Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello everybody. Dr. Ben Edwards, another episode of youf're the Cure. Excited to have a couple of guests with us. We're kind of continuing the conversation we had had Dr. Steve Ingersoll on last week and we've got him back this week but with an additional guest, Cassidy Luna.
Cassidy, have you been on the show before?
[00:00:18] Speaker B: Last year about this time with Dr. Steve actually. So. But that's my first time in the five and a half years at Veritas.
[00:00:24] Speaker C: Yeah.
[00:00:24] Speaker A: So Cassidy came to Veritas five and a half years ago. She's a physician assistant. She's been a wonderful addition to Veritas Medical.
She focuses on our on the children. She's pediatric practitioner.
And then as we talked about last year on the show when we got introduced to Iconics by one of our patients. Thank you, Sarah.
Cassidy just lit up and got really interested in this and I'll let her share the story.
But today we're going to talk about a new model of education and right here in Lubbock, Texas, as well as can be replicated elsewhere too. And so Dr. Steve will jump in and kind of discuss some of this, but trying to build a new, new systems, new models, new ways of doing things because the old ways aren't working just like in the medical field, like I talk about all the time. We've had about 110 years of this conventional pharmaceutical treat, a symptom based approach ignoring root caus causes and it's just not working.
This one size fits all approach to medicine as opposed to individualized medicine. It just doesn't work. The outcomes are poor. And it's the same thing in the education system. We have poor outcomes. We'll get into that more later. But Cassidy, I'd like you to share first just a little bit of your heart and some of your as much of your story as you'd like and what you've seen since last year when we had the conversation as you've been working with some kids with the Iconx Neurodevelopmental program.
Just share some of what you've seen and some of the testimony.
[00:02:06] Speaker B: Thank you. Thank you for having me on.
So I really have been in love with atypical neurodevelopmental kiddos since I can remember. I remember going to the state school whenever I was younger and I loved just sitting there and talking with the individuals, the residents there.
I just had a heart for it and so really didn't recognize that that was my calling and trajectory for the rest of my life. But in after nursing school I found myself in the NICU and so really seeing how kids can be affected at that, that age and what kind of hits that they can have early on and then quickly into getting to work with a Dr. Karen Rogers, who's a late developmental pediatrician here in town. And we saw on the conventional side we worked with kids with atypical neurodevelopmental issues. So some of histories into the, their, their rough start in the NICU and then some not so adhd, some autism that you can't really see at birth.
So we, I worked there but really knew that there was a missing piece. And I think I've shared this before whenever I was on before, but knew that pharmaceuticals was not the answer. We weren't getting results. We were getting dazed out kids and really drowning out their personalities. And so that really broke my heart.
I was blessed to get to come on to Veritas and I had a patient load kind of follow me from the clinic at, with Dr. Karen Rogers and really tried to find some nutraceuticals and better ways to help these kids. And there are. We were getting good results with removing environmental toxins and helping build up their nutrient nutritional base and really getting sunlight and talking about just all the things that you talk about here on the podcast, really just getting basics for these kids. But we really weren't getting complete elimination of these symptoms I would say so when until I met Dr. Steve and I was, I was watching, I was watching Olivia Sears girl just flourish under his care and really just wanted to know why and what was going on. And so Dr. Steve and I began talking, really talking about.
It started off talking about my kiddos but then it quickly turned into let's figure out how to help all of these kids that I'm seeing. So then resilient beginning was born in doing some neurovisual therapy with these kids and really finding and hitting the filling the need there. Working in conjunction with Dr. Steve, who's been amazing through this entire process.
I so I it's right at almost about a year now that I started seeing clients and it's been amazing really learning the developmental hierarchy. Something that I really kind of blew off whenever I was doing all of the medical training previously learning and going back to the basics and learning that developmental hierarchy and where are the holes?
Where are the holes in these kids and how can we help fill those holes and build them up? And so one of my favorite stories is I had a kid in clinic and was very collapsed down peripherally and Dr. Steve can get it. And he has shared a little bit of the science behind it on some previous podcasts, so I'm not going to go into too much detail there, but was severely collapsed down. Really didn't even know where he was at in time and space. And so after about two months of working with him and really expanding his visual mind, we.
His mom came to me and said, hey, he's been really affectionate lately.
And I was able to look at her and say, he knows you exist.
And so that was kind of the first time.
And then just the realization on her face like, yes, he does know I exist now. I've always been this mom and kind of this figure in his life that was kind of a leader, but didn't really know or experience that bond. And so to have. And to see that, I mean, it was. It was amazing. And so I've had several stories like that over this last year. It's really been phenomenal to see these lives changed and to see these kids erased. So see these, these lies and all these other diagnostic labels that they've been given by the world, really just see them diminish and see these kids flourish into who God created them to be.
That's been.
That's been something else to watch. So it's been truly amazing.
We. And knowing too, that every kid.
It doesn't flourish in the public school system. And. And now, I mean, I think this is a great time to do this podcast with so many people questioning what.
Questioning, just questioning everything.
And now questioning what is my child being taught at school.
And so really, I. I'm.
Dr. Steve's going to go into a lot of detail on why these kids don't flourish in that system. And even today we were really talking about.
So talking about different types of atypical, neurodevelopmental stuff going on. I called Steve because I had realized in some of my patients that I was seeing here in clinic, they were having some.
The atypical or the involuntary movements of the head, so muscular tics was happening when they were watching screens. And so I wanted to. And he's going to go into the science about all of that. I'd love him to share that. But really having it make sense of why the blue light is affecting them in that moment and then eliminating that and really expanding their peripheral vision is really the treatment for that. So I'd love for Dr. Steve or.
[00:08:46] Speaker C: Dr. Ben, whoever would like to jump along those lines.
You're talking about excessive physicality as, let's say, kind of a dramatic example of that would be Tourette's with the tics, the physical tics and the verbal tics that go along with that.
And we have to realize that, that the neurotransmitter acetylcholine is the neurotransmitter of muscular movement, of movement. And blue light resonates with the molecular structure of acetylcholine. So it enhances the effectiveness of effectivity of acetylcholine. And so we get this extra little bump of muscular stimulus.
And so these kids are hyperactive and sometimes wait, wait, wait and explode. So that's kind of the, you know, there's a impulse to do a certain repetitive tick and it builds up and then fires. And that's the acetylcholine. And you know, when we're, when we're involved in the construction of imagery in our minds.
So the kids that are, that are more susceptible to that blue light are the kids that are not particularly visually dominant in their cognition.
That is, there's really two ways we think we speak to ourselves and we create imagery.
Well, language is really not quite, is not efficient. It's its sequential word, word, word, word, word, meaning.
Whereas imagery contains all of the meaning instantaneously.
And we use language to describe imagery. But imagery is a tough, is a tall developmental task. It's kind of like the main developmental task.
Those among us who see with the greatest accuracy through time and space with their minds win at whatever endeavor we're talking about.
And the increasingly arcane signals that trigger those imagery, little marks on a page. The stock picker looks at the New York Times and sees stock and makes the proper prediction. You know, so it's the ability to construct imagery from increasingly abstract or arcane signals that differentiate success and failure.
And human beings are endowed with this fantastic capacity to construct imagery, which is the vehicle of prediction.
And that prediction forms the basis of choice.
I see this possible outcome or that one, I choose this one or that one.
Well now that means we're culpable of choice.
So this visual capacity brings into being culpability.
So prior to the apple being bitten, there was no culpability because there was no knowledge of good and evil after the apple. Oh, we have this capacity, this godlike capacity to see and choose.
And okay, that's a double edged sword, isn't it? We're responsible.
And so in a sense we're, we're training these kids up to get into the culpability game.
And maybe we're not doing them a favor, right?
But anyway, that's the Iconics model is all about the pinnacle of neurologic sophistication, which is this ability to see with one's mind in response to letters on a page, you know, words on a page, or mathematics, and understanding the meaning of the. Of the equation.
But, you know, I wanted to talk a little bit about the educational system as a whole.
We have kind of a one size fits all system, and it's not working very well. You know, we're seeing some bad outcomes. We're kind of middle of the pack. In the international test scores of seventh graders, we typically finish out of 70 countries that participate. We're 35 to 50 in reading, math and science. We just don't do well.
And we know we're not doing well.
Our kids are falling behind in standard testing, but worse than that, they're not very happy and they're not doing all that well socially. And there's very increasing number of neurodevelopmental labels that, you know, the autism, obviously a disaster, attention deficit, learning disabilities, all these labels have been increasing in percentage of total population over the years.
And we've known this for years.
And it's getting worse because I think we have a.
We're trying to wedge kids into a system where what we really ought to be doing is taking a look at the characteristics, developmental characteristics of each child and building the educational program around him.
And that's really what happens in homeschool. And homeschoolers outperform public school all the time.
So.
But, you know, in today's society, both parents have to work almost always, and it's a big commitment to homeschool, but we know that works better.
So how can we support that homeschool or quasi homeschool situation? And that's really what we've done. And what are doing in Iconics? We're decentralizing education.
We're building customized educational programs around each student by starting with a good educational diagnosis, meaning what does this child need developmentally? And that includes nutritional toxicity, elimination, medical, psychological, and physical development. So we need all of those disciplines involved. And indeed, we built a multidisciplinary network of providers who look at each kid that's having trouble and generalized. Generally, every child gets assessed. And we use a child study team in our schools and in our home school pods and in our clinics to identify what kids need and then program around those needs.
So we've built a structure that is multifaceted. We have the clinical operation that's both virtual and brick and mortar.
We have a specialty school for those kids. That are highly involved in autistic behaviors, severe attention deficits, down syndrome, and other genetic problems.
So those kids can't exist in a general classroom very effectively. They need a higher level of sort of clinical service on their development, not so much the data.
And then we have the regular brick and mortar school, which we believe should be in churches.
We think every church in the land ought to have its own school. And that would be the general educational facility that supports homeschoolers.
So homeschool people can come in a day, a week or two days a week, whatever they like, and homeschool at home. So the articulation between the church school, the clinic school, and homeschool needs to be available, flexible, and according to the family's need. Children can move between these systems to get what they need.
And moms are not alone out there. They get clinical support, diagnostic support, curricular support, pedagogical support, and they can.
We have a mom's program that builds a community of moms online with some of our clinicians and instructors assisting.
So we have a minimal intervention, more intervention, diagnostic services, materials and support, and how to. How to teach, games to play, curricular information and access to brick and mortar, both clinic and general school, church school, and specialty school. So out of that menu of structural options comes a customized educational program for each family and each child. And that's. That's really what we're doing because our goal is to decentralize education and customize education, very much what you're doing in the. In the medical field. We're. We're looking to apply scientifically and developmentally sound principles and a delivery system that respects that, as opposed to trying to wedge kids into grades by chronological age, for example.
And so that's really what we're doing at Fresh Fire Christian Academy and Resilient beginning in Lubbock are working hand in hand, and we're exploring the start of a specialty school with resilience and cassidy to handle the kids that are in special need.
They are developmentally behind to the point they have difficulty existing well in a general classroom. Therefore, let's build a school that matches their need and they can mature out of that school into the general classroom.
And likewise, homeschool kids can.
You know, one of the things about homeschool is the socialization. You know, you want to have a connection to a group of other kids too. And mom wants a day off here once in a while too, so that works pretty well.
So that's kind of what we're. What we're doing in Lubbock and other places, and we're real excited about that. And there's a.
A whole group of people that are involved and lots of moms swirling around the idea and the nexus of the Fresh Fire Academy as a kind of a home base and resilient beginnings as well.
[00:20:35] Speaker A: Cassidy, could you speak a little bit about Freshfire Christian Academy here in Lubbock, as you've been working closely with them and even your kids participating, but kind of just give the audience who doesn't. Never have. Never heard of them, maybe the local audience in particular that might be interested. What. What's that school look like? What have you seen? How have you been working with them and kind of just share a little more about that academy?
[00:21:02] Speaker B: Yeah, I'd love to. So, yeah, two of my kiddos were there last year, and I had the privilege to get to be there all day on Mondays, and so I could pull the kiddos that really needed help. So I would be doing a lot of the things that I do in clinic. So we work on neuro visual exercises and get to see their progress as the year went on. But I do, and whenever somebody is inquiring about it, because I've had a lot of patients inquire about Fresh Fire here at Veritas. And so I explained to them that it's gonna look a lot different whenever you walk in.
They're gonna be playing. They get.
I think it's something like three hours of outside time a day, which is phenomenal, which. And as you know, Veritas patients, they're really excited about that. And so lots of outside time, lots of play time, the learning is gonna look a little bit different. It's gonna look like play, which is exactly what we want them to be doing. The kids learn best whenever they're playing.
And so it looks like chaos, a little bit of organized chaos, but the kids are having fun. And it's been fun to see even the kids that come and they shadow for days or random days here and there, leaving with smiles on their face. And, mom, I had so much fun.
And so it's not something typical that you see from regular education that a kid runs out saying, I had so much fun today.
So that has been. That's been. It's been a whole lot of fun to see the kids and get to know the kids and then see the success stories, too.
Some of the kids came in unable to, like Dr. Steve said, unable to function in the classroom setting.
And so we've had ups and downs. It's been a roller coaster. But it's been fun to see and put together the pieces, especially on the medical side. I find that fun. I find that interesting.
Watching the kids behaviors and why they're doing what they're doing and then how to help support them in that.
That has been, it's been a whole lot of fun for me to see.
[00:23:27] Speaker A: Hey everyone, quick break from the show. I've got something really special to share with you.
[00:23:31] Speaker B: You.
[00:23:31] Speaker A: I'm so excited to introduce you to our self paced 9 module online video education program called you're the cure. We've been working on this for many months, prayerfully and passionately building this out at Veritas for you. This isn't just some wellness program online. It's really a movement of truth and transformation and hope. And I truly believe it has the power to change your life. It's really designed to help you uncover the root causes of what you're facing and walk in true healing. I'll be guiding you along with other members of the Veritas team as we return to God's original design for your health. Through some simple but powerful tools focused on nutrition, hydration, movement and peace, you'll gain clarity and confidence and lasting transformation. The journey is yours to take guys, because you know, the truth is, you are the cure. I'm so excited for you to experience this. So head over to veritaswellnessmember.com to learn more. It's coming soon.
[00:24:33] Speaker C: You know, if I may, we've started many schools, more than a dozen, and they all start the same way.
The early adopters are the parents of kids that are really troubled. I mean, they're really looking for some alternative because the child is way behind.
In each one of these schools, they followed the same trajectory.
They were very low performing.
In the charter school arena where there's state testing, they would be dead last in the first year.
And by the third year, every single one of them rose to the top of their region in test scores and cumulatively top in the state with our model. And when you think about it, if you look at the period of time of greatest increase in synaptic density in the brain, two to five years old, and at six years old, it starts declining.
So when kids go to school, the synaptic density actually declines because we start narrowing their focus so much into these sequential systems. That's not the right move.
The greatest pedagogy, the greatest learning behavior of all time is play.
So if we had any sense about us, we would do everything we can to extend that great learning. Prescription into school.
And that's exactly what we've done.
We have, we use a general category, general description called vamma. And it means visualize, associate, manipulate, meaning a whole bunch of different rules to match each child's level of sophistication and then apply, apply in a game.
So the information of the lesson is presented in icons that are little memory visual triggers. Like the second amendment is a bear flexing his bicep and his shirts ripping apart the right to bear arms. This is right arm. The right to bear arms, okay? It's the second amendment.
So you remember the bear, you remember the picture.
And it's anchored in some spots, clock dial spots, and they're color coded. And so we can play all kinds of games where the child is challenged to think of first of all, what does it mean?
And then give the sign gesture, American sign language gesture for the keyword that's associated with it.
So now we've got all these different signals going on. And in the end, the child, once he gets the right answer with all this mental manipulation, then he's got a contest.
Might be toss a ping pong ball into the properly colored cup or balance a marble in a spoon while he, you know, runs a little obstacle course and deposits it in the right color that accrues to the second amendment, something like that. So there's this complex thinking. And of course, the child's engaged not because of the thinking and the learning, because he wants to play the game.
And of course, that's the fun part.
And so if you talk to any teacher, what's their biggest problems? Student engagement and lesson planning. Well, if you drive the curricular data through the vehicle of games employing the most powerful thinking apparatus that we have, photographic memory, then you've got a prescription for success.
And the kids are enjoying themselves. So I knew when we were starting this school fresh fire that we were on the right track. Of course, because I got the report back that the kids were complaining they wanted to go to school on Saturday.
Okay, okay, we're doing this, right?
And kids love it. I'll tell you a story. One time in one of our schools, we had some carpet layers where they're putting in new carpet.
And one of my staff overheard them saying to one another, is this place some kind of a cult?
The kids are all happy.
Hey, isn't this school? Aren't the kids supposed to be unhappy here?
And so it's really important, I think, to.
Well, there's no doubt about it, it is important to play and have fun, because learning is Much better because engagement's better and it's just better for relationships, better for growth, better for everything really.
And, and so it's just a better model.
[00:29:53] Speaker A: Dr. Steve, I'd like you to contrast the model you just laid out that learning style with what the vast majority of American children are in. And I don't, you know, don't want to.
I know there's lots of great people just like in medicine, lots of great people.
Nurses, doctors, medical assistants and aides. And the whole system is full of great people. It's a system problem and there's a multifactorial in all these is we're eating toxic nutrient depleted food, we're under all this stress and blue lights and all the things. So it's a multifactorial but going all the way back into. And we were talking before we hit record and I think it'd be interesting to touch on some of that historical perspective because I talk about it all the time on the medical side when the Flexner report came in and marginalized all the more natural healing modalities that have been around for ages and standardized, quote unquote, standardize this thing to allopathic pharmaceutical based only and look at those outcomes now. So maybe give some of that historical and contrast the models that is employed today.
[00:31:02] Speaker C: Ironically, it was the same time period at that same time in right around 1913. 1913 in my opinion was the worst year in US history.
Woodrow Wilson was incapacitated, his wife was kind of acting president. No one knew that. But he was bedridden and out of commission when this all happened.
They invented the Fed.
The Federal Reserve act was put in place, they instituted the income tax.
They changed the 17th amendment to change how senators were.
Senators previously had been appointed by state governments and their job was to was to represent the states.
They changed it to a popular vote instead of state government figuring out how to choose their senators, leaving the states unrepresented at federal level.
So senators are elected just the same way that the House of Representatives are elected.
And so at that same time, I can't remember the guy's name but he invented the term public relations and he was a relative of Charles Darwin.
And they had figured out that they could control or convince the masses of certain things with media.
And so that's why they went to the general elections of and passing the 17th amendment to make senators a popular vote instead of a state's vote. And that was a catastrophe for the states. The states are then the federal government is supposed to be a service provider to the states and the people, but mostly the states to carry out a few functions that are very limited by the 10th amendment.
And the 9th amendment says anything not mentioned does not belong to the feds.
So if you look at the cabinets, there's not a word in the Constitution about housing, education, health and human services.
There's not a word they're actually, that's kind of unconstitutional according to the ninth Amendment.
So anyway, chipped away with judicial rulings over the years.
But anyway, that all happened.
The Flexner Report modified how health care was delivered.
Dewey of the Dewey Decimal System became the kind of leader of bringing the Prussian model of education to the United States. And it was really done by the, you know, Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan. Those, those were the guys that were kind of running this show on both the Flexner Report that changed medicine and in education.
They brought this Prussian model to essentially educate workers, factory workers.
That's why we had the bell, you know, change classes and so forth.
Prior to that, education was pretty much a home school or small school, multi age, community based enterprise.
But it became this behemoth. And ever, if you just kind of step back and think about it, the thing that's most important to all of us that are parents is the future of our children.
And what determines that? Their mind. Of course, the most precious thing that we, that we are responsible for is the mental development, intellectual and spiritual development of our children.
We delegate that to the government.
That's crazy from a, you know, step back from convention point of view.
And I we need to help families help themselves.
And we know it's doable. I mean people that do homeschool do better.
So can people homeschool? Well, most think, well maybe that's too much for me to bite off. We've got to help them.
That's really what we're doing.
And there are big forces as we're now sort of coming aware that we've been, you know, kind of living for a hundred years here with sort of blinders.
There are forces.
This is a spiritual battle really, as is becoming increasingly clear. If it weren't the evil things that are going on in the world can't be.
I don't know anybody that would do those things without the influence of the, of the enemy of the devil.
I mean, do you know anybody that's so evil to do the things that we read about in the news?
I don't know anybody like that. So it's got to be these people get twisted up somehow.
And it's a spiritual battle really.
And we need to hold the developing minds of our kids a little bit closer than.
It's a little dangerous out there, it seems to me. And we need to support.
We need to support moms and dads and homes and families and churches.
There's natural synergy there. Every church in the land should have a school that bleeds into homeschool, back and forth and supports. And then we've learned so much about the development of the mind, the brain and the mind. I want to make a distinction there between. The brain is a piece of equipment.
Our mind is.
Well, not quite sure what that is, but it's not physical and it's the target and it's the development of that mind, which needs body work and needs intellectual work.
But the mind itself, hard to pinpoint what that is exactly, but it does appear to be visual in its operation.
When I think of something, it appears in imagery.
If I ask you A language question, Dr. Ben, do you have a bicycle? I think we talked about this before.
Yes. You see the bicycle and you see yourself doing things with the bicycle in the past, and you might choose to do something else with the bicycle tomorrow. And that's how you plan.
So these are visual events.
Where exactly are they? I don't know.
I don't know. In space or time? They seem to be outside of space and time and outside of my brain. I can measure the metabolic activity in the brain when I'm thinking certain ways and certain things, but that doesn't really define. That's like me saying, you know, of course you hear this all the time. Well, we've studied and studied and we see that the.
In dyslexic readers, excessive neurometabolic activity. In Broca's area of language, therefore, there's the problem. Broca's area, no, that would be like saying, I've studied runners and I see this, I measure this, and I observe this physiologic sign, moisture on the skin.
That would, like me come to the conclusion that sweating causes running.
Now, something else causes running, which causes sweating.
And of course, in dyslexia, that guy is phonologically decoding words. That's why Broca's area is active, whereas the good readers are not doing that. That's why their Broca's area is not active. So the real question is strategy.
And why did that strategy emerge? Those are the kinds of cognitive educational diagnoses that need to be made. So we know what to do with the kids, we know what to teach.
So the kids that are struggling are using a different thinking strategy than the kids that are succeeding.
It's not that they're just not good at that task. They're not doing the same thing.
And it's important to make that distinction. And that's where the diagnosticians come in. So we've got these educational diagnosticians, we get the medical and biologic underpinning diagnoses, we've got the physical and movement diagnostics, cranial sacral, chiropractic, psychologic, and then of course, educational specialists. All of these services need to be supporting families so that they can take control of their own kids education and not be beholden to kind of a mysterious behemoth that no one really understands. And then when, like when Covid hit and everybody got a peek at what was going on in school, it was like, what?
These are the lessons the kids are getting.
This is crazy.
And of course kids aren't going to engage in a, you know, online curriculum doesn't work.
Kids won't stay engaged in that.
They meet, they need play, physical play. So we need to design educational systems. We can deliver content and training and information virtually to the adults and we can even observe kids and make good diagnosis virtually.
But the actual educational experience needs to be physical.
They need to do something with the information. They need to demonstrate physically, demonstrate the fruit of their thought.
And then we need to tighter the complexity of thinking with the child's growth, always keeping them into more and more complex thinking skills.
And it gets expressed in a fun and doable game.
And so kids that are real sophisticated have much more mental load. But the game itself is the same as the kid that's got a little load. So now we've got a handicap situation like I can play golf with good golfers because there's a handicap situation. And that's kind of what we're doing in the VAMA protocol that that manipulation is. And that's really the art of instruction that we teach homeschool moms and instructors in the brick and mortar schools, clinic, special clinic school and general school is to know when and how to tighter the complexity of load, cognitive load, that, that each child what's their rule, so to speak. And after their rule, they're tossing the ping pong ball at the cup or whatever the game is.
And so is the little kid that's got a rule that's that complex. Run over there and crush the cup with your foot as opposed to, you know, think of that multiply by 12 and divide it by seven, you know, and then arrive at a different cup, something like that.
And, and you have to say the key word in Portuguese.
So, you know, we could tighter the complexity to match.
You know, Dr. Ben would. So we've got a first grader beating Dr. Ben. And what fun is that? You know, that would be great if we had a classroom of kids and the teacher or the visiting doctor plays and the teacher picks the rules for each participant and the kids beat the doctor.
Oh, what a fantastic circumstance that is. Or the kids beat the teacher. There's nothing they love more. And so the teachers play with the kids. The same game, same curricular information, same end game.
What's different is the task, the thinking task. Complexity of the thinking task in the middle.
And so it looks like, yeah, we're just throwing ping pong balls at cups, both the teacher and the kids.
But which cup? And how do you arrive at that cup?
By knowing the curriculum and manipulating mentally the spatial and mathematical patterns that expand your learning capacity.
[00:44:43] Speaker A: Cassidy, could you talk a little bit about. And just think about the audience, especially for local folks, some moms and dads that may be listening.
Maybe their kids have been struggling with various learning challenges or even some more significant neurodevelopmental delays.
What would be their next step? Who, who would come see you as a medical patient? Veritas medical versus a resilient beginnings client versus maybe just contacting Fresh Fire Academy and enrolling in the school. Kind of give those different scenarios so the listeners could know how to move for next steps.
[00:45:24] Speaker B: So yeah, they're really looking at the parent as a whole and really seeing what, what they're already doing. What have they already tried, what has been going on with that family? So I do know that I have done several just informational meetings here at Veritas just to kind of discuss and talk about what is the immediate need for these kids. Are they, are they really needing to detox right now and needing medical center support right now? Are they ready to start diving into some of the therapy sessions also too.
And I understand there's a financial piece to it as well.
So really trying to get you and, and I'm more than happy to discuss with anybody where they feel like where they should fit in right now. So, so is that getting help from somebody else in the community is that getting help with resilient beginning and iconics right now is that, hey, we need to look at a different school option overall. So.
And I'm also more than happy to discuss a lot of things over email too.
So it's really tricky with each different situation. I think it's Kind of independent on what the family is doing right now, what they're already doing, what they already know and then kind of the desired need that those kids have right now. A lot of them have come to me really reaching out because they heard through Veritas that this service was provided.
And so I've had a lot reach out that way and they've already been doing a whole lot of things. They've already been doing a whole lot of nutraceuticals, they've tried several different things and they're really at their wits end. And so then we do the developmental assessment on them initially and can give guidance on where we can help them.
And I do. I am working with kids that are in, a few kids that are in the public school system. I am working with a few kids that are in various private schools around here. So I'm not working just with fresh fire. I am seeing outside clients as well and, and getting some really good results and really kind of building. It's, it's been fun, it's been interest. Interesting to hear some of the stories that some of these teachers, they're like, what are you doing? What, what are you, what's going on? Something changed.
[00:47:59] Speaker C: So this all started way back.
I was doing just exactly what you're doing, working with these kids clinically. And school teachers started calling me up and saying what's going on here? They got a different kid and explained the visual cognition, you know, moving them up to the, in their visual cognitive capacity.
And that's how I got started. And ultimately when they brought the charter school law into being, some educators contacted me and said, hey, why don't you write a paper on what you think schools ought to look like. And so I did that and boom, I'm in the school business.
So that's how it happened. And it happens that way, you know, and it's not just once. You.
The target shouldn't be in the beginning. The target is build the vehicle of learning first, then drive the data through the vehicle. In other words, you got to get the child's mind working properly, working in a visually dominant way. Vision is instantaneous speech sub vocalized speech moves at the speed of speech, moves at the speed of sound.
So if you can use photographic memory, I mean we all know, we've heard stories about, oh, that guy has a photographic memory. We all do, we all do.
We all use it for everything but school.
And the few kids that do, people that do use it for academic work, written language work, they're geniuses, you know, they're amazing. Every kid can do that.
And that's what we teach. We teach them to do that.
If you can recall the look of anything, you're home free, aren't you?
And we've all encountered guys like that. I mean, one of the guys in my optometry class, he never studied. He read it once, and then when we'd study, we always had him come to our study group because he would say, oh, it's on. He would be watching TV or something, watching the ball game and say, it's on page 435, three quarters of the way down. He'd say stuff like that. And we'd turn the book out. Yep, there it is. You know, I mean, the guy was a genius that way. He simply remembered the look of the pages.
Perfectly doable in the. In everybody, this is not genius thing.
It's exactly what you do for everything in life.
Just apply the same thing.
Look at the page of print as if it were a chair, you know.
You know, or a person, you know, we all. We all encounter people and we say, hey, I know that guy. I've seen that guy before.
I don't know his symbol. I don't know the language equivalent of this guy, his name, but I remember the look of him, you know, we just have to use that part of our mind, and it's perfectly doable. And that's what these games are designed to do. And once the kid realizes that he can remember stuff that way. And of course, we make it easy because we make the icons little funny pictures like the bear with the arm, you know, that's easy. And so everybody gets it. And then you do the same thing in math.
Math, there's just patterns.
And so if you recognize a pattern, you can distribute it, and it's easy.
So that's what we teach. We teach them to do stuff the easy way, the visual way.
And our whole, you know, our whole school system targeted toward language. It ought to be chart the targeted toward the most powerful and efficient part of our minds, the visual part of your mind.
And that's what we've done. It's pretty simple formula, really. It's not that complicated.
You know, it's. There's a lot of neuroanatomy maybe to talk about, but in the end, it's pretty darn simple.
I can remember the word chair in exactly the same way that I remember the look of a chair, a real chair.
I use the same thing. The child that has trouble spelling or reading, he doesn't do that. He doesn't remember the look of chair. He remembers the look of the real chair just fine.
But when it comes to the word, he's going, you know, he's making all kinds of sound, and he doesn't know how to spell it because he's making sound. And we can see it. When he picks up the pencil, he spells because B, E, K, U, Z.
The kid is trying to make sound come out the end of a pencil.
You know, it's a strategic error, not something crossed up in his mind. Nothing to do with intellectual capacity. He's making a strategic error of thought.
We need to recognize that, you know, he doesn't need more phonics.
Thinking in sound is his problem.
He needs to remember the look of the word because otherwise you're not going to spell it right. Because it sure phonologically is irregular, as is 40% of all English words.
So if you want a 40% handicap against you, then, then approach the written language phonologically as your primary way to.
It's just incorrect.
And, you know, we, we think everybody thinks that early phonics is the right move. It's not.
And the, and the reason they think that is the kids that succeed in education were good at early phonics. You know why they were good at early phonics? They already knew what the word was.
So it's easy to do phonics if you already know the word, they visually recognize the word. And then I can apply the phonics rules if, if I had to.
I can tell you, none of the three of us know very many phonics rules because we don't use them. We never use them.
Rarely. Very rarely.
It's an extraordinary event that we encounter a written word that we don't visually recognize. That's why we're good academics, right?
The kids that are puzzling over words all the time, they'll resound out words that they just covered the sentence before.
They're just making a strategic error.
So we have to look for that kind of thing and put our energy on training the child to use a different thinking strategy as opposed to, you know, hammering away at the same spelling words. That's not right.
The right answer is think differently.
Essentially copy those good guys. You know, the poor readers are serially phonologically decoding words.
That's what poor readers do. The good readers never chronologically decode words. Yet our primary remedial strategy is essentially copy the worst readers among us.
Not correct.
And so anyway, we emphasize this visual development and fun and play because those are the things that work the best and they're natural. That's why homeschool works so well, because it's. It's a natural education.
And, you know, it's relevant, it's enjoyable, it's done in safe and loving connection.
That's what school ought to look like.
Not this scary, institutional, you know, socially fearful, and who knows what content's coming their way. I mean, it's just our kids, minds developing minds are too important to relegate to the government. I mean, what things does the government do? Well, not too much that I can see.
So I think we need to support families and churches. And of course, that's a great thing because the church facility is available during school hours, pretty much.
And churches, what better way to grow and solidify the congregation than to have the families coming in? I mean, it's a synergistic win all the way around.
And homeschool hybrid couple days in the brick and mortar perfect arrangement. And that's just what's going on at Fresh Fresh Fire Academy.
And. And it's a beautiful thing.
And those kids that I want to mention, I want to mention, and that is the school changes as time goes on. As I mentioned, the early adopters are kids that are in heavy need.
But then this model of visual learning starts to pump out extraordinary success.
And within a couple of three years, it usually takes about three years. In about three years, all of a sudden, the school is known as the elite school of performance.
So now the parents are coming because they want their kids to accelerate.
And that's exactly what happens. You know why it's three years? It's the teacher's learning curve.
It's not the kids.
The teachers need to learn to do something differently. And so my training of teachers, and I've had trained thousands of teachers over the years, this is how it goes. In the beginning, they come to me and they say, I don't know if I'm in the right place, maybe.
Maybe I shouldn't be here because I don't understand much about what you're saying.
And then a little later on they'll say, wow, you're getting better at explaining this stuff.
And then finally they start coming to me and they say, hey, I've got a kid. Well, Cassidy, like you came this morning and talking about this kid with the repetitive gestures, head ticks and what's going on there. And so finally they come and say, hey, I've got this kid. And I know it's associated with blue light.
What's the story again? Oh, Resonance with acetylcholine. And that's why it only happens when he's engaged in the screens.
And the antidote to that is, of course, the screen precludes the child.
The child is addicted to screens.
Just because we are visually dominant creatures, if we can't make the imagery in our minds, we seek the device that supplies it. It's like, you know, the dog is an olfactory dominant creature. You let your dog out after he's been inside for a while. He is a sniffing machine. He just goes around and finds scent.
We're like that visually. If we don't make vision in our mind because we're developmentally not very skilled at it, we're going to find it in electronic media and we're going to get addicted to it, and we're going to get a whole dose of resonating blue light and we're going to be extra physically active, thus the hyperactivity and the Tourette's.
That's what's going on there.
And imagery, you know how it is when you're dreaming in imagery, you know you're flying in your dream, right? And your arms won't flap, you know, fast enough, or you're running, but your legs won't move. You actually are paralyzed by visual imagery. In REM sleep, your imagery sends an inhibitory signal to the motor planning area of the brain. And we can't move because our vision of the mind is moving for us and it inhibits physicality.
So when that is uninhibited, that's hyperactivity.
Vision supersedes movement once the child is competent.
And that's where the specialized programming comes in.
Rambling here. But these are the things that make up the diagnostic for each child.
Don't just keep practicing the same stuff. It's like I use the golf swing, you know, I get this miserable golf swing and I hit 500 more balls with it.
That's just not going to work. You got to make a diagnosis. You got to figure out what's the best technique here.
What is it that the smart kids are doing that the unsuccessful kids are not doing?
We don't look at that in general school. In the, in the default school, the government school looks at grade. This guy's got 85%, this guy's got 40%.
That's it.
Practice more. That bad golf swing, you 40 percenter, hit 500 more bad balls. You know, that's not the right answer. It's. Shouldn't we look at the characteristics of this good performer and the poor Performance. See, maybe they're not doing the same thing. And that's exactly what the story is.
They're not doing the same thing. So the educational program ought to be teach this kid to do what this kid is doing, not practice more data, fix the vehicle, fix the strategy.
And that's the diagnostic component that the developmental optometrists are involved in and the therapeutic instructors to change learning style, learning strategy.
And wow, that works great because it's distributed, it crosses domains when you get the visual mind moving.
So that's a big deal.
So the goal is develop the mind. And the data is easy.
We all know that the successful kids, school's easy and the unsuccessful kids, they can work hard and get reasonable grade if they and stay at it. And stay at it.
And most don't that are using a bad thinking strategy. Most wilt and of course then they internalize. I'm just not very smart or not very good or I'm lazy, you know, all the things, all the bad things that follow.
So we really have to take a good diagnostic look at these kids. Whether the child is a homeschooler or some hybrid or the church school or the specialty school, we need to know what's going on.
And that is also the underlying biology and physiology, the nutritional and toxicities. And so now we're talking, you know, the medical end of things and the structural end of things with kinesiology and chiropractic and cranial sacral manipulation, all of these things. The knee bone is connected to the thigh bone here. And we need to take a look holistically at the kids.
And that's why I'm so attracted to Veritas.
You guys are exactly what we're trying to do in education, you're doing in medicine. And that's a beautiful thing. It's what the country needs badly.
[01:04:28] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, thank you, Dr. Steve, for your support, your knowledge and obviously your time on the show today. Cassidy, I think you blend all this that Dr. Steve just said, Craniosacral, the medical side, the development, the diagnostic therapeutics and all of it. So we gotta wrap this show up, but why don't you just maybe end it with what are the best ways for people to get in touch with you or Freshfire Academy or if they, if there's just Q and A time you're going to do or the academy is going to do, could you kind of just end on that maybe?
[01:05:01] Speaker B: Yes.
So website is still being built, so I don't have a website just yet, but infoisiliantbeginning.com you can shoot an email there also too, you can contact Dr. Steve, I believe his contact information through Iconics was listed.
[01:05:19] Speaker C: You can, you can look at Iconics Learning Clinic or IconicsInstitute.com that's kind of the training arm of our network, freshfire academy.com I think, right.
[01:05:37] Speaker B: Christian Academy, Academy, FFCA and follow their Instagram page as well. They are having a Tuesday evening this coming Tuesday evening. So if you're local, at 6:30 at fresh fire Fire Christian Academy, they're having a get to know Iconics. So I will be there, my staff will be there, Dr. Steve will be there. And so it'll be a good time for anybody and everybody who is interested in Iconics, FFCA or homeschooling, whatever, to get to connect there. So that is 6:30 this coming Tuesday.
[01:06:11] Speaker C: Yep, this coming Tuesday at 6:30 at the Fresh Fryer Christian Academy, which is on Frankfurt Avenue.
[01:06:20] Speaker A: 3602 Frankfurt Avenue. And their website is ffcalubbock.com.
[01:06:27] Speaker C: Thank you.
And that'll be a good meeting to chat with homeschoolers mainly or anybody interested in enrolling or interested in what we're trying to accomplish. And I'll have a lot to say in person there.
And a couple other staffers and doctors will be coming with me from Iconics.
And then we're doing some training and seeing some patients and students on Monday and Tuesday.
And then Wednesday morning there's a brunch at the academy for homeschool moms and I think almost anyone can come.
Maybe I'm out of bounds there a little bit. But if you're interested, you know, maybe they'll 9:30, so come on down. And if too many people come and we have a few less biscuits or something, I'll go without.
It'll be a terrible thing if I had a caloric reduction. But.
[01:07:43] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Steve Ingersoll and Cassidy Luna. Thank you all for being with us today. Thank you for all you're doing for these kids and, and for the education system at large.
The ripple effect from that will, you know, untold benefit for so many. So thank y' all so much.
And I'm sorry, I was supposed to do this at the beginning out of two quick announcements. I'll be speaking July 26, 9am to 4pm actually, I'll be in the afternoon, but that's here in Lubbock, walking in. Freedom Ministries is hosting a conference, Rewire your mind with Pastor Carrie Kirkwood and myself. So be sure to check that out walking in Freedom Ministries is where you can find out more information. And that'll be at Trinity church. And then August 8th and 9th in Oxford, Mississippi. I'll be speaking there with a number of other speakers, including Sue Becker, who we'll have back on the show here soon. But that's it. Need your cure. Need is in needing the bread. K N E A D. I'll be speaking there. So we got to wrap this show up. Thank you, Dr. Steve. Thank you, Cassidy, and thank you, listeners, for joining us. This will be on all the podcast platforms and on our website, veritas.wellnessmember.com our previous shows with Dr. Steve and with Cassidy from last year. You can go check those out. We archive all the shows there. Join us next week for another great show. Until then, we'll see you next time. Bye.
[01:09:06] Speaker C: Bye.
