The Cranial Doc | A Chiropractic & Cranial Mastery Show for Pediatric, Family, and Neurologically-based Chiropractors

I corrected the right subluxation on a plagiocephaly case. The baby did not respond. A friend asked me one question, and it changed my care.

The question was about what I did after the adjustment. I had skipped the level one CSF and dural work. I thought the basic stuff was beneath me.

Here is the gap. A spinal patient walks out and gets motion for free. A skull gets none. Nobody stretches a temporal bone on the drive home. After the correction, you have to supply that motion yourself.

I walk through how I run both pieces now. Specific correction first. Level one global work to close it. Skip either one and results hit a ceiling.

What we cover

• Why a perfect specific adjustment can still fail to hold
• The C2 thought experiment: a patient who never moves for a week
• Why spinal adjustments hold through daily life and cranial ones do not
• What CSF and dural motion supply after a sutural correction
• Correction versus therapy: the same work done quickly or held for 30 minutes
• My order of care now: analyze everything together, correct, then close with level one work
• Reciprocal temporal rocking after a temporal bone adjustment

Your assignment

1. Pull your last 10 cranial adjustments.
2. Write down the specific correction you delivered in each.
3. Write down how you supplied CSF and dural motion afterward.
4. Note how each patient held their visits.
5. Note how their body healed.

Mentioned

• Foundations of Cranial Adjusting: thecranialdoc.com/training

Free email series: thecranialdoc.com

Chapters 0:00 Hook and intro 0:35 Why my adjustments stopped holding 1:14 The question that changed my care 1:22 Chasing the advanced corrections 3:13 What I told my friend 3:34 How the spine and skull differ after an adjustment 4:21 The C2 thought experiment 5:42 Why the skull needs CSF and dural motion 6:48 Why craniopathy brings both together 7:54 Therapy versus correction 8:40 What I changed in my practice 10:37 Your assignment: review your last 10 cases 11:40 Outro

A patient retraces. The pain shows up in a new spot. What do you say?

A Foundations of Cranial Adjusting Q&A before level one sent me back to D.D. Palmer. It also sent me to Bessel van der Kolk's The Body Keeps the Score.

Here is where I land. The body shows the nervous system's current threshold. The brain decides what becomes pain, where you feel it, and how much. After years of overload, a brain can turn awareness of the body down. Adjust that patient and they may feel more of their life. For better or for worse.

Then I give you the words to use when it happens in your office.

What we cover - D.D. Palmer's line on uniting man the spiritual with man the physical - Why every trauma-informed provider should read The Body Keeps the Score - Why "trauma is stored in the tissues" is a stretch, and what the body does show - What pain is: the brain's interpretation of signals from the body - Phantom limb pain and referred pain as examples of the brain's map - Fight, flight, freeze and central sensitization, including fibromyalgia, CRPS and AMPS - What a chronic subluxation does to input, and what an adjustment restores - Freeze: when the brain turns sensation down - Why patients can feel more after adjustments

Your assignment 1. A patient says, "Wow, I'm so sore, doc." Look at them first. 2. Say, "Wow, that's interesting. Tell me more about what you've been experiencing." 3. Ask what else their brain has been noticing as it connects to their body. 4. Name what to expect. Sleep, immune system and stress tolerance may change too. 5. Name where you expect to feel it first. Neck and jaw before low back, for example. 6. When they ask, "Is that normal?" explain common versus normal. Then say, "Based on what you came in with, this is expected."

Mentioned - The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk - Foundations of Cranial Adjusting - Law Abiding Citizen (the movie)

Free email series: thecranialdoc.com

Chapters 0:00 Cold open and intro 0:34 Today's topic: dissociation and D.D. Palmer 1:22 D.D. Palmer and The Body Keeps the Score 2:43 Trauma informed starts with this book 3:27 Trauma and the tissues 4:59 What is pain? 6:37 The sensitized brain 7:23 Fight, flight, freeze 8:13 What an adjustment changes 9:09 Freeze: turning sensation down 10:50 D.D. Palmer: man the spiritual and man the physical 12:34 Why patients feel more 13:46 The assignment: what to say when a patient retraces 15:48 Outro

Last quarter I lost a doctor and my office manager of seven years. I hired a wave of new CAs and moved into the office about 50 hours a week, plus another 20 at home. The practice still posted a record quarter.

Then my quarterly prep skill showed me what I had been ignoring. When I feel pressure, I go back to doing. My team rewards it.

This episode walks through the prompts I used and the six moves I run before every board meeting. It ends with the question I am carrying into the next month. Am I the fix, or am I building the fix?

What we cover

• Why a record quarter still left me working 70-hour weeks
• The $20,000 in refund errors I found once I took over report of findings
• The CEO focus prompt from The Uncommon Business by Callen Faulkner, and my honest answers
• Why I waited for every checklist to be perfect before handing anything off
• Handing off outcomes instead of tasks
• Six moves for quarterly board prep

Your assignment this week

1. Write down the last three times something broke in your practice and you stepped in.
2. Next to each one, answer: did I fix it, or did I teach it?
3. Pick the one most likely to break again. Name the person who should own it. Hand it off this week.

Expect it to get worse for a while. That dip is the investment.

Mentioned in this episode

• The Uncommon Business by Callen Faulkner
• Hormozi's $100 Million Scaling Roadmap
• The E-Myth
• Net Promoter Score

Free email series: thecranialdoc.com

Chapters

• 0:00 Intro
• 0:40 Last quarter and the hero trap
• 3:02 Losing a doctor and an office manager
• 6:56 Doing everything myself
• 11:34 The quarterly prep skill
• 12:24 The CEO focus prompt
• 17:30 The answer that hit hardest
• 19:19 The pattern I ignored for years
• 21:45 Handing off outcomes instead of tasks
• 23:50 Am I fixing this or am I teaching this?
• 24:38 Six moves for board prep
• 31:40 Your assignment
• 32:44 The question to carry
• 33:03 Outro

In past episodes I showed you how we run our Google Ads and Meta analysis through Claude. It worked. It was also a lot of clicking.

At first I spent one to two hours a week on it. Then we used n8n to pull the reports automatically. Then Claude Code started reading the folder on its own. But I was still pressing every button in Google Ads myself.

Building those workflows took me weeks to months. I copied error messages back and forth all day.

That changed when the Claude and n8n connection improved. Claude can now create, edit, and fix workflows directly. I never open n8n.

This episode walks through the full evolution. I keep it simple, even if you've never touched an automation tool.

Here's the loop I run now. Claude finishes the analysis. It executes what it can. For the rest, it tells me whether it can build the ability or whether a VA should do it. Out of 25 tasks, it handles about 24.

I also cover how it hands tasks to my team through Trello and Slack. You'll hear how API keys stay secure. And I explain the weekly loop that researches new best practices and rewrites its own workflow.

Plus the silliest build I run: a nightly bedtime story for my kids.

What we cover:

• Where we started: manual downloads, one to two hours a week
• Using n8n (about $20 a month) to pull Google Ads and Meta reports
• Moving to Claude Code so it reads the report folder itself
• The bottleneck: still clicking every change by hand
• The upgrade: Claude now builds and edits n8n workflows for you
• The "can you build the workflow?" conversation
• Execute, build, or delegate: sorting every weekly action step
• What we automate: blog posts, schema, SEO, meta tags, ads, Google Business Profile, Instagram, LinkedIn
• Sending tasks to Trello and Slack from the same chat
• Turning team meetings into assigned action steps
• API keys: the one step you do by hand, and why
• Dropping someone's AI video into Claude and asking, "Should we build this?"
• A loop that updates itself on new best practices every week
• Teaching Claude why you disagreed with its decision
• The Navy SEAL bedtime story automation

Your first step:

Make an n8n account. Install Claude Code. Connect them. Then describe the outcome you want and tell Claude to build it.

Send me your build:

Built something wild? Email me at [email protected]. If I use your idea, I'll send you some of my secret sauce for ads and analytics.

Links:

Free weekly email series: thecranialdoc.com Email Dr. Anthony: [email protected] n8n: n8n.io

Chapters:

• 00:00 Cold open
• 00:36 Where we left off with Claude and ads
• 01:03 The problem: still time intensive
• 01:44 Using n8n to pull every report
• 03:01 Claude Code reads the folder itself
• 03:24 Still pressing every button by hand
• 03:51 The upgrade: Claude builds the workflows
• 04:45 Recap of the full evolution
• 05:51 Letting Claude make Google Ads changes
• 06:56 Why this matters if you're not technical
• 07:46 "Can you build the workflow?"
• 08:11 Execute, build, or delegate: 24 of 25 tasks
• 08:41 What we run on autopilot
• 09:20 Handing tasks to Trello and Slack
• 11:07 API keys and security
• 12:16 Connect anything to anything
• 13:31 "Is anything in this video worth building?"
• 14:25 The loop that improves itself
• 15:48 Learning from your disagreements
• 16:03 Your first step
• 17:08 Send me your wildest build
• 17:27 The Navy SEAL bedtime story automation
• 18:59 A secret sauce trade

A patient came in with two complaints. Headache. Jaw pressure. She had a concussive injury a while back, and that was the whole list she gave me.

I ran a full evaluation, including our FOCUS protocol with Dr. Aimee Spoelstra even though I don't usually run that complete neuro workup on adults. I expected massive deficits given her mechanism and post-concussive history. Outside of some visual tracking challenges, there wasn't much there at all.

Then I went to palpate her cranium. It felt like a brick. No symmetry, quality, amplitude, or rate issues to compare, because everything was symmetrically garbage. Static. Not pumping at all.

That stillness matters. CSF isn't just fluid moving around. It buffers pH, regulates temperature, delivers nutrients, and clears metabolites and toxins from the cranial system. When it isn't pumping, none of that is happening. Damadian and Rosa's work on whiplash and MS points at the same mechanism, cerebrospinal fluid stasis leading to protein leaching and an autoimmune reaction, even though their study was specific to the upper cervical joint.

Here's the part I actually want you sitting with. Chronic subluxation and chronic pain change the threshold for how the nervous system processes signals from the body. It becomes easy for the brain to dissociate from the body entirely. Stop checking in. Stop noticing what's happening down there, because the input is too overwhelming to keep processing. That's the third F after fight and flight. Freeze.

This is why some patients show up massively subluxated and report almost nothing. Their brain isn't lying to you. It genuinely stopped registering what the body is going through.

I break down what that looks like on the table, why a trauma-informed approach matters even for patients who never bring up trauma, how to know when you're pushing a patient past what they can metabolically handle, and what it actually looks like when a patient starts waking back up during care.

What we cover: (unchanged)

• Why I ran a full FOCUS neuro workup on an adult post-concussive case
• What a cranium in static mode actually feels like under your hands
• SQAR: symmetry, quality, amplitude, rate, and what it means when nothing is moving
• CSF's four jobs: nutrient delivery, pH buffering, thermoregulation, metabolite and toxin clearance
• Damadian and Rosa: whiplash, CSF stasis, and the autoimmune connection
• Chronic subluxation, chronic pain, and the shift in nervous system threshold
• Dissociation as the third F: freeze
• Why a quiet patient can be more concerning than a loud one
• Building a trauma-informed approach into every adjustment
• Ragdoll: knowing when you've pushed a patient past what they can metabolically handle
• What waking back up looks like: sleep, energy, sensation returning

Your assignment this week: (unchanged)

Pull a case where the cranium feels locked down, where SQAR is flat instead of asymmetric. Look at the actual symptom list the patient gave you on intake. Ask yourself what they might have stopped reporting, not because it isn't happening, but because they stopped feeling it. Then ask them directly.

Links:

Foundations of Cranial Adjusting: thecranialdoc.com/training

Chapters:

• 0:00 Cold open: "it felt like a vice"
• 0:40 The two-symptom case that didn't add up
• 2:02 Running the full FOCUS workup on an adult
• 2:24 What the visual tracking findings did and didn't show
• 2:41 Palpating a cranium that feels like a brick
• 3:07 SQAR and symmetrically garbage
• 3:40 What CSF is actually supposed to be doing
• 4:18 Damadian and Rosa: whiplash, stasis, autoimmune reaction
• 4:58 The symptoms she wasn't reporting
• 5:19 Chronic subluxation and the nervous system's threshold
• 5:45 Dissociation as the third F: freeze
• 6:18 Why a quiet patient can be the bigger concern
• 6:53 The disconnect between findings and what patients say
• 7:30 The avatar patient: chronic health challenges
• 7:58 Trauma-informed care: predictable hands, no surprises
• 9:35 Ragdoll: knowing when you've pushed too far
• 10:28 What waking back up looks like
• 11:04 This week's assignment and where to learn more

A chiropractor messaged me after running a case through the free cranial calculator. Her cranial vault asymmetry index was improving. Her cephalic index would not move. That one message is this whole episode.

Most of us learned cranial measurement through a plagiocephaly lens. Asymmetry in, asymmetry out. That lens will carry you through a lot of cases and then quietly fail you on the brachycephaly kid whose head is short and wide with near-zero asymmetry.

In this episode I break down the four measurements, both index formulas and their thresholds, and why brachycephaly is a different mechanical problem than plagiocephaly. Plagio has a real outside-in component. Brachy almost never does. Brachy is a sphenobasilar flexion pattern that shortens the falx, and by reciprocal tension membrane, the paired bones have to rotate externally.

That is where most docs stop. They work the sphenobasilar all day, the adjustment feels great, and the calipers do not move. The missing piece is bilateral temporal external rotation, which drags both fossae back, recesses the mandible, and makes a frenulum look worse than it is.

I also cover honest care planning once the posterior fontanelle closes around two to three months, how I present platinum and gold recommendations, and why I stopped being a scans-only doc.

What we cover:

• The four measurements: A to P, lateral parietal width, right oblique, left oblique
• Why I use Mimos calipers and the 30 degree marks
• CVAI formula and thresholds: under 3.5 balanced, 3.5 to 6.25 mild, 6.25 to 8.75 moderate, 8.75 to 11 severe, 11 and above very severe
• Cephalic index formula and ranges: under 76 dolichocephalic, 76 to 81 typical, 81 to 85.5 brachycephalic, 85.5 and up hyperbrachycephalic
• Why 6.25 is where helmet coordination conversations usually start
• Spine first, always. No cranium until the spine is clear, and the dural reason why
• Plagio: outside-in force, torticollis, lambdoidal restriction, compensatory frontal bulge
• Brachy: sphenobasilar flexion, shortened falx, occiput tucked under, parietals buckling
• Unpaired bones move in flexion and extension. Paired bones move in external and internal rotation.
• Bilateral temporal external rotation and why the jaw looks recessed instead of deviated
• The faux tongue tie: why a revision sometimes changes nothing
• Reciprocal tension membrane means every subluxation carries compensation. Find the primary, correct both, in order.
• Honest expectations after the posterior fontanelle closes
• Platinum versus gold recommendations and giving parents ownership
• Why I added primitive reflexes, gross and fine motor, auditory, verbal, visual and cognitive processing to my outcome measures

Your assignment this week:

Pull the cases that will not budge. Take the four measurements. Run them at thecranialdoc.com/calc. Check the cephalic index, not just the CVAI. On every case with a cephalic index issue, look at the jaw. Is it recessed? Does it deviate on occlusion? Then tell me what you found.

Links:

Free cranial calculator: thecranialdoc.com/calc Foundations of Cranial Adjusting: thecranialdoc.com/training

Dr. Anthony was listening to Huberman Lab and heard a mention of research on the neurophysiology of choking under pressure. Not the gag reflex kind, the high stakes performance kind. He couldn't stop thinking about how directly it maps onto every patient sitting in your office stuck in chronic sympathetic stress.

The stress response runs on two systems, not one. There's the salience network, the fast one, amygdala and midbrain, threat detection in milliseconds, no thinking involved. And there's the executive control network, the slow one, prefrontal cortex, the part that can actually evaluate a threat instead of just reacting to it. A nervous system stuck in chronic stress isn't broken. It's an alarm system running with nothing pushing back on it.

What's covered:

• Why stress from an unrelated event yesterday primes the threat system to overreact to something small today

• The pregenual ACC and why early life stress exposure, per the ACE studies, predicts how well built someone's regulating circuitry actually is, their brake pedal

• Why subluxation and dysafferentation load the nervous system so heavily that some patients wake up already past their fight or flight threshold

• The beta blocker study that isolated norepinephrine from cortisol and proved the fast system doesn't answer to logic, "musician steroids" and all

• Why it's not chiropractic's job to remove the stressor, it's to lower the noise reaching the brain so the nervous system has room to adapt

• What outcome measures actually look like for this: EMG, thermal scans, heart rate variability, whatever shows the noise going down visit over visit

This is why "just relax" was never going to work on command, and what to say to a patient instead. Send it to a doc who needs a real answer for the patient who says "I know I'm fine, I just can't calm down."

00:00 Two Stress Clocks 00:18 Podcast Welcome 00:49 Choking Under Pressure 01:51 Two Stress Networks 03:59 Chronic Stress Load 05:11 Brake Pedal Development 05:56 Subluxation And Threshold 07:39 Measuring Nervous System Change 08:20 Norepinephrine Vs Cortisol 09:20 Why Relax Fails 10:26 Key Takeaways 11:22 Closing And Subscribe

A friend of Dr. Anthony's just got asked to speak at his state dental hygienist association's conference. In the past they'd booked a chiropractor to talk ergonomics and stretches. This time the request was different: talk to us about the nervous system.

Nobody had to convince them. They got there on their own.

This episode is Dr. Anthony building the talk he'd give if he were the one walking into that room, and it turns into a full mechanism most docs have never connected out loud.

What's covered:

• The meet and drag: how to connect with a skeptical audience through something they already feel (forward head posture, jaw tightness by Friday) before you take them somewhere new

• Why the trigeminocervical complex means the upper cervical spine and the jaw are never separate problems, they're one feedback loop

• Why adjusting the jaw alone doesn't hold, and why cervical work alone doesn't either

• The chain from forward head posture to jaw clenching to pelvic floor guarding to shallow breathing, and back into the jaw again

• Why this same mechanism applies at every stage of life, not just pediatrics, not just adults

• Why dentists, hygienists, and hairdressers all show up in office with the same early C5, C6 degeneration and cranial base changes

This is the case for why the profession is getting invited into rooms it used to have to fight its way into. Send it to a doc who still thinks TMJ cases are a jaw problem.

00:00 Hygienist In Pain 00:18 Podcast Intro 00:52 Text From Hygienist Association 03:11 Meet And Drag Framework 03:30 Posture To TMJ Link 05:37 Trigeminal Cervical Loop 07:11 Stress Physiology Amplifier 08:46 Jaw Pelvic Floor Connection 10:16 Why This Matters Now 11:23 Training Invitation 12:32 Wrap Up And Subscribe

Your ADHD patient can get through the test with his eyes open. Close his eyes, same test, and the whole thing falls apart. That's not two different kids. That's one kid whose Ferrari has been plowing a field all day.

This episode breaks down an analogy Dr. Anthony's been using in office for months, the Ferrari and the tractor. The nervous system has two tools: the tractor for low level, automatic tasks, and the Ferrari for high level executive function, adaptability, and socialization. When a kid's tractor is out of gas, the Ferrari gets pulled off the track to plow the field instead, and by the time the brain actually needs it, it's destroyed.

What's covered:

• Why a child can pass a reflex test with eyes open but fall apart with eyes closed, and how to read that as a parent

• The pediatric case walkthrough, filtered through Dr. Aimee Spoolstra's Focus evaluation and the Brain Blossom framework

• How category two pelvic instability adults are doing the exact same thing, burning resources just to stay upright against gravity

• Why medicine blames the driver (genetics, "that's just how he's wired") instead of looking at the Ferrari

• Dysafferentation: how the brain builds its wiring based on the input it gets, not in a vacuum

• Why chronic fight or flight in a developing nervous system doesn't stay temporary, it becomes the lens the kid grows through

• How to explain this to a parent in one sentence and watch it land

The real win here isn't a new adjustment technique. It's a way to help a parent see life through their kid's eyes for thirty seconds, and start understanding what's actually driving the behavior they've been told is just personality.

Know a doc who needs a better way to explain nervous system stress to parents? Send them this one.

00:00 Medicine Misses The Point 00:18 Podcast Welcome And Setup 01:46 Ferrari Vs Tractor Explained 03:14 Eyes Open Eyes Closed Clue 04:06 Why The Ferrari Burns Out 04:53 Adult Stress And Pelvic Stability 06:01 Rant On Symptom Treatment 07:12 Build The Tractor First 08:51 Objective Measures And Parenting 11:36 Wrap Up And Sendoff

A four-month-old walks into your office with a torticollis diagnosis already in hand from the pediatrician. Three months of chin stretches. No change in the photos. And you're standing there looking at the face in front of you wondering how the rest of it got missed.

This episode names that pattern: JET syndrome. Jaw, eye, torticollis. Not three separate problems, one cranial and spinal subluxation pattern showing up in three places at once.

What's covered:

• Why JET isn't a diagnosis or a disease. It's a clinical pattern, visible from three feet away, that gives parents and referral partners a name for what they're seeing.

• The mechanical chain behind it: sternocleidomastoid spasm pulling on the mastoid, temporal bone rotation, TMJ distortion, and how that ties into frontal, sphenoid, and orbital changes.

• Why JET syndrome shows up alongside plagiocephaly, and why range-of-motion work alone won't fix a sutural restriction, whichever one is the chicken and which is the egg.

• The three-part screen: is the jaw deviating, is there minor eye asymmetry, is there a cervical range of motion issue. Any combination points to JET.

• How to move past visual analysis into numbers, using the cranial vault asymmetry index and cephalic index from episode 12, so the finding becomes something you can track and report on instead of just eyeballing.

• The referral problem most offices never fix: telling a lactation consultant "send me anyone with a feeding difficulty" doesn't work. Giving them one specific, memorable finding does.

Big takeaway: referral partners forget vague instructions fast. A named pattern with three visible checkpoints is something they can actually use. Combine that with measurement instead of guesswork, and you're not competing with the helmet-and-wait-it-out model, you're the authority in the room.

Free tool: thecranialdoc.com/calc runs your CVAI and cephalic index calculations and builds the parent-facing report for you.

Share this with a doc who's still telling referral partners "send me anything."

00:00 Jaw Eye Torticollis Link 00:43 Referral Clarity Framework 02:05 What Is JET Syndrome 04:15 Why Torticollis Is Cranial 06:32 The Big Three Screen 07:11 Plagiocephaly Mechanics Explained 09:44 Measure With CVAI CI 12:12 Case Walkthrough Recap 13:26 Track Progress And Next Steps 14:51 Closing And Call To Action