Tag Archives: Pediatrics

Dr. M’s Women and Children First Podcast #104: SMaeve O’Connor, MD – Allergy and Immune Literacy


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Today, I’m joined by Dr. Maeve O’Connor, a board-certified allergist and immunologist practicing in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Dr. O’Connor’s training reflects both rigor and range. She completed dual undergraduate degrees at the University of South Carolina Honors College with a Bachelor of Science in Biology and a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish before earning her medical degree at the University of South Carolina School of Medicine. She then completed her internship and residency at the University of Texas and its affiliated hospitals in Houston, where she served as Chief Medical Resident.

Her subspecialty training in Allergy and Immunology was completed at the National Jewish Medical and Research Center in Denver consistently ranked the number one respiratory hospital in the United States where she developed deep expertise in asthma, allergic disease, and immune dysregulation. She further expanded her clinical lens through fellowship training in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona from 2013 to 2015.

Clinically, Dr. O’Connor works at the intersection of pediatrics, immunology, and real family life where eczema isn’t just a rash, food reactions aren’t just labels, and immune symptoms rarely fit neatly into algorithmic boxes. Her work emphasizes careful diagnosis, evidence-based treatment, and avoiding both over-medicalization and missed pathology.

In a time when allergy medicine is often reduced to test results and avoidance lists, Dr. O’Connor brings a grounded, thoughtful approach helping families and clinicians distinguish what’s truly allergic, what’s inflammatory, what’s developmental, and what’s simply noise.

Today, we’ll explore how allergic disease actually presents in children, why mislabeling is so common, how early immune signals shape long-term health, and how pediatricians and specialists can collaborate more effectively without fear-based medicine.

This is a conversation about immune literacy, clinical nuance, and doing better for children in a world where their immune systems are under increasing pressure.

I’m excited to welcome Dr. Maeve O’Connor.

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 31 – Poly Vagal Theory, Stephen Porges, PhD

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I think that this is an important time to pause and relook at Polyvagal Theory before continuing with Beyond Behaviors.

Polyvagal Theory: Current Status, Clinical Applications, and Future Directions (Porges, S. 2025)

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


When I dove into Stephen Porges’s 2025 review of the Polyvagal Theory (PVT), I felt like I’d stepped into a crossroads where neurobiology, clinical practice, trauma science, and human experience collide. This paper isn’t merely a summary of three decades of work (all of which I have read); it’s a spirited defense of a paradigm that’s been both celebrated (by me) and contested (by others). What follows is an honest appraisal of what the article teaches us, where it sparks real insight, and where it may fall short, especially through the lens of evidence-based medicine and developmental neurophysiology. (I also went deeper into his 2022 paper in Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience for the biophysiology of the ANS)

At its heart, the article argues that the autonomic nervous system (ANS), through a set of hierarchically organized circuits centered on the vagus nerve, is not just a background player in stress and homeostasis, but a core regulator of social engagement, physiological flexibility, and behavior. Dr. Porges situates his theory as an alternative and expansion to classical views that treat sympathetic (fight/flight) and parasympathetic (rest/digest) branches as functional opposites. Instead, he proposes a three-component hierarchy: the ventral vagal complex (VVC) supporting social engagement, a mobilization circuit mediated by the sympathetic nervous system or fight or flight state, and a dorsal vagal circuit that facilitates shutdown or immobilization under extreme threat…..

Enjoy,
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 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 #101: Sandy Newmark, MD; Elisa Song, MD; Leslie Stone, MD – Autism Etiology?

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Today’s conversation takes us upstream—to the source—of one of the most pressing and emotionally charged topics in modern pediatrics: the rise in autism spectrum disorders. Autism rates have continued to climb in 2025, but what if much of what we call “the epidemic” isn’t simply genetics or better diagnosis, but a reflection of deeper biological, environmental, and developmental changes affecting the human organism before birth?

To explore this critical question, I’m joined by three extraordinary clinicians who have dedicated their lives to understanding the roots of children’s health and disease.

Dr. Sandy Newmark, Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at UCSF, has spent the past two decades at the intersection of conventional and integrative medicine—focusing specifically on children with autism and ADHD. His approach blends deep compassion with scientific rigor, examining how nutrition, toxins, inflammation, and the microbiome shape the developing brain.

Dr. Elisa Song, Stanford-, NYU-, and UCSF-trained integrative pediatrician and author of Healthy Kids, Happy Kids, is one of the leading global voices in pediatric functional medicine. As founder and Chief Medical Officer of Healthy Kids Happy Kids and Tiny Health, she’s pioneering microbiome-centered strategies to reverse chronic disease in children and reshape how we think about wellness from the inside out.

Dr. Leslie Stone, family physician, obstetrician, and co-founder of GrowBabyHealth.com, brings a lifetime of experience delivering and caring for over 5,000 babies. Her groundbreaking work in the science of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease—the DOHaD model—shows how what happens before and during pregnancy programs a child’s long-term health, resilience, and risk for conditions like autism.

Together, we’ll discuss the emerging evidence that the autism epidemic is not a mystery of genetics alone, but a story written in inflammation, metabolic disruption, environmental exposures, and the developmental stressors of modern life. We’ll explore how integrative and functional medicine are reframing prevention—not just treatment—and what it will take to truly turn the tide for the next generation.

This is a conversation about hope, science, and the possibility of rewriting the future—one mother, one child, and one generation at a time.

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 26 – Back To Sleep

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Back to Sleep and Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS)

Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is defined as “the sudden death of an infant under one year of age which remains unexplained after a thorough case investigation, including a complete autopsy, examination of the death scene, and review of the clinical history.”

During my time at the University of Virginia, I trained under neonatologist Dr. John Kattwinkel, a champion for newborn health and one of the leading figures in shaping national safe sleep policies. In the early 1990s, he chaired the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) Task Force on Infant Sleep Position and SIDS, which laid the foundation for the landmark Back to Sleep campaign.

At that time, SIDS claimed roughly 14 infants per 10,000 live births in 1988. Following the campaign’s launch in 1994, the rate plummeted by over 60%, reaching about 5 deaths per 10,000 live births by 2006. Despite this dramatic improvement, recent data suggest that the decline has plateaued…..

Dr. M

Dr. M’s SPA Newsletter Volume 15 Issue 25 – Tough Conversations

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Speaking Truth in Love: The Weight of Avoidance in Pediatric Metabolic Health

After completing the second round of our Asthma and Obesity Metabolic Pilot Program at Salisbury Pediatrics, I left the clinic reflecting deeply on what I witnessed. It crystallized a truth that is uncomfortable but undeniable: the greatest health threats to our children today are not infectious or accidental, they are metabolic. Diseases once reserved for adulthood: insulin resistance, fatty liver, hypertension, early vascular aging are now appearing in children who should be free to run, play, and thrive.

In modern society, conversations about weight and metabolic dysfunction have become relatively taboo. This is not to say that children of normal or low weight are immune; they, too, can be at risk. However, the excess-weight group carries the highest statistical burden. Too often, clinicians hesitate to speak truth to families for fear of offending, shaming, or overstepping. In doing so, we risk silence becoming complicity and allowing preventable disease to take root in the very children we are charged to protect.

Much of this epidemic is not born of individual failure but of systemic neglect. Government-funded, poor-quality school meals, cheap processed foods, and relentless marketing of sugar and refined carbohydrates have built an environment where metabolic injury is almost inevitable. When a child’s daily fuel is engineered for shelf life instead of cell life, the outcome is not accidental, it is predictable. Our pilot program lab results are a painful window into that truth…. and a literature review on eczema and anaphylaxis.

Enjoy Dr. M

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