The Cranial Doc | A Chiropractic & Cranial Mastery Show for Pediatric, Family, and Neurologically-based Chiropractors

In past episodes I showed you how we run our Google Ads and Meta analysis through Claude. It worked. It was also a lot of clicking. At first I spent one to two hours a week on it. Then we used n8n to pull the reports automatically. Then Claude Code started reading the folder on its own. But I was still pressing every button in Google Ads myself. Building those workflows took me weeks to months. I...

A patient came in with two complaints. Headache. Jaw pressure. She had a concussive injury a while back, and that was the whole list she gave me. I ran a full evaluation, including our FOCUS protocol with Dr. Aimee Spoelstra even though I don't usually run that complete neuro workup on adults. I expected massive deficits given her mechanism and post-concussive history. Outside of some visual track...

A chiropractor messaged me after running a case through the free cranial calculator. Her cranial vault asymmetry index was improving. Her cephalic index would not move. That one message is this whole episode. Most of us learned cranial measurement through a plagiocephaly lens. Asymmetry in, asymmetry out. That lens will carry you through a lot of cases and then quietly fail you on the brachycephal...

Dr. Anthony was listening to Huberman Lab and heard a mention of research on the neurophysiology of choking under pressure. Not the gag reflex kind, the high stakes performance kind. He couldn't stop thinking about how directly it maps onto every patient sitting in your office stuck in chronic sympathetic stress. The stress response runs on two systems, not one. There's the salience network, the f...

A friend of Dr. Anthony's just got asked to speak at his state dental hygienist association's conference. In the past they'd booked a chiropractor to talk ergonomics and stretches. This time the request was different: talk to us about the nervous system. Nobody had to convince them. They got there on their own. This episode is Dr. Anthony building the talk he'd give if he were the one walking into...

Your ADHD patient can get through the test with his eyes open. Close his eyes, same test, and the whole thing falls apart. That's not two different kids. That's one kid whose Ferrari has been plowing a field all day. This episode breaks down an analogy Dr. Anthony's been using in office for months, the Ferrari and the tractor. The nervous system has two tools: the tractor for low level, automatic...

A four-month-old walks into your office with a torticollis diagnosis already in hand from the pediatrician. Three months of chin stretches. No change in the photos. And you're standing there looking at the face in front of you wondering how the rest of it got missed. This episode names that pattern: JET syndrome . Jaw, eye, torticollis. Not three separate problems, one cranial and spinal subluxati...

Your patient's insomnia isn't a melatonin problem. It's a rumination problem, and the fix I hand out more than anything else isn't a supplement or a weighted blanket. It's stand-up comedy. In this one, I break down: Why rumination, not noise or light, is what's actually keeping patients awake The vagus nerve mechanism behind why a real laugh works better than meditation Why true crime, dramas, and...

Most cranial techniques pick one level of force and call it gospel. That's why one doc feels like a feather and the next feels like they're trying to crack a walnut, and why patients keep telling us how inconsistent this work looks from provider to provider. In this episode, Dr. Anthony breaks down the four distinct levels of force used in craniopathy, from lightest to heaviest: Level 1: CSF flow...

The eustachian tube can't open itself. It's a passive structure that sits closed by default, and the only thing that opens it is a muscle bolted directly onto the bone you adjust every day. This episode breaks down the mechanism after Dr. Anthony sat through a live dissection from Anatomy Trains on head and neck anatomy, and one section stopped him cold: the tensor veli palatini, the eustachian tu...

I ended up on my bathroom floor on Father's Day. Cold sweat, room spinning, dry heaving, genuinely wondering if I was dying. Turns out it wasn't a tumor. It was my vagus nerve doing exactly what it's built to do. Heavy RDLs the day before had already loaded my pelvic floor. Then I chugged a cold smoothie too fast on my way out the door, rushed a hard push on the toilet, and ended up in the fetal p...

Doing the basics extraordinarily well beats chasing advanced technique. Every time. Dr. Anthony breaks down the real reason most chiropractors stall out with cranial work, and it's not what you think. It's not the technique. Trained associates picked up correction work faster than he did, and he still teaches it. The real gap is palpatory confidence: knowing what you're feeling is real before you...

Your patient feels incredible after the adjustment. Two days later they're tight again, back on your table three times a week to maintain it. That's not your technique failing. That's a loop you only interrupted at one point. This episode breaks down the actual neurology connecting the jaw and the pelvic floor, and why neither one resolves when you treat it in isolation. What we get into: The cate...

You drove home from that seminar with a full heart and an empty notebook. This episode is about why that keeps happening. We get into: The three C's of leadership: charisma, competence, and content. Most people only have one. Why some speakers sound incredible, then you realize two days later you learned nothing The difference between someone you quote for a week and someone who actually changes h...

You built the website. You earned the reviews. You did the local SEO the right way for a decade, and it worked. But your research-heavy parents and complex-case adults aren't starting on Google anymore. They're opening ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude and asking, in plain language, "who's the best nervous system chiro near me?" They get a name back. The only question is whether it's yours. This epi...

Everybody laughs about brain freeze. Your kids laugh about it. Your patients laugh about it. Hell, half the specialists your migraine patients have already seen have probably had one. What nobody realizes is that the same mechanism behind a 30-second brain freeze may be sitting underneath years of headaches, sinus pressure, TMJ dysfunction, clenching, and upper cervical tension. In this episode, D...

If you're jumping straight to the cranium without clearing pelvic instability first, there's a good chance you're chasing compensation instead of solving the pattern. This episode breaks down the progression Dr. Anthony sees over and over: The infant with sphenoid restriction and feeding issues. The kid who never sleeps deeply and mouth breathes through half of elementary school. The teenager grin...

The pediatrician should be referring to you. Not the ENT. Not the myofunctional therapist. You. That's not a fantasy. It's what happens when chiropractors own this work the way it deserves to be owned. This episode is Dr. Anthony laying out exactly what he built, why he built it, and who it's for. No mechanism deep-dives. No practice management rabbit holes. Just the course (Foundations of Cranial...

Ten years in practice. 121 chiropractors within 10 miles. Half that radius is the Atlantic Ocean. And honestly, saying no is one of the biggest reasons the practice finally got easier. This episode breaks down the framework we use to decide who belongs in our office and who we'd rather send somewhere else. We stopped pretending we had to be the right fit for everybody. What we get into: • Why pati...

This one's a little different. For the last few weeks I've been prepping my 25-minute ICPA talk, closing out Friday night, cranial work and mastery. Last week I recorded myself running through it so I could listen back in the car. Made a ton of changes after. Figured, might as well release it to my people. If you were at the talk, the live version is way better. This is the rough cut. The sphenoid...

Most of what you're reading in chiropractic circles right now was written by a computer. And your readers already know it. The second they clock the pattern, they're gone. Doesn't matter how good the idea was. This week I'm walking you through my actual AI Red Flags Document, the checklist I upload to every project folder before a single word gets written. Because even when your AI knows your bran...

Here's the hard truth: most chiropractors hit a ceiling and the industry tells them to go wider: add laser, add soft wave, add red light, do more. Dr. Anthony Pellegrino hit that same ceiling and told the industry to go to hell. Instead, he went deeper. Cranial chiropractic. One niche. One mile deep. And built a seven-figure practice doing it. But it wasn't always that clean. There was a night, ro...

Real talk.. you keep saying you'll take the trip  when things calm down. But here's the hard truth: things don't calm down. You decide they're calm enough, and then you go. Or you don't. And one day you're sitting in regret that no amount of practice revenue can fix. This episode was recorded from a farm in Tuscany. And it's not about Italy. It's about a trip Dr. Anthony almost didn't take, the ex...

If your practice feels stuck, you're not adding patients fast enough. You're leaking them too fast. Most docs are obsessed with new patients. Fair. But if you don't know your churn rate, you're flying blind in a storm and calling it a plan. This episode tears apart the math that separates practices that actually grow from ones that just feel like they're growing. What we cover: Why net growth ≠ ne...

You're not a CEO. You're a data janitor. Let's fix that. If your Monday starts with you opening 14 tabs, chasing your team for numbers, and praying the meeting doesn't expose how unprepared you are - this episode is an intervention. Dr. Anthony breaks down the exact automation stack he built to turn his Monday morning scramble into a 15-minute decision session. No code. No agency. No excuses. What...