Too Many Therapies, Not Enough Results?
If you find yourself running from one appointment to the next — physical therapy on Mondays and Wednesdays, occupational therapy Tuesdays, speech therapy squeezed in on Fridays, plus weekly sensory integration sessions and maybe even ABA or other behavioral interventions — all while trying to manage a strict, restrictive diet and administer what feels like 50 to 100 different supplements, vitamins, detox agents, and homeopathics every single day… I want you to know you’re not alone.
More importantly, I want you to know — you’re not missing anything. You’re not failing your child.
The truth is, you may actually be doing too much.
The Hidden Trap of “More is Better”
In the quest to help your child heal, develop, and regulate, it’s easy to fall into the trap of constantly adding more — more therapies, more protocols, more supplements — without realizing that their nervous system may already be at or beyond capacity.
When the brain and body are stuck in a constant state of stress — sympathetic overload, vagus nerve dysfunction, subluxation, dysautonomia — even well-intentioned interventions can become overstimulating, and in some cases, even counterproductive.
That’s why so many families report that despite doing everything “right,” their child is still stuck, plateaued… or even regressing.
It’s not because you haven’t found the perfect protocol or the right combination of therapies. It’s because healing doesn’t come from piling on more — it comes from starting at the foundation.
And oftentimes, the most powerful next step isn’t another supplement or session… but rather taking a step back, calming the chaos, and working to first regulate and restore the nervous system.
What is Healing Interventions Overload?
Through work with thousands of families, we’ve identified an all-too-common frustrating and heartbreaking pattern. Families often arrive with children enrolled in an overwhelming schedule: physical therapy and occupational therapy 2-4 sessions weekly, speech therapy with additional feeding interventions, behavioral programs or ABA therapy sometimes 20+ hours weekly, sensory integration programs, academic tutoring, 10-40+ supplements with complex dietary protocols, detox programs, and primitive reflex integration therapy.
These parents have faithfully followed every recommendation, eliminated foods from their child’s diet, given countless supplements, and wondered why their child seems more overwhelmed and exhausted than before.
Healing Interventions Overload occurs when multiple beneficial therapies overwhelm a child’s already dysregulated nervous system, causing individual interventions to work against each other rather than building synergistically toward improvement.
Think of your child’s nervous system like a computer with limited processing power — when too many tabs are open and too many programs are running simultaneously, the entire system slows down or crashes.
You can also think of your child’s nervous system like a circuit board — if it’s already miswired or overloaded, plugging in too many things at once, even good therapies, can trip the system and blow a fuse.
This explains why kids with nervous system dysregulation often struggle with sleep, meltdowns, sensory overload, and even seizures or motor tics when their system gets overwhelmed from too many therapies happening all at once.
The Science Behind Why Good Therapies Go Bad
When your child’s nervous system is stuck in sympathetic dominance, essentially living in constant “fight-or-flight,” it operates like a smartphone with a dying battery — every function becomes about survival and energy conservation, not growth and learning.
Stressed nervous systems drain energy in a specific hierarchy:
First: The Gut and GI System Suffers
The digestive system often struggles with motility, absorption, assimilation, and elimination, causing a child to chronically not “feel good” and therefore struggle in therapies. This is why millions of kids today still struggle with chronic gut issues despite having pristine diets and thousands of dollars worth of supplements — the problem is not with their nutrition, it’s with their neurology.
Second: The Motor System Breaks Down
Delayed milestones, poor coordination, hypertonicity and spasms, weak core strength result in crawling delays, W-sitting, toe walking, incoordination, and gait issues that stall out and are hard to address with PT or OT alone. Speech issues are also at their root a neuro-motor dysfunction.
Third: Immune Function Deteriorates
This leads to chronic inflammation, frequent ear infections, antibiotics, more infections, asthma, and autoimmune conditions. If your child is sick all the time, they either can’t even make it to therapies, or can’t get much out of them.
The Transformative Solution: Sequential Healing That Works
The answer isn’t to abandon beneficial therapies — it’s to understand the proper sequence for introducing them, creating what we call “the multiplier effect” where each intervention becomes exponentially more effective.
Phase 1: Building the Foundation
This phase focuses exclusively on high-frequency Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic Care to address subluxation patterns and restore proper nervous system function, implementing a “less is more” approach by pausing most other major interventions. Consider this building the foundation!
Phase 2: Supporting the Core Four
This phase strategically reintroduces support for the “Core Four” functions: sleep, gut and GI function, immune balance, and motor development. These foundational systems must be online before higher-level functions like speech or academic learning can develop properly.
The best place to start within Phase 2 is the Motor System — you’ll now see your child be able to benefit so much more from PT, OT, and Speech Therapy once their nervous system is better regulated, connected, and coordinated.
In most cases when a full care plan of Neurologically-Focused Chiropractic is done right and done fully, primitive reflexes will fade and integrate on their own.
Finally, after the neuro-motor system is working better, you can begin to better support the gut-immune system and work on detoxification and elimination more smoothly, safely, and effectively.
Phase 3: The Magic Happens
With a regulated nervous system and stable foundational functions, previously ineffective therapies can produce dramatic results, and children with regulated autonomic function experience exponentially better therapy gains and start to really catch up and get back on track developmentally!
How to Know If Your Child is Dysregulated and Overloaded
Start first by doing an honest “gut check” on their progress, and what your “parent gut” is telling you may be going on. Ask yourself: Are the current interventions moving things forward, leaving your child stuck, or making things worse?
Advanced assessment technology, INSiGHT scans, can precisely measure nervous system dysregulation, subluxation, and vagus nerve dysfunction to see if your child’s nervous system is completely overloaded, overwhelmed, and exhausted — meaning they would struggle to gain benefit from other integrated therapies.
This gives parents confidence to trust the process and resist the urge to add more interventions prematurely, because clinically we know that nervous system improvements often happen before visible signs, which means true foundational neurological healing is happening first.
Your Next Steps
If everything we’ve discussed sounds familiar, know that you’re not alone in this journey. The exhaustion you feel from juggling multiple therapies while wondering why progress has stalled is valid, and there is hope.
At Thrive Family Chiropractic, we understand that healing happens from the foundation up, and know how to regulate and restore your child’s nervous system.
Your child’s healing journey doesn’t have to be overwhelming and we want to help. Give Thrive Family Chiropractic a call today to schedule a consultation. If you are not local to us, check out the PX Docs directory to find a PX Docs office near you.
When we address the foundation first — the nervous system — every other intervention becomes more effective, and your child can finally experience the breakthrough you’ve been working so hard to achieve.
