If You Care About Health, You Need to Care Deeply About Development

In my practice, I specialize in supporting people to recover from complex chronic health conditions. Things like autoimmunity, Lyme, mold illness, Chronic Fatigue, fibromyalgia, and so on.

I was just reading a paper about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which stated that the recovery rate from this condition is 5%. That was shocking and also affirming since the people that I work with regularly recover.

But what I realized several years ago is that the people I work with fall into roughly two categories: those who, when you help them systematically reduce load in their system, they recover. And those whose fatigue persists despite being healthier in many ways.

In diving deeper for answers, I realized that especially for those in the latter category, to look for blocks to recovery and potential solutions, we needed to go back to their early life.

Now, I’m not the first person to suggest that. We know that people who experience more Adverse Childhood Events (known as ACEs) are more likely to experience poor health as adults. But the question is, how can we understand why, beyond a simple association, and what can we do about it?

This led me to learn about early childhood neurological development and in particular, the role that retained primitive reflexes play as objective markers of nervous system immaturity. Primitive reflexes are reflexes that are present in utero and the first 6 months of life. Their role is to help us perform survival functions while our brain is maturing as young infants.

When primitive reflexes persist past infancy, it’s an objective sign that there was some sort of impediment to the brain maturing in a healthy way. It’s also an objective sign of frontal lobe dysfunction. The retained reflexes are both the result of an issue that prevented normal integration and the cause of issues in that they’re firing creates noise in the nervous system, which is counter-productive to clear-thinking, easy movement and good regulation.

The primitive reflexes come from nerves that shoot off of the brainstem, which makes sense as this is the bottom of the neural tree. So we can also see their persistence as related to brainstem dysfunction and now we get closer to looking at issues directly related to why people might seek my help in the first place. Fatigue, dysautonomias like POTS and orthostatic hypertension, widespread body pain, sleep issues, brain fog, temperature dysregulation, immune dysregulation, etc.

As I’ve continued with this work, I couldn’t help but notice the connection between my adult patients with complex chronic health challenges and the high incidence of their children being diagnosed with developmental challenges, like autism, ADHD, or dyslexia. All of these are also directly related to maturational delays and retained primitive reflexes.

Zooming out, our peak health is directly related to the thoroughness and completeness of our development. So even if you don’t have a chronic illness but just want to be well, this is equally as important for you.

In that light, I was very excited to see that Michael Levin, the extraordinary and prolific biologist out of Tufts University, has already published a study in 2026 (I mean, of course, it’s already the 6th of January!!) and that study demonstrates something that I had already believed to be true. (https://doi.org/10.1111/acel.70305)

Most discussion in, Industrial Medicine, Functional Medicine and BioHacking approaches focuses at the cellular and sub-cellular level to understand aging and other health issues. The most common theories revolve around accumulated damage or genetic trade-offs, where we decrease the growth required to repair in order to prevent the growth associated with cancer, something like that.

But what Levin’s paper found was that dysregulation of gene expression followed an orderly pattern where more recently evolved and more recently developed genes became dysregulated and cells and tissues reverted back to more primitive, simpler states, tracing their developmental journey back towards their embryological roots.

One of the challenges I have is to try get people to care about early development and primitive reflexes, beyond just those who have children with developmental challenges or maybe even their own “neurodiverse” diagnoses and characteristics.

But we need to understand that early development is fundamental to adult health and healthy aging. Complex systems are sensitive to initial starting conditions.

So before looking at labs with hundreds of markers and trying to micromanage them with medications or supplements, take a step back: how well has your neurological development proceeded? what was your early life like? what can you do now to shore up weaknesses and address early sticking points to better unfold into the present?