Episodes
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In this podcast repost, we rediscover the work of Pediatric Gastroenterologist Dr. Alessio Fasano from the Massachusettes General Hospital Department of Pediatric Gastroenterology. In this conversation, we discussed the research on Intestinal Permeability, Microbiomes and MIS, Multi Inflammatory Syndrome in Children . Dr. Fasano also directs the Mucosal Immunology and Biology Research Center and is associate chief for Basic, Clinical and Translational Research. Under his leadership, investigators are studying the molecular mechanisms of autoimmune disorders including celiac disease, and other-
The Healing Power of Saying No Why the path to health often begins with restraint! Every major faith tradition discovered something long before neuroscience or evolutionary biology could explain it. Growth often begins with restraint. During Lent, people give something up, not because chocolate, wine, or social media are inherently evil, but because saying no creates space. Space for awareness. Space for clarity. Space to notice how often our impulses quietly run the show. We need this space to rise above habit and find purpose. Science is slowly arriving at the same destination. The ability t
Welcome back to Dr. M's Women and Children First. One of the recurring themes on this podcast is that the future of medicine won't be discovered through faster-paced healthcare alone. It will be discovered by slowing down, listening more carefully, and embracing a patient-centered approach that seeks to understand the whole person—not just the disease. Ultimately, the future of medicine begins with a better question: How do we truly hear a patient's story so that we can better serve the person sitting in front of us? Today's guest has spent his entire career helping answer that question. Our c
Failing Them Why Are We? We are failing our children, the next generation. I have been spending an inordinate amount of time studying cellular biology and mitochondrial function in order to understand worsening disease trends. Thus, I want to revisit a landmark study that is one of the most comprehensive assessments of pediatric health ever conducted in the United States. Rather than examining a single disease or health outcome, Dr. Forrest and colleagues integrated data from multiple nationally representative surveys, mortality databases, and electronic health records encompassing millions of
Pain Do we listen to its signal? Pain: Your Body's Built-In Warning System Pain is one of the body's oldest and most important protective mechanisms. It isn't your enemy. It is a messenger. Imagine walking barefoot across your living room and accidentally kicking the corner of the coffee table. The sharp pain that shoots through your toe isn't there to punish you, it is there to protect you. Within fractions of a second, nerves carry a signal to your brain, telling you that cells and tissue have been injured. Your body immediately encourages you to stop what you're doing. Protect the area and
Welcome back to Dr. M's Women and Children First Podcast, where we explore the science, stories, and strategies that help children thrive and families flourish. Today, we're diving into something that affects every parent, every marriage, every friendship, and really every human being: our emotional triggers. Why do seemingly small moments sometimes provoke such big reactions? Why do we repeat the same patterns even when we know better? And perhaps most importantly, how do we become the kind of adults who respond with wisdom instead of reacting from old wounds? To help us answer those question
Autism and Diagnosis Metabolites and Phenotypes In a brand new paper entitled. “Elevated Microbially-Derived Metabolites in Autism: A Possible Diagnostic Screening Test for a Distinct ASD Phenotype,” Dr. Flynn and colleagues investigated whether specific urinary metabolites produced by intestinal microbes could serve as predictive biomarkers for autism spectrum disorder. The study proposes that a large subset of children with autism may represent a biologically distinct phenotype characterized by markedly elevated microbial metabolites, which the authors term ASD-MDM (Autism Spectrum Disorder
DEATH or Better Yet, Live for Today Recently, there has been more death and morbidity in my life than usual. There is no easy way to discuss this topic. Death is finite and simultaneously infinitely painful for the survivors. Everyone learns in the moment how to deal with death. There is no on-the-job training. We are not born ready to accept this reality. It is simply thrust upon us. While I deal with illness and death more frequently than the average American, an occupational reality, it never becomes easy. Each loss has its own weight. Each reminds us of truths we would rather not face. I f
Today's podcast guest is Dr. Aimie Apigian, a physician who has become one of the leading voices in helping us understand the biology of trauma. Dr. Aimie is double board-certified in Preventive Medicine and Addiction Medicine, with advanced training in biochemistry, public health, and functional medicine. She earned her medical degree from Loma Linda University, where her education also included behavioral health, child psychiatric therapy, play therapy, and addiction family counseling. Before medical school, she studied Cell and Molecular Biology at the University of Washington, where she wo
Fake It Till You Make It? One of the most misunderstood pieces of advice in our culture is the phrase "fake it until you make it." At face value, it sounds dishonest. It sounds like pretending to be something you are not. It sounds like confidence without competence. But after nearly three decades in medicine, I have come to believe there is a deeper truth hiding inside that phrase. Most success in life is not built on pretending. It is built on being willing to step into situations where you are not yet fully prepared, knowing that growth happens only when you are slightly or deeply beyond yo
Welcome back to Dr. M’s Women and Children First. Today, we are joined by one of the leading voices in the world of vagus nerve health, functional medicine, and autonomic nervous system regulation, Dr. Navaz Habib. Dr. Habib is a chiropractor, educator, international speaker, and author of the bestselling books *Activate Your Vagus Nerve* and *Upgrade Your Vagus Nerve*. His work has helped bring the science of the vagus nerve from the research world into practical clinical medicine, helping providers and patients better understand the powerful connection between the brain, immune system, gut,
Should You Feed A Viral Illness? This Nature news article discusses emerging evidence that eating may acutely enhance immune responsiveness, particularly through effects on T cells, the learning part of the adaptive immune system. The paper centers on the old saying “feed a cold, starve a fever,” suggesting there may actually be biologic truth behind at least the “feed a cold” half of the proverb. The article reviews a new study in mice and humans showing that T cells, key adaptive immune cells responsible for recognizing and attacking pathogens, behave differently depending on recent nutritio
The Adult Chair, the Adolescent Chair and the Child's Chair The Adult Chair by Michelle Chalfant is a practical framework for emotional maturity, self-awareness, and healing old patterns that unconsciously drive adult behavior. The central premise is that most people move through life reacting not from their grounded adult self, but from unresolved emotional states formed during childhood and adolescence. She organizes this idea into what she calls the “three chairs”: the Child Chair, the Adolescent Chair, and the Adult Chair. The Child Chair represents the emotional self formed in early child
Birth Order Birth Order Is Biology, Not Birthright - so says a new paper in MedRxIV (Kramer et. al. 2026) Here is a short field guide to how sequence shapes the immune system, and maybe the brain in children. We’ve treated birth order like personality trivia. First-borns are “responsible.” Youngest are “free spirits.” Middle children… well, we forgot them. This paper suggests something more interesting: birth order is a biologic exposure. Not destiny. Not diagnosis. But signal. Across a very large dataset, the researchers mapped birth order against hundreds of diseases. The effects are small f
Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First, we welcome one of the most important voices in modern child development and behavioral science, Mona Delahooke. Dr. Delahooke is a licensed clinical psychologist, internationally recognized speaker, and the author of groundbreaking books including Beyond Behaviors and Brain-Body Parenting. Her work challenges one of the deepest assumptions in modern parenting and education: that difficult behaviors are simply choices to be corrected. Instead, she invites us to ask a radically different question, what is the nervous system trying to communicate? This c
Creatine and Microbiomes A new 2026 Cell Metabolism study explores a compelling and increasingly central idea in modern biology: the gut/brain/immune/metabolism axis is not just associative, it is mechanistic. Specifically, Dr. Lu and colleagues investigate how the gut microbiota can directly influence depressive behavior by reshaping systemic and neural metabolism. This is another in a long running list of papers describing the amazing work that bacterial commensal microbes do for us. In this case, our minds and moods. "Although peripheral-brain crosstalk regulates energy metabolism, its role
Welcome back to Dr. M’s Women and Children First. Today’s conversation moves into one of the deepest layers of human development: attachment, relationship, and the way early experiences shape the architecture of our emotional lives. My guest today is Duey Freeman, a licensed therapist, teacher, mentor, and internationally respected voice in attachment theory, human development, and relational psychology. Duey has spent decades teaching therapists, graduate students, and helping professionals around the world, developing a practical framework for understanding how connection, or the absence of
Screenshot Magnesium Magnesium is a major cofactor in over 300 enzymatic reactions in the body, less a supplement than a piece of physiologic infrastructure. It is required for energy production (ATP), insulin signaling, protein synthesis, blood pressure regulation, and proper muscle and nerve function, essentially touching every major system we care about. And it goes deeper: magnesium is necessary for the creation and protection of DNA and RNA and for the production of glutathione, one of our most important intracellular antioxidants/detox mechanisms. About half of our magnesium is stored in
Covid 6 Years Later What Should We Remember The COVID Post-Mortem: What We Missed (and What We Still Can Fix) We ran the largest public health experiment of our lifetime. We failed. Not everywhere. Not always. But in the places that mattered most, children, truth, and upstream health, we got it wrong. And if we don’t name it clearly, we’ll do it again. The First Mistake: Forgetting the Child When the world shut down, we told ourselves it was temporary. Two weeks. Flatten the curve. Regroup. Then two months became a season. A season became a year. For some kids, it became a disappearance. Over
Welcome to Dr. M's Women and Children First Podcast. Today’s conversation is a little different. Six men. One table. No scripts. Just a shared commitment to something that doesn’t come with a manual—fatherhood. We’re talking about what it means to show up as a dad when you’re tired, when you’re stretched thin, and when the stakes feel higher than anything else you do. And we’re grounding that conversation in the ethos of F3 Nation—fitness, fellowship, and faith—where men gather early, push each other physically, and, more importantly, build something deeper: accountability, purpose, and commun
Brene Brown - Leadership Tools to Teach Your Children and SELF “Stand firmly enough to lead, loosely enough to listen.” Strong Ground by Brené Brown published in 2025 Breaking down this new book by the excellent Brene Brown, we find that strong leaders don’t eliminate tension or risk. They hold it. And this is key! What does the hold look like? How does it show up to the team? The theme in my mind is "toughness with tenderness" Clarity is kindness. Vagueness is avoidance dressed as politeness. You can be both confident and uncertain. That’s not weakness, it’s reality. Values are not what you b
Nothing in biology is random. Not growth. Not metabolism. Not disease. What we will explore today is the reality that the earliest inputs in life: nutrition, environment, signaling, don’t just influence outcomes… They shape them. They write the first draft. And if you understand that, if you truly let that land, then everything about how we approach pregnancy, childhood, and prevention begins to shift. From reaction…to intention. From downstream management…to upstream design. Why This Conversation Matters This episode is not just another discussion. In many ways, it is ground zero. Because if
THE FUNCTIONAL MEDICINE STORY DR. JEFF BLAND "Change occurs from the outside in" Dr. Bland Medicine has a habit of believing it has arrived. Every generation of physicians looks around the room, surveys the white coats and microscopes and MRI machines, and quietly assumes the puzzle is mostly solved. History laughs at that assumption. The truth is that medicine is always mid-sentence in a very long story. Dr. Jeff Bland has spent decades helping rewrite that sentence. In a recent conversation on The Root Cause Business of Medicine Podcast, Dr. Bland’s life work comes into focus. Not as a rebel
Elk Antlers - What a Story After returning from Jackson Hole, Wyoming this week, I was struck by the beauty of the Elk refuge, a place where thousands of elk relax in the winter lowlands. Staring at them, I pondered a question: why do the elk shed their antlers yearly? Seems like a lot of wasted energy in a resource scarce world. The answer, mating. Nature has a peculiar sense of theater. When reproduction is the goal, evolution doesn’t whisper, it builds costumes, props, and entire stage productions. Sometimes expensive ones. Across the mammalian world, attracting a mate often requires a spec
Screenshot On today’s episode of Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast, we welcome Halie Hauser, a pediatric clinician, storyteller, and quiet architect of early childhood connection. Halie is the creator of Storytime Explorers, a storytelling platform designed for toddlers and preschoolers that sits at the intersection of language, emotion, and human development. With a Doctor of Nursing Practice focused on pediatric primary care, she brings both clinical depth and creative intuition to the way she reaches children—and just as importantly, their parents. \ Her work lives in the small momen
