Your Child's PANDAS Symptoms Involve More Than the Infection

One week your child was doing homework, giggling at dinner, sleeping through the night. The next week they were washing their hands until the skin cracked, or checking the door lock a dozen times before bed, or screaming at you over something so small you couldn't even name it later. You called it a phase at first. Then it kept going, and you started asking your child's pediatrician questions that didn't have easy answers.

If a strep infection or another illness came right before the change, you may have already heard the words PANDAS or PANS. Even with a name for it, the waiting for a specialist, the trial medications, the 2 a.m. searches for anyone who has seen this before, none of that gets easier just because there's a diagnosis. You are not imagining what happened to your child, and you are right to keep looking for anything that might help them feel steadier.

We want to say clearly, before anything else: PANDAS and PANS need medical diagnosis and treatment, and our doctors work alongside your child's physicians, never in place of them. What we offer at Van Every Family Chiropractic Center in Royal Oak is gentle, nervous system-focused care that supports your child's ability to settle and recover between flares, as one more piece of the picture your medical team is already building.

What PANDAS and PANS Actually Look Like at Home

PANDAS (Pediatric Autoimmune Neuropsychiatric Disorders Associated with Streptococcal infections) describes sudden OCD behaviors or tics that follow a strep infection, driven by an immune response that mistakenly affects the brain. PANS (Pediatric Acute-onset Neuropsychiatric Syndrome) is the broader version of the same picture, triggered by other infections or immune stressors instead of strep alone. In both, the symptoms show up fast and hit hard: new OCD rituals, tics that weren't there a month ago, rage or panic that swings further than anything you've seen from your child before. Handwriting that falls apart seemingly overnight. Nightmares, bedwetting, a sudden new sensitivity to sound or light or touch. Some children even lose ground physically, an unsteady walk or clumsier hands than they had a few weeks earlier. Every child's presentation is a little different, but underneath most of it is a nervous system running in a state of high alert.

Why the Nervous System Is Part of the Picture

Your child's autonomic nervous system works something like a gas pedal and a brake pedal. The gas pedal drives the stress response, faster heart rate, heightened vigilance, a body braced for a threat. The brake pedal, largely controlled by the vagus nerve, is what lets the body settle back down once the threat has passed. The vagus nerve also works as one of the immune system's off switches, and when its signal is weak, the body has a harder time recognizing that an infection has cleared and it's safe to stand down. For a child with PANDAS or PANS, the immune trigger pushed the gas pedal down hard, and if the brake pedal was already working under a heavy load, from a difficult birth, an earlier illness, ordinary childhood stress, the system can get stuck there far longer than the infection itself lasted.

Why the Usual Approaches Sometimes Fall Short

Medical management of PANDAS and PANS, antibiotics, anti-inflammatory protocols, and in some cases IVIG, addresses the immune and infectious piece directly and is essential. Many families also work through gut healing, dietary changes, or other functional approaches, and those can genuinely help for a while. What we see often, though, is that these approaches work on the output, the gut, the immune markers, the visible symptoms, while the nervous system that coordinates all of it stays stuck in overdrive underneath. That's usually why progress plateaus or symptoms creep back even when everyone involved is doing everything right. Supporting the nervous system's capacity to settle doesn't replace any of that work. It gives it more room to hold.

What Gentle Care at Van Every Looks Like

We start with a full history and a conversation about where your child's medical care currently stands, along with INSiGHT neurological scans that measure thermal patterns, heart rate variability, and muscle tension along the spine. These scans give us an objective look at how much stress your child's nervous system is carrying and where it's concentrated, rather than relying on guesswork. From there we walk you through a report of findings in plain language.

Care itself uses Koren Specific Technique (KST) and Talsky Tonal Chiropractic (TTC), both gentle, nervous system-focused approaches with no cracking or twisting. We work with the lightest possible touch around the upper cervical spine and the areas connected to vagal tone, and we build a calm, predictable environment for kids who are often more sensitive than usual right now. Your child gets choices about their own care whenever we can offer them, and we adapt the pace of every visit to how they're doing that day. We also stay in contact with your child's medical team and are glad to share what we observe so our approach fits within the framework they've already built.

What Parents Often Notice

Because flares are unpredictable, progress with PANDAS and PANS is rarely a straight line, and we're honest about that from the start. That said, many parents describe their child settling a bit within the first several visits, and often the softer signs show up first: easier sleep, less physical tension, a slightly calmer version of their kid at dinner. Over time, some families report flares that feel shorter or less intense, and a child who seems to bounce back a little faster once one passes. Sensory sensitivities that were overwhelming during a flare tend to ease somewhat in the calmer stretches between them. We track all of this with follow-up scans so the progress isn't just a feeling, it's something we can actually measure alongside you.

Supporting Your Child Between Visits

Families often ask what helps day to day, especially during a flare. A few things we hear from parents and see reflected in the research on nervous system regulation:

• Keep bedtime and mealtime routines as predictable as you can manage, even loosely, since predictability itself is calming to an overactivated nervous system
• Notice and reduce sensory load where you're able to, dimmer lighting in the evening, quieter transitions, fewer surprises during a flare
• Track symptoms and possible triggers in a simple notebook or app so patterns are easier to spot and share with your child's doctors
• Give your child small choices when you can, what shirt to wear, which chair to sit in, since a sense of control can lower the stress response in the moment
• Protect your own rest and support where possible. A calmer parent has more capacity to stay steady for a child who is struggling

Taking the Next Step

If your child is in the middle of a PANDAS or PANS flare, or you're still trying to understand what happened to them, our doctors in Royal Oak would like to talk with you about what gentle, complementary nervous system support could look like alongside your child's medical care. You can read more on our PANDAS and PANS support page, download our free guide on nervous system support for PANDAS and PANS, or book a consultation directly. You can also call us at (248) 616-0900 to ask questions before you come in. Whatever your child's medical team has already put in place, we're glad to work alongside it.