Insight Scans

While traditional medicine relies primarily on symptoms and looks for obvious pathology on standard exams like blood work, MRIs, and EEGs, our clinic uses an incredible piece of technology called the INSiGHT Scans that accurately assesses the health and function of the Central Nervous System.

When we get into things like technology and neurology, many of us can get overwhelmed and confused quite quickly, but that’s the beauty and practicality of our INSiGHT Scanning Technology, it’s super simple and easy to understand.

This article will help you do just that!

What is the Central Nervous System?

The most critical system that determines whether you're healthy or not is the Central Nervous System, or just the 'nervous system' for short. It's made up of three divisions, Sensory, Autonomic, and Motor, that work together to coordinate EVERY internal body function with EVERY movement and with EVERY thought, emotion, behavior, and cognitive function. It's 'Air Traffic Control' for the entire human experience!

Dr. Bruce Lipton puts it this way:

"The function of the nervous system is to perceive the environment and coordinate the function of all other cells."

That means you've probably invested a lot of time, energy, and resources into getting your gut health, immune system, and motor tone (PT, OT, and other movement-based work) functioning the best it can, and your provider team may have overlooked the one thread that ties it all together: the nervous system.

When you see the word 'autonomic' in this context, it just means everything runs on autopilot, happening automatically without you having to think about it. You can see this system at work in the basics every body relies on: breathing, digesting, sleeping, and healing.

The autonomic nervous system controls and coordinates all of these key functions, and we can measure how well (or not) it's doing its job with our simple, safe, and reliable INSiGHT Scans!

Basically, the examination and assessment process across the 3 different healthcare approaches breaks down like this:

Traditional Medicine: chases symptoms and looks for obvious pathology, not function
Movement-Based Therapies (PT, OT, Speech): assess muscular or 'motor tone' function through various movement assessments, strength tests, etc.
Nervous System focused Chiropractic: assesses and determines the function of the nervous system

How Does It Work?

The nervous system is a two-way street.

One set of nerves is called 'sensory' nerves. They send information and report to the brain and brainstem precisely what's going on inside your body (internal environment) and outside your body (external environment).

The other set of nerves is what's termed 'motor control' nerves. They send signals out from the brain and spinal cord and tell the various parts of your body what to do, when to do it, and how to do it.

Because neurological communication within the autonomic nervous system has to do this vitally important job for 37.2 million cells in the human body, things need to happen fast, with absolutely clear lines of communication. We were designed to operate well past 5G long before it was ever invented, and none of us can afford to be running at dial-up speeds.

This is especially true early on: a child's brain and nervous system double in size during the first year of life and keep developing at that pace through age 3 to 7. But the same principle holds at any age. Whether you're 2 or 62, your nervous system is running this same high speed, high stakes operation every second of every day, which is why making sure it's working at full function is one of the most important exams any provider can perform.

So it's not even close: an INSiGHT Scan that shows you exactly how your brain and nervous system are functioning and communicating tells you far more than the standard numbers you walk away with from a routine check-up, like your height, weight, or blood pressure.

What Do the INSiGHT Scans Look For?

The INSiGHT Scans are about finding, tracking, and understanding whether subluxation and dysautonomia are present. If they are, we need to know two things:

How significant or severe is it (mild, moderate, severe, or intensive)?
Where within the neurospinal system is it primarily located (tracking, targeting)?

When too much tension and stress is stuck in one specific area of the neurospinal system, it helps explain why certain symptoms and conditions show up. Running the INSiGHT Scans as part of a wellness checkup, before any symptoms are present, also helps us predict and get ahead of potential trouble down the road.

Think of the neurospinal system like the fuse box in your home. Our nervous system is a lot more intricate and complex than that, but at its core, many of the sensory and motor nerves function the same way. In our office, we use the Neuro Fuse Chart to track and locate exactly where and what kind of trouble the subluxation and dysautonomia may be causing.

What is Subluxation & Dysautonomia Again?

Subluxation and dysautonomia both point to the same underlying problem: a nervous system that's stuck in stress mode and struggling to function the way it should. When that happens, three things tend to go wrong:

Stuck stress, tension, and spasm in the body
Lack of balance and coordination
Disorganization and dysfunction in how the nervous system communicates

Signs of a nervous system that's stressed out, tense, and stuck in fight-or-flight look different depending on who you are. In babies and young kids, that might show up as colic, frequent tantrums, sensory sensitivities, or delays in motor skills and speech. In teens and adults, it tends to look more like trouble sleeping, digestive issues, brain fog, anxiety, or a body that never fully relaxes. When this pattern sticks around long term, that's what we call dysautonomia, and it doesn't care how old you are.

What's always been fascinating about using INSiGHT Scans in our practice is that you see the same stuck patterns whether someone is a few months old or a few decades in. It looks different depending on age and stage of life, but the root cause is nearly the same: a stressed out, wound up, out-of-balance nervous system.

Sadly, both kids and adults get dismissed this way. Parents get told, "don't worry, they'll grow out of it." Adults get told, "that's just stress," or "that's just part of getting older." We now know that for most people, those symptoms are obvious signs of trouble brewing in the nervous system, something PX Docs calls The Perfect Storm.

Now that we understand why the INSiGHT Scans are so important and what they're looking for, let's dive into each of the three individual scans.

NeuroThermal Scans

This is the first scan we will run, and we can run this scan on everyone from a 1-day old infant to mom and dad in a matter of minutes.

The main thing the NeuroThermal Scans help us find is the regional effects of subluxation and dysautonomia. That means the Neuro Fuse Box Chart discussed and shown above is very helpful in interpreting this scan.

Since the core functions of the autonomic nervous system are to coordinate and regulate the function of the digestive system, immune system, hormones, and so forth… this scan helps us really understand what’s going on in our patients who are struggling with things such as colic, reflux, constipation, chronic ear infections, allergies, adrenal dysfunction, and sleep disorders.

The scan image below is a NeuroThermal Scan of a child struggling with virtually all those conditions of the neuro-gastric-immune complex and anxiety.

We will explain each scan finding in more detail, but the three (3) things we don’t like to see in these scans are:

Green, blue, and red bars on the top half NCM graph– indicates that stuck, tension, and sympathetic dominance component of the subluxation.
Tons of ‘back and forth’ or ‘tug of war’ type tracking and tracking on the bottom summary graph – this indicates dysautonomia and tension throughout the neurospinal system.
The DTG bars along the sides of the summary graph (bottom half) are inside the black lines and blue – this indicates the subluxation and condition are becoming more chronic.

NeuroSpinal EMG Scans

This particular scan is vital for helping our Perfect Storm patients best. It's one of the most important forms of testing we can do when conditions like Autism, Asperger's, Sensory Integration Disorders, ADHD, and Anxiety are being investigated.

That's because each of these neurodevelopmental and neurosensory challenges is rooted in stuck tension, altered tone, and exhaustion of the neuromotor system. Most people who've spent time in this world, whether that's parents of a spectrum or sensory kid or adults navigating their own diagnosis, are familiar with the word "tone," from working with PTs, OTs, and Speech Therapists, or from their own experience.

Neurological and tone challenges are a big deal, since motor function and development are tied directly to brain function and development. That means if the EMG scan detects patterns of stuck tension and imbalance, the brain is almost certainly stuck in sympathetic (fight or flight) tone and also struggling with an imbalance between its core functions of regulating emotions, behavior, learning, and memory.

There are three common findings with EMG scans, and we'll briefly describe them here, then show examples of each type below:

Raging Bull: this is someone whose nervous system is stuck on the "gas pedal" and entirely sympathetic dominant, leading to challenges with things like hyperactivity, impulsivity, anxiety, difficulty sleeping, and so on.
Drunken Bull: this scan finding most often correlates with someone struggling with coordination, focus, reading comprehension, communication, and so on.
Raging Drunken Bull: over time, it's common to end up with both scan patterns, along with the signs and symptoms of each.

One of the most exciting things about this work is that we can see changes in EMG scans fairly quickly, especially in kids, since a developing nervous system is still learning to grow and adapt at such a fast pace. But the same principle holds at any age: when subluxation gets into the neuromuscular system (as shown on EMG), it can wreak havoc and alter someone's function and development for years to come, whether that person is 5 or 55.

Diving a bit deeper into this scan, our INSiGHT EMG Scans use a 3-step scoring system that helps us really understand what's going on with that patient's neuromotor system, and therefore their overall brain and neurological function.

Here are the 3 scores you'll see on your EMG Scan, with a quick explanation of what they mean, and then we've provided some examples below:

Total Energy Score: this score tends to go way up in someone who's wound up and stuck in sympathetic mode, so a high score here is most often seen with our "Raging Bull" cases struggling with things like anxiety, behavior, and sleep issues.
Pattern Score: this reflects overall neurological tone, and a low score here indicates someone who's likely struggling with emotional dysregulation, focus and concentration challenges, postural exhaustion, and a weak core.
Symmetry Score: this score measures the balance between the right and left sides of the neurospinal system, which is crucial to overall balance in brain function and coordination.

Raging Bull (High Total Energy) EMG Scan:

The #1 thing that signifies this child’s scan as a ‘Raging Bull’ scan is the excessively high Total Energy number, shown in the bottom left corner (413.8). The “normal” score should be 100. This means her entire neuromotor system is fully locked into fight-or-flight tone and interfering with her neuromotor development (standing, walking, etc.), sleep, behavior, emotions, digestion, and more. Interestingly, this child is also a ‘Drunken Bull’ as shown by the other two low scores.

Drunken Bull (Low Pattern + Symmetry) EMG Scan:

For this child, her Pattern score being low (24.2) signifies she’s struggling with ‘Drunken Bull’ type neurological challenges – emotional regulation, sensory processing, motor coordination, digestion, and more.

Heart Rate Variability (HRV) Scans

These scans are great for getting a broader picture of a patient's neurological health: whether their autonomic nervous system is healthy, balanced, and fully charged, or stressed out, imbalanced, and worn out.

The key word here is "variability," because that's the number one marker of good neurological health: the ability to be adaptable and resilient. Adaptability is the key to good health, whether we're talking about gut and immune health or behavioral, emotional, and cognitive health.

All of us encounter bacteria, viruses, physical injuries, environmental toxins, and emotional challenges almost daily. So what we know about good health is that it's not determined by avoiding or hiding from these things, but by being able to adapt and overcome them.

A lot of our patients, or parents when it's their kids, come in wanting more flexibility and less dependence on strict, rigid routines to feel okay. The HRV Scan helps show why that's often not the case starting out, and why it tends to improve over time with neurologically-focused adjustments.

The vast majority of HRV scans in our office look like the sample scan below, for kids and adults alike. The white dot to the lower left indicates two very common findings that are the result of subluxation and dysautonomia:

Shifted left: meaning the patient is stuck predominantly in sympathetic fight-or-flight mode and/or has an exhausted parasympathetic nervous system and vagal tone issues.
Shifted low: indicating the patient has lower "reserve capacity" and adaptability, or "low energy."

As we can see with so many HRV scans, this patient’s anxiety builds throughout the short 3-minute exam, as their heart rate (red line) and galvanic skin response (blue line) build and increase over time goes on. Now imagine dealing with that stress build-up when trying to concentrate in school or fall asleep. Those are just two common examples of where subluxation and sympathetic dominance (dysautonomia) show up and cause daily struggles in the lives of so many kids and families!

With the high-stress, high-demand ‘perfect storm’ world that most families are stuck in today, they often feel ‘wound up and worn out’ at the same time!

Just think of it like a toddler who skipped their nap on a busy day… by the time evening rolls around, you’ll have a fully exhausted child, throwing tantrums, not listening, and having a tough time.

In the same way that an infant doesn’t really grow out of colic but instead often grows into sensory and spectrum challenges… the same is true for the stress and tension seen on HRVs throughout the family. We don’t grow out of tantrums and behavior issues; we grow into ADHD, anxiety, and even depression.

The HRV Scans are the most helpful in sorting out what’s going on with our patients looking for drug-free help with mental and emotional disorders, sleep, energy, and so forth. Without these scans, we’d be chasing symptoms like most other medical approaches.

The chart below shows the absolute life-transforming changes in those areas that our patients experience once under neurologically-focused chiropractic care. We can track these changes along with functional improvements on their HRV Scans!

Those changes are just truly incredible!

Millions of Americans take multiple medications to try and get some sleep, mood regulation, and decrease their pain + tension… and we can get all of that and more in just minutes with neurologically-focused chiropractic adjustments! Even better, no side effects!

Putting It All Together

We will take you through each scan individually, perhaps the most important aspect of the INSiGHT Scans is being able to put them all together and get a full picture of what’s going on with you, or your child’s, nervous system and overall health!

The INSiGHT Scans do exactly what they’re named for – give us insights and an understanding of the most crucial aspect of your health in ways no other health practitioner can.

The nervous system really is the control tower for your entire body, keeping everything and everyone on track at all times. And just like any control tower running non-stop, it can get overloaded and worn out.

But it doesn't have to stay that way. We'll put together a fully personalized Care Plan just for you. With each adjustment during your Restoration or Wellness Care Plan, you'll feel the stuck stress and tension leave your body, and the calm, relaxation, and healing capacity kick back in.

Take a few minutes to watch the video below as Dr. Matt walks through more of the science and visuals behind how this technology works.

We can't wait for you to Experience Miracles that only this kind of neurologically-focused chiropractic care can bring.