A Key Underlying Factor of Autism That is Often Missed

00:00 Tara Hunkin:
This is My Child Will Thrive. And I'm your host, Tara Hunkin nutritional therapy practitioner, certified GAPs practitioner, restorative wellness practitioner, and mother. I'm thrilled to share with you the latest information, tips, resources, and tools to help you on the path to recovery for your child. With ADHD, autism, sensory processing disorder, or learning disabilities.

My own experiences with my daughter combined with as much training as I can get my hands on research I can dig into and conferences I can attend have helped me to develop systems and tools for parents like you who feel overwhelmed, trying to help their children. So sit back as I share another great topic to help you on your journey. A quick disclaimer before we get started.

My Child Will Thrive is not a substitute for working with a qualified healthcare practitioner. The information provided on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat your child. Please consult your healthcare practitioner before implementing any information or treatments that you have learned about on this podcast. There are many gifted, passionate, and knowledgeable practitioners with hundreds if not thousands of hours of study and clinical experience available to help guide you.

Part of our goal is to give you the knowledge and tools you need to effectively advocate for your child so that you don't blindly implement each new treatment that comes along. No one knows your child better than you. No one knows your child's history like you do or can better judge what is normal or abnormal for your child. The greatest success in recovery comes from the parent being informed and asking the right questions and making the best decisions for their child in coordination with a team of qualified practitioners in different areas of specialty.

Today's podcast is sponsored by the Autism, ADHD and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. In order to learn more about the summit and to sign up for free, please go to mychildwillthrive.com/summit.

2:30 Tara Hunkin:
Hi. Welcome back to the My Child Will Thrive podcast. I'm Tara Hunkin and I am really excited to bring to you today an excerpt from an interview that I did with Luminara Serdar for the Autism, ADHD and Sensory Processing Disorder Summit. Luminara is a scientist, nutritionist and holistic healer who helps recover kids from autism, using many strategies, including the neuromodulation technique. She spent nearly 20 years in the biotech industry as a molecular biologist product manager and consultant, and was involved with the human genome project sequencing project. Her allergies were eliminated in two sessions using neuromodulation technique, and she was so impressed that she learned the technique and now uses it along with nutrition, detoxification, and her intimate knowledge of body biochemistry to help heal children on the autism spectrum.

She's been eliminating allergies and correcting mind body dysfunction since 2006. So what I wanted to do was bring to you an excerpt from her interview. In this interview, she created actually a masterclass so if you are listening to this on the podcast, you may want to jump on over to the My Child Will Thrive Instagram account or our YouTube channel to see the slides that she's presenting in this excerpt.

The interview in its entirety can be found in the summit. So if you want, you can sign up for free for the summit and listen to the entire interview. If it captures your interest along with other expert interviews, and that can be found at mychildwillthrive.com/summit. So the interview itself, she's going to teach you all about the key element that biomedical practitioners and doctors tend to miss when she is working with parents towards recovering their child's health and ways that drainage can be supported in children and why you must address methylation and mitochondrial function to speed recovery and the order of the protocols to address dysfunction successfully.

So that's what she talks about throughout her entire interview in masterclass that she has on the summit, but here today on the podcast, I just wanted to give you a taste of that to see if you might be interested in hearing more. So without further ado, here is an excerpt from my interview with Luminara Serdar.

4:40 Tara Hunkin:
So what we're going to be talking about today, that item that you're saying that most practitioners are missing. Let's dive right into what that is. So what is that key element that you feel that biomedical practitioners and doctors are missing when we're talking about recovering the health of these children?

4:56 Luminara Serdar:
Well, it's one word and it's called drainage. And when I bring up that word with people, with parents, like on my social media and stuff, people don't really understand what that is. So I wanted to dive into what drainage and why it's important in the body. And there have been systems like in medical school and in nursing and the body systems that have been ignored for a long time. And one of them is the lymphatic system and one had been the liver for the longest time.

Like it just kind of, wasn't this important thing that people focused on. So those are both included in the drainage category. Picture your house, you're taking a shower, you're flushing your toilet, you're running your water and it's going down the sink. It goes through pipes and it goes out into the sewer system that goes into the street and the water treatment plant.

So I want people to think of the body similarly, right. We have cells that do a bunch of biochemical functions, right? They help us survive. They produce our energy, they're converting one thing to another all the time and they produce waste. And that waste goes outside of the cells and ideally our lymphatic system, like the drain pipes are supposed to catch that waste and take it to the water treatment plant in the body, the sewage treatment plant. So that would be the liver. That would be the kidneys. For gases, that would be the lungs, that's our respiratory tract. And then our skin toxins go out through our skin.

But most of the heavy work, I think it's done in the liver, but this whole system is drainage. Did I mention kidneys already? I think I did. You did. Yeah. So this waste goes out of us through sweat, through our breath, through our poop, through elimination and through our urine. And of course we're also excreting if we blow our nose or cough up phlegm or something, if we're sick. So those are other ways that things get out.

But I think that what a lot of practitioners don't think about, we think about the supplements going in and the nutrition and we think about how to manipulate things within the body.

But we don't think as much about it, we think about the poop and the pee going on, but we don't think about the ways they get out. So that's why I think drainage is important. I think I want to share my screen just to give a visual, let's do that right now. It's always good to be able to see things as well as hear.

7:50 Luminara Serdar:
So the first thing I just wanted to say is I don't have a picture of the cells, but essentially let me go to my other picture. So these green lines represent the lymphatic system and they're vessels that just follow the blood vessels, they're parallel to them. And so they touch all the cells. So ideally the waste would go out of the cells and we have this space between the cells called the extracellular matrix.

That's our connective tissue, that's where we have college in your hear a lot about eating, drinking collagen and bone broth now, right? And that's where our support, like our scaffolding of our tissues comes in place, right? The connective tissue holds our bones together and holds our organs in. So that space, that extracellular space between the cells can get clogged with toxins and clogged with that cellular waste. Ideally, can you see my pointer here?

8:56 Tara Hunkin:
I can see it.

8:57 Luminara Serdar:
So ideally, we're going to put all this waste into the lymphatic system. And the way the body works is everything from the chest down, so all the legs and the left arm, all of this lymph is going to flow right up the arm and up the body and dump right here into the heart.

And then the head and the right arm, all of that comes up to here, the right shoulder area, and meets and dumps in the heart. So that's kind of like where our stuff is coming from in the body. So the lymph is a sewer system that moves things around. And then once that blood goes into the heart, then it's going to be pumped through the liver, which is going to be the cleanup system. And then you can't see the gallbladder, but it would be under here, stored under here, within the liver, or like covered by the liver. And here's your stomach and here's your liver.

And what happens is the liver does its detoxification. It makes bile and it puts those toxins in the bile and then it stores them in the gallbladder. And if we don't have a gallbladder, we're not going to be storing the bile, we have to make it fresh every time. But most of our kids have their gallbladders. And then when we digest this bile squirts out and it'll come, these are your small intestines here. It'll squirt out into the small intestine.

And then there's a bunch of like little tube looking things, one long tube. And then there's some point here down at the bottom where the small intestine meets the large intestine or the colon. And then this is your ascending colon on your right side. And all those toxins are gonna come up through there, go across the descending colon and just follow the tube out, right.

And then, sorry, the transverse colon, and then go out the descending colon. There's your rectum there. Now, if this system isn't moving, you're not moving your toxins out. And one of the things that happens while your fecal matter and the bile contains all those toxins, while it sits in that or goes through the large intestine, our bodies naturally need to reabsorb water through here, which is part of our water balance system. And we're also going to reabsorb toxins at the same time. So the longer that fecal matter sits in here, the longer the opportunity to reabsorb toxins and then we also reuse the bile. So if that bile doesn't, if the toxins aren't taken outta there, we can also just be pulling back the toxic bile, which we don't want to do.

11:42 Tara Hunkin:
Okay. Yeah. So I want to ask a question in that picture, you were showing the lymphatic system. So can you talk about how fluids then move into the lymph in terms of how does the lymph fluid actually move through the body? Cause it's different than the blood and circulatory system, right?

12:01 Luminara Serdar:
Yeah. Good point. And that was gonna be one of my strategies for how to move the lymph. So yeah, our blood vessels, our arteries have valves, they have smooth muscle, sorry, not valve, smooth muscle. And they constrict and that's how our blood moves and our heart pumps it too, right.

So we have the heart muscle and we have the arterial muscles. Our veins and our lymphatic system, they don't have muscles that contract and move the fluids around. They have valves. So the valves would sit like this and the fluid let's say from the calf, the fluid would get pumped up by muscular movement. It gets pumped up and then, so it doesn't fall back down, the valves close. So we need movement. We need jumping on the trampolines. I think that's why kids love them so much. I think they feel good moving that lymph around.

So that's how the lymph moves around. And if we have a lethargic child, someone who's really tired, someone who doesn't have good mitochondrial function, low muscle tone, they're not going to be moving that lymph as easily. So yeah, it does move differently than the blood.

13:08 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah. So let's talk about that a little bit more then cause you just talked about one of the strategies that you can do because you want to get the lymph moving. So what are the other things that you can do to help support drainage? I think a lot of people have learned that and actually, as you said, it's multipurpose getting a mini trampoline for these kids gives them lots of different things, gives them the lymph fluid movement like you were talking about, but it also gives them that sensory input and vestibular input that they so desperately need to start regulating their system as well. So it has a multipurpose function. And for any of us who have busy kids, especially if they're stuck home, jumping on that trampoline is a really good solution right now.

13:58 Luminara Serdar:
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So one of the things you can also do to get the lymph moving around, especially if your child is one of those that doesn't like as much exercise is you can just do like manual compression, right. And I know there's specific lymphatic massage, but you could really just do that yourself. And it might feel really good for them actually and I would like to squeeze up from the bottom and squeeze up from the limbs and then go up and you even do a lot of abdominal compression.

You can compress the liver, you can do a massage in a clockwise direction. Remember I showed that picture where the colon goes up the right side across and then down the left side. So if you massage in that direction, that's also helping to move things through the colon and through the intestines. And it might feel kind of uncomfortable if things are stuck so you just want to gauge how your child's responding to that.

Another great thing is to move the lymph, so there's been recent research in the literature. Like I said, the lymphatic system was mostly ignored and I don't know, several years ago people found, oh, there's this whole lymphatic system in the head and they're calling it the glymphatic system because they're the glial cells in the brain and the lymph fluid movement.

And so what happens is when we sleep our brain compresses by about 40{4537a52abafa24f75931b694e3f6d1d9b0beb5896e18e49b3141987b78b41d96}, it's kind of like squeezing a sponge. So if you go in when your child's in a deep sleep and you actually manually compress, that helps their sponge squeeze out the toxins. Now it's no good to squeeze out the toxins if the way they get out, the lymph channels here that follow the blood vessels are clogged.

15:47 Luminara Serdar:
And Dr. Marco Ruggiero has done some research on looking at how these vessels are actually constricted. So if you think about having a big smoothie straw versus having a little tiny coffee stirrer straw, I think a lot of our kids have the coffee stirrer straws. So the vessels aren't open and what we want to do is get them open.

So one thing you can do before bed is do a lymphatic massage of the neck and you can go under the chin here. So go to the point of the chin and go under and feel the soft tissue and massage. There's lymph all the whole chain of lymph nodes here. So if you massage back and forth slowly, gently at first, right? Cause if we've got a lot of fluid and a lot of stuff in there, then we're not, it's going to hurt, especially with sensitive kids. And then we want to just massage down like this.

And I remember a chiropractor taught me something like that like decades ago for sinus drainage, for cold. And so it really works. You can just feel it opening up. So if you do that before bed, that's opening up that lymph there.

And maybe you want to do some compression other times or have them, hate to say this, jump on the bed, but these are ways that we get our lymph moving for sure. And then what we want to do is have the kidneys open, right? Or sorry, the liver open because all that stuff's going to go into the liver and if it's clogged with things, then it's not going to be able to move well.

Actually, you know what, let me backup before we start moving the lymph, what we want to move is the colon. We want to make sure our child is pooping every day, because if they're not, you can stimulate that lymph and then toxins will just settle, they'll go where they can go because there's no exit route. So when we see kids who have eczema and skin rashes and stuff like that, that's their route of elimination because they're not open in their liver and their gallbladder, maybe in their kidneys, in their colon.

I think I want to say too, that constipation, we know constipation is a big issue with our kids. And I think with a lot of people, not just our kids, right? And I think there's a lot of things that contribute to that, but we want to make sure that the poop comes out, even if they're pooping every day and it's like little rabbit pellets, that's still constipation.

18:19 Luminara Serdar:
There's something called the Bristol poop scale and it talks about the different types of poops, you can look it up. And we just want to make sure it's well formed, not too soft, not too hard. We're looking for the Goldilocks poop here. And we need to get our kids doing that and there's lots of ways to do that.

There's herbs, which I find a lot of kids are very sensitive to. There's homeopathics, there's magnesium, there's vitamin C, there's aloe. So there are a lot of different strategies. So pooping is number one, right? We need that elimination. So imagine it like a funnel, if that poop is on the bottom, if that's leaving then everything else can flow down.

19:01 Tara Hunkin:
Yeah, yeah, no, it is amazing. There's so many different protocols that are out there that people start and they're really great, but if their child is constipated, they're going to either get a really big Hercs reaction. You know, what people call a healing reaction. But really actually it's not just a healing reaction, this is an over it's, they can't detoxify. So constipation is so key.

So that's a wrap. Thanks for joining me this week on My Child Will Thrive. I'm so passionate about giving you the tools and information you need to help your child recover. And as they say, it takes a village, so join us in the My Child Will Thrive village Facebook group, where you can meet like-minded parents and stay up to date on everything we have going on at My Child Will Thrive. This is Tara Hunkin and I'll catch you on the next podcast or over at mychildwillthrive.com.