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PODCAST TRANSCRIPT - FEATURING ALLYSON CHRYSTAL

The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your condition. Featuring natural health experts from around the world, we share in-formation, tools, products and strategies for living better lives in the areas of physical, chem-

ical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-being.

© 2016 The Centre for Epigenetic Expression. All rights reserved.

Dr. De Koyer: Hello and welcome back to Beyond Your Wildest Genes podcast, my name is Dr. Noah De Koyer and I am your co-host. Today I’m super excited to have Allyson Chrystal as our guest.

Allyson is an occupational therapist and a clinical instructor specializing in pediatrics. In her clinical work and research, Allyson has focused on sen-sory integration and self-regulation in children with behavioral and devel-opmental disorders. More recently she has expanded her work with self-regulation to typically developing children in adolescents. Allyson is also currently completing a Master’s degree in Functional Medicine and Clinical Nutrition.

How are you today Allyson?

Allyson: I am great, how are you?

Dr. De Koyer: Great. You know, we met about a month ago at the Func-tional Forum Christmas party in New York City.

Allyson: Yes.

Dr. De Koyer: Well, in fact we both did a Functional In 5 talk. I thought your presentation was the best by far and I knew I had to have you on. Thanks for your time today.

Allyson: Oh, well I appreciate that. You were actually the first one on that stage and I think you did a good job of raising the bar for the rest of us, so it was a great night for sure.

Dr. De Koyer: You know, James said, “Noah, do you know when you want go?” and I’m like, “You can put me anywhere,” and sure enough he put me on first.

Allyson: Famous last words.

Dr. De Koyer: Yeah. So, I like our audience to hear from the person about their backstory, so how about a little bit about yourself?

Allyson: Sure, so kind of an abbreviated version. My current role, as an OT, in in pediatrics and I’m combining that now with a functional medicine piece, but leading up to that, I was definitely in the realm of wanting to go into more traditional allopathic medicine as an undergrad and wanted to go into pediatrics and I’d had some experiences as a medic and some part-time jobs that really made me rethink whether that traditional medi-cal model was one that I could embrace and have a long term career at. I was definitely leaning towards more of an ongoing relationship with pa-tients and clients in a healing capacity.

So, let led me to rehab and more specifically OT, and my history in occu-pational therapy has been really concentrated in pediatrics and I’ve been fortunate enough to work in several different environments where I can care for kids, whether it be at those very beginning stages of life in Neonatal Intensive Care or in early intervention, in home-based therapy, in schools, in hospitals and out-patients.

So, I feel like I’ve gotten a really nice wide variety of patients and clients and in recent years, as I have found functional medicine, I have really been able to address some of what I felt all along in OT and in rehab, was really a void. In rehab we have this kind of idea that when there’s dysfunc-tion and when there is disability, we either remediate and try and fix it, or we compensate and adapt the environment around the person so they can still be functional. Although those two things are incredibly powerful, I think the functional medicine lends as much more depth to that process, in terms of how we heal folks from the inside out.

So, I feel like now that I’m able to kind of marry those two, from a rehab OT perspective and then a functional medicine perspective and then a kid perspective, so I guess there’s the marrying of three, the opportunities for helping kids has just been outstanding.

So, I feel like I’m in the right place now and coming at the pediatric ther-apy role with a little bit of a different lens in functional medicine, but one that really is a good fit.

Dr. De Koyer: Yeah, I think your perspective of occupational therapy combined with functional medicine is extremely unique and for our audi-ence, how about just in the beginning, specifically defining occupational therapy, because I think people are more familiar with physical therapy, I

The purpose of this presentation is to convey information. It is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure your condition. Fea-turing natural health experts from around the world, we share information, tools, products and strategies for living better

lives in the areas of physical, chemical/nutritional and emotional/spiritual well-being.

© 2016 Beyond Your Wildest Genes and The Centre for Epigenetic Expression. All rights reserved.

even employ a physical therapist at our office, but occupational is a little bit different.

Allyson: You’re exactly right and it’s one that I think people have a hard time understanding and I’ve gotten questions like, “So, you get kids jobs?” And I’m like, “No, no, no, it’s really that.”

So what the role of an OT is, is similar to PT and kind of parallel to PT, we are brought into a patient’s life when there is disability or dysfunction that’s impacting their ability to do the things they need and want to do and OT’s kind of take that into a little more functional role and our job is really to look at, okay, what are the things that this person does through-out the day that are important to them in their role as a mother or a fa-ther or a student or a community member or an employee, and has is that disability or dysfunction getting in the way of their success doing the things they need to do? Their occupation, as we say, are daily living.

So, from an OT perspective, I look at pediatrics and I address situations with kids and disability and dysfunction from a functional perspective, so I’m looking at, what are the cognitive, psychological, physical, socioemo-tional, behavioral barriers to a child really being successful in their roles as a peer, daughters, students, a player, community member, all of those things and how can I provide support or the mediation or the adaptations in order to help the kids really do the things they need and want to do to be successful.

So, kind of a long-winded definition, but basically, how do I help kids do all the things that kids need to do and be successful at them?

Dr. De Koyer: Yeah, I think that’s a great explanation. My experience with occupational therapy, I take care of special needs children and “typi-cal children” and pregnant mothers in my office and over the years I’ve taken care of a lot of kids that have had speech delays, just could not speak or could not even formulate words and after I started adjusting them they started to speak more.

Allyson: Yes.

Dr. De Koyer: So, recently, this year I’ve had two patients that have been referred to me, specifically for this, from occupational therapists, and from my perspective I love that, because I think we all need to work together, for the betterment of children across the board.

Allyson: I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s so interesting you bring that up, because I was in Denver at the Ancestral Health Society presenting




this summer, and after my talk a chiropractor came up, it’s on YouTube, you can her his question because it’s so in line with what you’re saying, but he came up and he said, “There is this thing that happens when we as chiropractors address proprioception from an adjustment perspective and there is a development piece there that helps kids,” and my presentation was all about proprioception and behavior and he kind of zoomed out and went, “Wow, I’m providing adjustments and now we’re getting skills that are emerging, like language, like behavioral changes.”

So, there’s something there and you can actually speak to that a lot more eloquently than I could from a chiropractic standpoint, but yes, that corre-lation is a fascinating one.

Dr. De Koyer: Yeah, now I think this all has to do with sensory integra-tion.

Allyson: Yes.

Dr. De Koyer: So, could you explain what that is and what that means?

Allyson: Absolutely. SI or sensory integration or sensory integration dys-function is kind of a niche for OT. So, it’s something we spend a lot of time in graduate school, both learning and both in treatment and in theory and basically sensory integration, you know, we know about the five senses in kindergarten that we have, but there’s also internal senses, like proprio-ception, meaning like kind of that joint position and body awareness and space as well as the vestibular sensation, which is that sensation of move-ment and then there’s a whole other tactile world of touch and how you can register touch and then act on that, that we often don’t necessarily address directly. Sensory integration is the concept of taking, not only those five senses, but also those additional three that I just mentioned, and in the brain, making sense of what’s happening to your body in its own environment and having a response that’s adaptive.

So, one of the examples I like to use, if you’re walking down a pier and there’s a canoe and you have to get into the canoe without falling over and spilling yourself in the drink, you’re not going to jump into the canoe, you’re not going to take a flying leap, you’re probably going to read your own cues from your body and maybe squat down a little bit, maybe walk in carefully, you’re going to modulate how much pressure you’re putting on parts of the canoe, your balance, your vision, all of that is coming to-gether and integrating in the adaptive response of sitting successfully in the canoe without going overboard and we do that every day, I mean, we’re doing that now, kids do that in classrooms, on the playground.




So, it’s something that happens for normal function on a daily basis and we do it well, but when it gets out of whack, so when some of those senses maybe we are hypersensitive to or maybe we’re not balanced in, then we start seeing things that look a little odd or quirky. So, the kid that walks into the classroom and slams his stuff down on his desk and things go everywhere and he walks with really, really stomping feet or he walks on his tippy toes, or he has to touch the wall as he’s walking down the hall, those are kids that their senses are not integrating the information from their environment and their body successfully in that moment, so we start to see things that look like imbalance and dysfunction.

So, sensory integration is something we all do on a daily basis, but it very easily can get out of whack and that’s when we start to see some signs of problem.

Dr. De Koyer: So, in your perspective, how do you treat this or deal with this or remedy this or improve upon it?

Allyson: That is the million-dollar question. So, whenever I have a kid come to me and it could be a referral through parents or a hospital or through teachers, my first question, my first point of contact, my first con-cern is, “What is this kid not able to do successfully? Where are the barri-ers to successfully playing and being a student and interacting positively with peers and being a great family member that gets along well with ev-eryone? So, where are the problems? Then, I take those specific, kind of, like what are the first battles we’re going to pick and I look at what’s caus-ing behavior or dysfunction that’s not appropriate to that environment and I look at what the kid’s doing.

So, your question about, how do I address sensory integration, it really de-pends on what I’m seeing as the issue. So, if a kid, for example is a mover and a shaker, a motor driven kid as I would say, so if there’s a kid and he can’t sit still in the classroom that can’t, you know, we hear the word fo-cus all the time, that can’t focus, that can’t follow along with a lesson, that can’t interact successfully, socially, because he’s impulsive in what he’s saying and it offends the other kids, that it might be difficult for him to keep personal space and he might be the kid that’s touching all the other kids’ supplies. So, that to me, I would register as seeking sensory input and my perception or my therapy for him would have to do with providing him appropriate sensory input, so that all of those systems that I just dis-cussed would then integrate and then support behavior that’s appropriate to the environment.




So, that’s a roundabout way of looking at it, but really the first step is as-sessment and where are the sensory imbalances and it’s kind of like look-ing at a nutritional profile, right? Like, what is too low, what is too high, what’s out of whack and then how do we equilibrate those and balance out those inputs so that the system work in balance, and that’s kind of what we do from a sensory perspective too?

Dr. De Koyer: When I talk to my patients about this, I use the term GIGO, Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Allyson: Yes.

Dr. De Koyer: If your brain is not receiving the right input, whether it’s through the spine or whether it’s from the eyes or whether it’s from the stomach and what they’re digesting, you can’t get the right output.

Allyson: I love that.

Dr. De Koyer: So, it’s as simple as, everybody can look at it through a computerized model or a computer model and you know, if you put a wrong compute program in a computer, you’re not going to get the right response back, and our brain and our nervous system works the same way.

Allyson: Absolutely, I love that analogy and that’s actually one I can use with my kids that’s very digestible and their terms and I think the other piece of that is that my disposal, my system, doesn’t work the same way yours does. So, you and I could take the same garbage, but our responses of what goes out might be very different because my processing is differ-ent and my history is different and my makeup is different. So I think that individualization is exactly what you’re doing and similar to what I’m do-ing as well with the kids that I treat.

Dr. De Koyer: That’s clearly why there’s got to be an integrative ap-proach because everybody is so different, functions differently, has differ-ent genetic makeup, different epigenetic signaling, everybody’s different but it takes a teach approach for sure.

Allyson: Absolutely, absolutely I couldn’t agree more.

Dr. De Koyer: Now, I have two sons, I have an eleven-year-old and a six-year-old and I look at them and how they play and how they use their electronics and then I think back how I played, probably how you played as well, and it’s totally different.




Allyson: It is.

Dr. De Koyer: In fact, it drives me bonkers. There’s got to be an effect here right, I mean there’s got to be something going on and happening because of this.

Allyson: There are so many effects. So, it’s kind of like any other system of toxic exposure and detoxification. So, my ability to maybe spend five hours a day, I’ll exaggerate, five hours a day in front of the computer and get zero movement whatsoever, that’s going to cause a different response in me that it might in you, who can probably tolerate that and still be func-tional as an adult. For me, my system might go crazy and I would end up crawling off the walls.

So, from an evolutionary perspective, we know that kids were wired to move and to survive and to be very, very engaged in their naturalistic en-vironment and that included so much physical movement; hanging and climbing and running and chasing and wrestling and all those things. So, we are wired, from an ancestral health perspective, to need all of that in-put in order to be successful in our environment and to be regulated, or to be ready to learn and to grow and to interact.

So, when we don’t get those inputs, dysregulation occurs and it’s creeps up to the surface in really unique and different ways. Some kids, it’s a shutdown and it looks like apathy and disengagement. Some kids, it’s a hyper response and it looks like lots and lots and lots of excessive move-ment and impulsivity.

So, I think from the perspective of our evolution of play, we are much more still and much more disengaged than we ever were and we’re see-ing milestones that are changing. I mean, I have kids, and you might know actually, more about this than me, but there’s a convergence insufficiency issues that, from the visual perceptual sense, happens when you spend too much time looking at a screen and suddenly your reading skills, even your vision might test as normal, these kids will have reversals in their reading and their capability to read is decreased and it looks like a learn-ing disability. Then, that actually is highly correlated with ADHD.

So, there’s this cascade of domino affects that happens when we have kids that are both still and in front of that screen and in small doses, I’m not certainly trying to demonize screens, that’s part of, certainly everyday life, but I do think that we, as parents, need to really be intuitive about looking at the cues that our kids are giving and if they’re starting to seek out movement, in really maladaptive, we need to really, kind of raise our




hand and address the issue of, how do I give this kid what he’s seeking out, in ways that are going to help him have that piece of self-regulation so they can be successful in social environments in the classroom and in family situations.

So, yeah, I think that… yes, huge issues in terms of how we used to play versus how we play and how that has really, I think, affected some of the issue that we’re seeing crop us so frequently in pediatric health.

Dr. De Koyer: So, what do you do about play in your aging population?

Allyson: Well, I think it depends on the age. So, what I would do with a one or two year old is much different than what I would do with, like some of my high school students and really with my older kids, even from the very basic kindergarten and elementary ages, is I try and teach the con-cept of self-awareness. So, I might use an analogy with a kid like, “Your body is like a car and when it runs really, really fast, what happens, and when it runs too slow what happens?” “Well it won’t go anywhere.” “Well, let’s take that into how you’re feeling in the classroom. How’s your engine running?” That’s actually a program that’s out there, How Does Your En-gine Run? “And if you’re engine’s running too fast, what happens in the classroom?” “Oh, I might get angry or I might hit a kid or I might not be able to sit still.” “So how do we slow down your engine?”

So, teaching kids first that self-identification of their states of regulation, and then being able to incorporate strategies to give them the input that they need, that helps, kind of mute that sympathetic nervous system that’s a little overactive and drive up that parasympathetic, that can help, kind of even out and add some equilibrium to some of the balance of be-havior.

Dr. De Koyer: So, very individualistic in terms of age and in terms of their needs, in terms of whether they’re a boy or a girl or any other situa-tion that they might have?

Allyson: You got it, that is very well said, that is exactly what it is and I think the template of thought, so that the assessment piece is kind of a template of what we’re looking at and we’re addressing it, but certainly the actual treatment strategies are going to be so individualized, because treatment in a school setting is going to look very different from treatment in a hospital setting or a home setting, but the overall goal is, how do I help this kid’s little system be in that just right mode, where the engine’s running just right so that they are able to really be successful in all the things that they need to do?




Dr. De Koyer: Now, how do you go out against taking away a kid’s verve or their spirit, because if you look at a child with ADD and the triad of ADD is distractibility, impulsivity and hyperactivity.

Allyson: Yes.

Dr. De Koyer: But if you take those and you turn them on their head, I mean you could look at distractibility as curiosity or impulsivity as creativ-ity, hyperactivity as energy, so you don’t want to take that away from a child, so how do you balance their energy and their excitement and their creativity with them controlling their behavior or controlling themselves in the classroom?

Allyson: Oh man, that is probably one of the most brilliant questions that I have been asked and it really is so multifaceted in terms of how to an-swer it, but to give you what I think would be my gut simplistic response, is first I couldn’t agree more that our goal, as therapists and functional medicine practitioners and your role as their treating doc, is not to sup-press, it is not to mute, it is not to counter, it is not to resist, it is not to make less what these kids are coming to the table with. Our role, I think, is to channel, is to harness, is to embrace what those individual needs are and provide them alternatives for how they’re meeting those needs. So, instead of one of my kiddo’s that is inconstantly falling out of his chair in the classroom and disrupting all the other kids with tweaking of a pencil, and sometimes it’s not even conscious, it’s just my body has so much overflow of energy that I can’t stop flicking this paper and I can’t stop talk-ing out in class and I can’t stop yelling at the kid across the room and fall-ing out of my chair.

So, all of those things are creating a negative impact in that role and our goal is not to, kind of put this kid in a box and kind of try and squelch all of that energy, but it’s to give him strategies to get that out that’s produc-tive.

So, this type of kid, that I asked to take this huge box of books down to the library every morning and that’s his job and it’s heavy work, heavy proprioceptive, lots of input, that meets his need for movement and that sensory integration piece. So, it’s evaluating a need and not taking those needs away, but teaching replacement behaviors that meet those same needs, so that when the kid goes back into the classroom, or maybe it’s being done in the classroom or at home or whatever, but he can still be successful in that environment. We just kind of channeled all of those things into something that is both socially and environmentally and be-haviorally appropriate.




Dr. De Koyer: So, we look at it through an evolutionary perspective. The child who is curious, creative, has high energy, he’s going to be the ruler of the roost, right, a million years ago?

Allyson: Yes, that’s it. Absolutely, because people were not afraid to take risks, right?

Dr. De Koyer: He’s the one to hunt down the lion or rule the hunter gath-ering, however you want to look at it. But now, in today’s perspective, he’s the kid with ADD or he’s the hyperactive kid.

Allyson: Yes.

Dr. De Koyer: It’s a tough perspective to look at but I think we have to look at those things more like that.

Allyson: Absolutely, and one of the key differences that I have found, and this is both theoretical and kind of experience, but one of the key differ-ences between that risk taking, hyperactive to use your word, of high en-ergetic behavior that was the kid that was kind of ruling our ancestral health environment, because he was the one that was actually bringing home dinner for the family or whatever.

Dr. De Koyer: Right.

Allyson: Versus the kid today that we’re looking at as being dysfunctional because they have all those same attributes, the difference is that our kids today are not getting the feedback from their environment that teaches them how those behaviors are working or not working for them. So, like ancestral health wise, that kid who was out doing all those crazy things was getting feedback constantly from his environment that he wasn’t learning from and realizing, “Oh, I do not want to go into that lion’s den to get dinner. That did not work out well for me,” or whatever, but our kids today don’t have those same capabilities of learning from their mis-takes and taking the risks and assessing them and then taking those neu-rocircuits and applying them to the next decision. So we’re kind of grow-ing kids that aren’t able to learn from how they’re interacting with their environment and I think the reason for that is multi, kind disciplinary but it’s about how we’re parenting, it’s about how we’re teaching, it’s about how we’re requiring kids to sit for six hours a day in school, how we’re squelching the independence and you know, we tell all the kids that they’re little special children but at the same time we make sure that ev-eryone is even and the same and risk taking, even in a social setting, is considered a bad thing.




So, I think although, maybe those traits or those characteristics haven’t changed the way that our society and cultural norms handle them have and I feel like that’s where the mismatch is and that’s where we’re start-ing to see some of the big discrepancies.

Dr. De Koyer: Now, is there anything else that you see, any important is-sues that crop up over and over again that are impacting children’s devel-opment and their behavior, something else other than what we’ve talked about?

Allyson: I think the nutritional aspect of things can’t be ignored. Nutri-tional aspect for sure, we know that that has a direct impact on gut health, which then has a direct impact on cognitive behavioral issues. So, I think the processed food, the high sugar thing, as much press as it gets, it really, at the end of the day, is the most fundamental and easily change-able, factor in dysregulation in kids.

So, definitely, that’s always something that I bring up and address and sometimes parents need a lot of support in making, even just very minor changes, but I feel like that’s an easy area to make some adjustments and see kind of positive changes.

Dr. De Koyer: Okay, so how about three or four nutritional things that you target with your parents and patients and that you plan to target more as your functional training deepens?

Allyson: Sure, that’s a good question. First I would say, decrease the sugar, decrease the dependence on things that come in the pantry and packages and baggies and all the things that we know that kids’ food looks like. Make small increases in the repertoire of protein and whole-foods, in terms of fruits and vegetables that kids will tolerate. I think adding in, certainly good probiotics and gut health kinds of things are huge, because that just kind of sets a baseline for everything else. And I think, from a mental health perspective and a sanity perspective, I think really being on top of kids’ sleep patterns is huge. It’s too easy now, for even our little guys, to be falling asleep with their phone in their bed and most parents that I ask, “How much sleep does your kid get?” They’ll be like, “Well, he goes in his room at 9:00, but he goes in with his Laptop or his iPad or his phone and we actually don’t know what time he actually gets to sleep and then the alarm goes off at 6:00.”

So, I think decreasing the amount of sugar, increasing the repertoire of good quality protein, fruit and vegetables that kids will tolerate. I think teaching kids how food makes them feel, you know, “Hey, I noticed when




you ate four bags of Skittles, that you really seemed, kind of like you were crawling out of your skin, you seemed a little uncomfortable. How did that make you feel?” You know, teaching about correlation between, “When I eat this or that, or I don’t get enough sleep, this behavior occurs or I just don’t feel good,” or whatever. So I think that self-awareness piece, even from a nutritional standpoint can start super early too.

Dr. De Koyer: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. The two big points that I pulled off from what you said tonight I agree with 100% is, first off sleep, right?

Allyson: Yes.

Dr. De Koyer: I know there’s kind of statistics, but I know my kids need about ten hours of sleep.

Allyson: Yeah.

Dr. De Koyer: They probably can get away with nine, but ten is really im-portant. We have amber lights in their room, so they sleep with an amber light nightlight, no regular nightlights. They don’t sleep with their lights on. When they go to bed, they go to bed, they don’t go to bed watching TV or they don’t go to bed playing video games, they go to bed. Those things are really, really crucial.

Allyson: Absolutely.

Dr. De Koyer: The second thing that you hit on was less sugars and less packaged foods is, essentially sugar regulation or sugar dysregulation. When you have these sugar swings, and I can see this with my youngest son, he really loves junk food and if his sugar is low or he doesn’t have those proteins and fats to sustain him, he’s a terror, he’s a terror and what frustrates me the most and now I’m just ranting, but with this whole peanut and nut allergy, when you can’t send in nuts, or something with nuts into your kids’ school for lunch, it really makes it difficult to send healthy snacks in.

Allyson: Absolutely, or any sorts of protein for that matter.

Dr. De Koyer: It’s really frustrating and I understand that peanut al-lergy’s a real issue and you have to be careful, but what easier thing to send with your kids is with some macadamia nuts or cashews or almonds or a mixture of macadamia nuts and dark chocolate to be given the right fats and proteins. I don’t know, there’s no solution there, but man, it drives me nuts.




Allyson: Well, it’s a huge issue, absolutely and one of the things, just to speak to what you were saying about your youngest, that I have actually done with my own kids, it sounds kind of obnoxious and over the top, but it’s hard, where, if we’re going to choose some sugary kinds of things, we jot it down, like if there’s a special party or Halloween thing or whatever, but then I actually ask them, I check in when them, “How’re you doing? How’s your engine running? What’s going on?” and they’ve been able to visually sometimes really see the correlation between what you were say-ing about, you know, if you OD’d on sugar and then it’s off the wall.

So, I think, even making those connections early, even if to them it’s just kind of our talking or barking at them, eventually I think that sinks in, I mean, kids are watching everything we’re doing and saying. But I think, the child lunch/school thing is a completely separately podcast and epi-demic issue for sure and it’s tough to keep our kids on track with what we value when we have these confines of what the school’s allowing, for sure.

Dr. De Koyer: It’s tough. Now, any other coping mechanisms for the par-ents of the children that you find extraordinarily helpful for useful that our audience might want to know about it here?

Allyson: You know, one of the things that has been, I think really helpful is, we use something called social stories, which is something that speech therapists will use a lot and it’s kind of a way of writing a story about a child that helps them process what’s going on with them, but isn’t some-one talking to them and it sounds a little cheesy, but finding a book that has to do with sensory issues or finding a website that maybe there’s some cartoon kind of social strategies, I think being able to start the lan-guage with kids about that self-awareness piece, even if it’s kind of third person and reading a story about it, is essential, and that I have found to be, kind of a game changer for some families with young kids, that are re-ally struggling with how to start that conversation with their kid. So, I think that’s a bit thing.

I think finding activities also, if you see that your kiddo is seeking a certain kind of input, find activities that reinforce that. I have some kids that are really in to and love to crash and crash and crash until they all crash into people, into they all crash into culture, well how can we take that and find something like a gymnastics class where he jumps on a trampoline or swim, where he gets all of that proprioceptive input.

So, I think two things: One is again, channeling and harnessing and cele-brating those individual differences, like finding outlets that are healthy and adaptive and then two, seeking or writing or finding books that can




start that conversation, even as early as kindergarten, so that kids can de-velop a better sense of self-awareness and self-acceptance.

Dr. De Koyer: Sounds great. Now, what I think is so special about you is the fact that you’re an occupational therapist and I think that’s why you just got interviewed by Robb Wolf and you’re going to speak at Ancestral Health Symposium, is that you’re entering into this functional medicine training as well, to really integrate the both, to make you extraordinarily unique. Talk to us a little bit about the functional medicine piece and how you visualize yourself and your practice and what you have to offer in the next several years.

Allyson: That’s another good question and honestly one that the answer changed daily, but for good reasons. I really felt like, at some point I was going to leave OT behind and really focus all of my efforts and profes-sional life on functional medicine and what I found is that every single day in my OT practice, the functional medicine concepts and tents of individu-alization and root causes of disorder and imbalance amongst the systems, is informing how I’m able to treat these kiddos and because I’m not com-pletely done, I’m about 75% of the way through with the Master’s, I haven’t completely been able to integrate the functional medicine aspect, but I think in the future, what I would love to see is a multi-disciplinary clinic that can look at children through many different lenses and offer kind of a wrap-around support.

So, from a functional medicine, nutritional perspective, we’re looking at, what are the root causes of dysfunction, where are the imbalances, what are the specific polymorphisms or nutritional deficiencies that are lending themselves to this dysregulation piece and then on the other side of it, how can I teach this child coping strategies and self-awareness and self-regulation strategies to harness those individualized differences and be successful. Then from maybe even more of the chiropractic medical per-spective, what other supports need to be adjusted for, no pun intended, in order to kind of finish off and cap off that 360-degree realm of care?

So, I really foresee, as I’m having more conversation with folks and as I’m connecting with people that are telling me, “Holy cow, what you’re saying is striking so many chords with me because my kid needs that perspec-tive,” and so on and so forth, I think my idea of where it can go is evolving but at the end of the day, it’s really about treating the kid as a whole kid and being able to provide all the different supports in order to find bal-ance both internally and externally.




Dr. De Koyer: Well said. Any final words for our audience, anything else you’d like to touch upon?

Allyson: I would love for folks to check out evolutionarytherapy.com to find out a little bit more about what this looks like in practice and to also find out a little bit more about where they can get some additional infor-mation, to either help them see their kids maybe through a little bit wider lens, or to find some strategies that may help. That will definitely be a site that there’s some weekly nuggets of information that folks might connect with and find helpful and some conversations that can start about strate-gies that folks are finding in their own world.

So, I think as a final thought, I would love to kind of stay connected with folks that this might resonate with. On Facebook, they can find me at Allyson Chrystal or at my website to kind of bring everybody together.

Dr. De Koyer: Well said. I truly appreciate your time. I loved meeting you in New York, I hope we get to meet again. I hope we could do another in-terview again and I appreciate…

Allyson: I’d love it. Fantastic. Thank you so much for your time, it’s been great.

Dr. De Koyer: Thank you Allyson.

My name is Dr. Noah De Koyer, your co-host and you are listening to the Beyond Your Wildest Genes podcast. If you like what you’ve heard today, please share this with your friends and encourage them to subscribe on iTunes. Leaving a review on iTunes would be the icing on the cake. Thank you.

You can subscribe to our weekly email at www.beyondyourwildestgenes.-com. Thank you, and as my oldest son Hayden says, “Be awesome and never unawesome.”




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