.
Titrate that message into our series because the CDC just came out in the past week or so, and they have altered the milestones. For instance, language acquisition, speech has been pushed further More not at two years of age, but beyond that two and a half years of age crawling has been pushed from our walking has been pushed from 12 months to 18 months.
We’re going to talk about those. Is that right or wrong? We’re going to bring those in next. Anyhow. So we should have these experiences, these milestones, and it’s creates a sensory experiences. And those synonyms that were formed in utero are broken and stronger, higher, more sophisticated synapses are formed.
So I like to use this analogy that primitive reflexes are like the roots of the nervous system. You see this tree here, they’re like the roots of the nervous system. They’re always part of our neurological system, but by the age of about one year, they should no longer be active. They should be low grass level.
So I like to use this picture of this graphic. Here they are the roots. We now go on to use more higher sophisticated centers of the brain.
So causes for poor integration. We used to use the term integration. We have switched that more to persistent, active reflexes. They stay active. When we have stress when there are stressors stresses of the mom during pregnancy. Now I’ve done several classes over the last decade, but especially over the last two years on prenatal stress as the neurobiology of disease.
And this is what we know from the current neurodevelopmental PA paradigm. It’s pregnancy stressors can cause these persistent, active reflexes lack of proper movement experiences, environmental experiences, sensory experiences, postnatally, lack of tummy time illnesses, trauma, chronic stress.
You name it, any stressors on the system can pull can keep those reflexes active tongue tie, lip tie. Okay. Tethered oral restrictions. So some S some look at these persistent reflexes as dysmaturation of higher inhibitory pathways. Okay. Lack of myelination. Of hire more sophisticated centers like the prefrontal cortex.
There is a hierarchy order in which these reflexes do integrate or become, should become less active. The fear paralysis reflex is actually one that should Disappear in utero, about 11 weeks of gestation. That gives rise to the Moro reflex. Again, if mom is in a chronic stress mode during pregnancy, the prenatal stress factor, this reflects often doesn’t integrate, it stays active and moral really doesn’t take over.
So as we go down the hierarchy Palmer and Rudy. They disengage they integrate or become less active three to four months. Morrow can take two to four months tonic, labyrinthine. There’s a fluxion component of that and an extension component. Again, what I’d like to do is take the next five months or so five series of these shows and hone in specifically on these specific reflexes, what to look for, what do they mean?
The Palmer and rooting reflex, for example, is going to foster. If it’s integrated, if it’s disengaged, it’s going to foster maturation of the tactile and proprioceptive sensory systems. So all of these reflexes represent the maturation of our sensory motor system. This is really an important thing that we need to understand.
If these guys stay active, it’s going to pull down maturation, our sensory motor systems Morrow, for example, Morrow represents all sensory systems. All of our sensory systems are external sensory systems and our internal. So not just sight, smell, sound, taste, touch, but our internal awareness, our microbiome, our immune system.
Again, if those things are dysregulated, if we have stressors on those systems, these reflexes are going to stay persistently active. And this is so important given the last two years of what we’ve been dealing with. So here’s the deal integration of these reflexes allows us to move through our spatial world.
As we go through the developmental stages of life. So on this hierarchy here, we have primitive reflexes. Again, those are the first we like to see disengaged no longer apt to active at 12, 12 months or later than not. If that happens, then we get pastoral reflexes, those reflexes, we want active. We want these to mature.
This is our sensory motor develop. This is our postural stability, and we’ve done little workshops here on ChiroSecure and past classes, past shows about postural stability. And the fact that postural stability is one of the number one things recognized that is associate posture. Instability, I should say, is associated with a number of neurological disorders or developmental disorders or label.
Add ADHD. Autism is huge here. Schizophrenia, dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome. They all have within that. A known issue with postural stability. So if we don’t get it right, if we don’t get those primitive reflexes to integrate, we have a heart, we have potholes and development, potholes, difficulty reaching, postural stability, and then we got to find motor control.
We have to have gross motor co drove it for fine motor control. So our handwriting, our visual tracking, our ocular motor function. So what I want you to take away from this. Before we go on in the next classes is looking at the stressors. Sometimes we try to work the tip of the iceberg, where we just want to give exercises for those primitive reflexes.
This can frustrate the little fiddle farts frustrate. You frustrate the parents because under times of stress, These reflexes can reemerge or reactivate. So we’ve got to ultimately look at what stressors are pulling down the system, especially with the last two years and all the prenatal stressors. So I want you to start looking at taking a red flag history looking at how to eliminate some of those stressors off the system.
Before you dive in and say, let’s just give this exercise for this reflex. You might do them in tandem. Yeah. The little fiddle part is able to handle that without neurological overwhelm. But look at these stressors are trauma or micro, macro, emotional, mental trauma. What toxic environment? If the little fiddle part didn’t have a lot of movement in utero, if there was an utero constraint, if they were breached.
Primitive reflexes is synopsis form by that little fiddle fart, moving in utero kicking the sounds they experienced mom’s heartbeat. External sounds. These are all forming sensory input, forming those initial reflex synopsis. If we’ve got these loads on them, what are the thoughts of mom, of dad, of the caregiver?
Technology. We’re getting study after study on technology in the, especially in the early years and how it is hampering neurological development. So again, you try to tackle those primitive reflexes and you don’t tackle the roots of what’s holding it up. You can have a negative effect. They’re tethered restrictions, tongue tie, lip tie, subluxations, anything that is restricted.
Biomechanical movement, fascia restrictions, lack of awareness from the body to the brain. And then the train they’re growing up in the external environment, their internal environment, their microbiome, or they call lucky, et cetera. Okay. So take the biggest takeaway from today. It’s understanding a, that these primitive reflexes are going to form be a synopsis from the experience in utero.
That experience is different than postnatally. So we need a proper postnatal, sensory environmental experience to break those primitive reflexes and form higher, more sophisticated neurological structures. If any of these 16. Are interfering with the nervous system’s ability to do you need to dig into those and clear that slate.
And then either at the same time, or once some of the load is taken off the system, then tackle those primitive reflex. Get those integrate, get your postural reflexes on board and then your fine motor. So again, today, I just wanted to dig into the foundations and let you stew on that a little bit. And then we’ll take this a step further next month when we tackle in integration.
Those individual reflexes. So until next time again, ChiroSecure. You’re amazing. Thank you everybody out there. Keep changing lives. Keep up the great work. Now more than ever those little fiddle parts on those families need you. And do you want Erik Kowalski next? The first Thursday of next month.
And I’ll be back the third Thursday next month.