Would you be able to take us from the very beginning, you know, before we talk about your work? Take me back to your son's diagnosis.

Yeah, my son, he was my first.

Everything was going well until it wasn't.

And, you know, he met every milestone.

There weren't concerns.

There weren't red flags.

Both of my parents were schoolteachers for over 30 years.

What are some ways that for those that are just seeing, you know, a conventional pediatrician or developmental pediatrician now that parents can advocate to work alongside the functional medicine physician and make that bridge, actually have the parent be that bridge?

What makes this population more likely to respond negatively, whether that's you know, we could talk about gut issues, we could talk about mold, we could talk about heavy metals, environmental toxicities, but what have you seen being some of these underlying mechanisms that often get ignored or overlooked that really make a big difference for these kids?

One of the big things that I talk to families about and get a good history of is the child's first two to three years of their life.

And the reason why I'm looking for the first two to three years of their life is to see if there was anything that could have altered the immune system development and response during that time.

So if you're looking at a child who's growing within the first two to three years, they're developing their immune system.

So we actually get inoculated or when a baby gets born, they start really trying to develop an immune system.

And what we actually do get is a lot of what we would consider the bad guys early on, your proteobacteria, your fungi and things like that.

And that's actually super important because those things actually help train the immune system.

But what are what's the big picture here? Like, what are the other things that that we can start looking at and working on to make a much bigger change long term?