Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #69 Repost – Stephen Porges, Ph.D. – Polyvagal Theory


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This week I sit down with Dr. Stephen Porges, a Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University where he is the founding director of the Traumatic Stress Research Consortium. He is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina, and Professor Emeritus at both the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Maryland.

He served as president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research and the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences and is a former recipient of a National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Development Award. He has published more than 400 peer-reviewed papers across several disciplines including anesthesiology, biomedical engineering, critical care medicine, ergonomics, exercise physiology, gerontology, neurology, neuroscience, obstetrics, pediatrics, psychiatry, psychology, psychometrics, space medicine, and substance abuse. In 1994 he proposed the Polyvagal Theory, a theory that links the evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system to social behavior and emphasizes the importance of physiological state in the expression of behavioral problems and psychiatric disorders. The theory is leading to innovative treatments based on insights into the mechanisms mediating symptoms observed in several behavioral, psychiatric, and physical disorders.
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He is the author of multiple books on his Polyvagal Theory: including the Neurophysiological foundations of Emotions, Attachment, Communication, and Self-regulation, as well as Polyvagal Safety: Attachment, Communication, Self-Regulation. His newest book cowritten with his son is called Our Polyvagal World, How Safety and Trauma Change Us. Dr. Porges is the creator of a music-based intervention, the Safe and Sound Protocol ™ (SSP), which is used by therapists to improve social engagement, language processing, and state regulation, as well as to reduce hearing sensitivities.

This is such a fascinating conversation. He brings the worlds of psychiatry and anthropological physiology into union for us to understand the why of trauma reactions and the future unwinding that is now possible. This is a must listen to conversation if you know anyone with trauma history.

Please enjoy my conversation with Professor Porges,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 30 – Beyond Behaviors Part 2, Mona Delahooke, PhD

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Review of Chapter 2 of Beyond Behaviors
by Mona Delahooke, PhD


“Social behavior and the capacity to manage challenge are dependent on the neural regulation of physiological state.” S. Porges

Top Down or Bottom Up?

“Before We Respond to Behavior, We Need to Understand Its Origin.”

With a deceptively simple observation, Dr. Delahooke reshapes the entire field of behavioral intervention: children’s actions come from two very different places in the brain. Some behaviors are top-down, intentional, planned, thoughtful. But many, especially the ones adults find most perplexing, arise bottom-up from stress responses generated by the body’s autonomic nervous system. We often think of this state in terms of fight or flight, however, it is not that simplistic. It is truly any significant response to the outside environment that leads to a neuroceptive reaction that is not governed by the neocortex, top down. If we don’t distinguish the source, our interventions are guesswork at best and often counterproductive at worst.

She illustrates this through a case, a child whose impulsive, disruptive behaviors were treated as failures of will or desire. School teachers and teams repeatedly urged him to “use his words,” as though language were a faucet he simply refused to turn on. What no one stopped to ask was the foundational question: Was his nervous system regulated enough to access language at all? Was he gated at the level of the amygdala blocking the ability to use his mind consciously and even have the opportunity to respond to a meaningful request? Is he capable of the ask, not in terms of willingness, but in terms of physiological access to the skill itself?
….. and more

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #103: Sam Yanuck, DC – Cogence

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Today on Dr. M’s Women and Children First, we’re joined by Dr. Sam Yanuck, a clinician-educator who has spent more than three decades translating immunology from the bench to the bedside. Dr. Yanuck has been in private practice since 1992 and is the creator of Cogence Immunology, one of the most widely respected functional immunology training programs in the world. Through Cogence, he has trained over 9,900 clinicians internationally to think mechanistically about immune signaling, chronic inflammation, autoimmunity, and the complex, often nonlinear patterns that define chronic disease.

What sets Dr. Yanuck apart is his insistence on precision. His work focuses on understanding the immune system as a dynamic network—one shaped by timing, context, feedback loops, and individual biology—rather than a collection of isolated lab values or diagnoses. In his clinical model, chronic illness is not random; it reflects an identifiable matrix of immune, metabolic, environmental, and regulatory factors that can be mapped, understood, and addressed.

In today’s conversation, we’ll explore how modern immunology reshapes clinical thinking around autoimmunity, chronic inflammatory disease, and long-term health—especially in complex patients where standard frameworks fall short.
This is a deep dive. If you care about mechanism, signal over noise, and treating patients with both scientific rigor and biological humility, this episode is for you.

Today, we’re stepping outside the sterile lab and into the wild world of evolutionary biology — where our immune system didn’t emerge in a vacuum, but in dirt, in danger, and in the delicate dance between microbe and mammal.

Join me and Dr. Sam Yanuck -the clinician, the teacher, and one of the best translators of complex immunology into something both clinically useful and biologically beautiful.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 29 – Beyond Behaviors, Mona Delahooke, PhD


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Review of Chapter 1 of Beyond Behaviors
by Mona Delahooke, PhD


“When we see a behavior that is problematic or confusing, the first question we should ask isn’t “How do we get rid of it?” but rather “What is this telling us about the child?” (MD 2019)


The opening chapter sets the stage for a quiet revolution in how we understand children who struggle. Dr. Mona Delahooke invites us to take a step back from the culturally and medically ingrained belief that children’s outward actions are reliable windows into their inner intentions – or what they really mean and want based on their actions. Instead, she asks, nay implores, us to adopt a more biologically accurate, compassionate, and clinically effective lens from which to view each child as they present themselves. Their behavior is communication from a developing nervous system striving for regulation and often stuck somewhere else, either frozen or in flight…..
Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 28 – Feeding Infants


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Food in Infancy
What do we know?

“Humans are the only mammals who feed our young special complementary foods before weaning and we are the only primates that wean our young before they can forage independently. There appears to be a sensitive period in the first several months of life when infants readily accept a wide variety of tastes and this period overlaps with a critical window for oral tolerance. As a result, infants should be exposed to a wide variety of flavors while mother is pregnant, while mother is nursing and beginning at an early age. There also appears to be a sensitive period between 4 and 9 months when infants are most receptive to different food textures. There remains debate about when it is best to begin introducing solid foods into an infant’s diet however, the available evidence suggests that provided the water and food supply are free of contamination, and the infant is provided adequate nutrition, there are no clear contraindications to feeding infants complementary foods at any age. There is emerging evidence that introduction of solid foods into an infant’s diet by 4 months may increase their willingness to eat a variety of fruits and vegetables later in life, decrease their risk of having feeding problems later in life, and decrease their risk of developing food allergies, and the early introduction of solid foods into an infant’s diet does not appear to increase their risk of obesity later in childhood.” (Borowitz S. 2021)

Food Introductions — What’s the best way to approach it?

As infants begin the shift from exclusive milk feeding to solid foods, a range of opinions inevitably emerge on how to navigate that transition. It’s tempting to get lost in modern guidelines, but an anthropological lens is often more revealing. Long before the age of purées in jars and puffed snacks in canisters, human infants ate what their parents ate. It was delivered in whole-food form and mechanically softened by chewing, cooking, or crushing. These early first foods carried important evolutionary advantages…Plus a piece on Hell Yeh or No by Derek Sivers

Enjoy,
Dr. M

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #102: Jeremy Goldberg – Life Begins


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This weeks Guest is Dr. Jeremy Goldberg. He styles himself as a compassion cultivating day making change agent/empathy collecting not quitting word wizard/chief burrito appreciator aspiring to inspire/struggle overcoming ranter in charge/ferocious idealist/never giver upper/a love bombing kindness pirate. What he really does, in my mind, is write and teach the world to project love and kindness where it is not layered enough. On his website he writes: My mission is to make kindness cool, empathy popular, and compassion commonplace. As part of that purpose, I write articles, send emails, host retreats and workshops, give TEDx talks, coach clients, host a podcast, write books, and make spoken word poetry videos. My name is Jeremy, I founded Long Distance Love Bombs, and I am fucking stoked to meet you. Send me an email and let’s get going: LongDistanceLoveBombs at gmail dot com. We breakdown words, relationship, connection and being happy in a world of silly tribal divisiveness!

In this conversation we discuss his experience as a new father and the initiation of fatherhood. “I have been wiped out and annihilated by parenting and the initiation of fatherhood. Hands down, brutally, face dragged along the hot coals of the initiation….” There are so many real, honest, open truths dropped along the winding road of this discussion. If you are young and ready to understand the world of fatherhood, this is a conversation for you!

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue Thanksgiving


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THANKSGIVING THOUGHTS

Every year, as the leaves turn and the air gets that crisp bite, I’m pulled back to 1621 in Plymouth, Massachusetts where a group of English Pilgrims, religious refugees who had crossed an ocean to breathe free, and their Wampanoag neighbors sat down together for three days of feasting. No treaties, no agendas, just gratitude for a successful harvest and the simple miracle that two very different peoples could share a meal in peace. Food and friendship. That was the entire point. At least, that is what history tells us.

Fast-forward two centuries and Abraham Lincoln, in the middle of the bloodiest war this country has ever known, paused on October 3, 1863 to proclaim a national day of Thanksgiving.

His words still ring true: “The year that is drawing towards its close, has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature, that they cannot fail to penetrate and soften even the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever watchful providence of Almighty God….

Dr. M

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