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By Emily Hagen, Contributor, The MAHA Report
A baby boy was found shivering on the snowy streets of Indianapolis, Indiana, on a blistering winter night. He had no coat to protect him from the 30-degree cold and wicked winds. His mother was homeless and unable to protect him. At just one year old, his tiny body was swollen and inflamed, burdened by Type 2 diabetes, glaucoma, and insomnia.
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This is just one example of the types of situations that land a child in foster care, in need of a safe and loving home.
Leah Wilson, a litigation attorney, and her husband, Nick, a chiropractor, were dealing with their own struggles as parents—facing secondary infertility. Years had passed since the birth of their first son and time was of the essence. Leah and Nick had always planned to eventually become foster parents. The wait for a baby propelled that timeline forward.
“There was something in my heart drawn to the muck and mire and need,” Wilson remembers. “It’s dark, it’s hard for a lot of people to approach.”
Her peers avoided looking into the eyes of orphans, afraid they’d be broken children. Wilson, on the other hand, was drawn to help, to believe in them.
“People don’t want to read stories about orphans and foster children because it’s just too hard to approach,” Wilson explained. “And for some reason, that was always my draw— to those kids, to that population.”
And the attorney always kept foster care reform in the back of her mind—hoping someday she’d get the opportunity to confront two patterns she saw devastating foster programs: aging out of the system and overmedication.
One Sunday evening, after participating in a worship service at their church in Indianapolis, Leah and Nick turned to each other, their thoughts in sync.
“Let’s start fostering now.”
As fate would have it, the Wilsons were paired with the sick baby boy who had been found in the cold on that 30-degree night. They welcomed him into their home as “Lad” (not his real name). When he arrived, the two-year-old was already in rough shape.
“He came to us very, very inflamed….completely swollen,” Leah remembers, adding that he couldn’t sleep and was afraid of men.
For most foster children, symptoms like these are usually treated with pharmaceuticals, with foster parents relying on a local doctor to manage their child’s trauma as a pathology that can only be medicated.
Luckily for Lad, his new parents were health freedom fighters.
The Wilsons had built their lives around wellness, medical freedom, and nervous-system-first care. For Lad, their home became a MAHA-coded sanctuary. They fashioned every detail to minimize disruption: synthetic fragrances and harsh detergents were removed, tap water was filtered, and the kitchen was stocked with whole foods only — or what Leah calls the “food-by-God diet.”
They also designed every meal, bedtime routine, and piece of furniture to calm Lad’s nervous system and profoundly transform the life of a dysregulated child trapped in survival mode. In doing so, the Wilsons created something rare in foster care: a non-toxic home that treated the whole child, not just the symptoms.
Their philosophy centers around the belief that a child’s environment can either hinder healing—or make it possible.
“People want to detox but they’re living in an environment that’s retoxing them,” Wilson says. She described a problem that plagues many American households whose air becomes infected by toxic cleaning supplies, excessive amounts of non-native EMFs, artificial fragrance, and other hormonal disruptors.
As Leah and Nick Wilson had taught their natural health patients for years, traditional medicine can be a dead end when you’re seeking healing. The principles of vitality and their desire to steward the body in accordance with natural laws have allowed them to help more than 10,000 individuals exit conventional medicine.
These principles, and the Wilsons’ way of life, are codified in their new book, Reclaim Vitality: A Guide to Exit Conventional Medicine and Live Naturally [ [link removed] ], to be released by Skyhorse Publishing on January 20.
Highlighting the corruption of today’s “sick care business” propelled by pharmaceuticals, the book presents a roadmap to natural healing; it includes a ‘vitality’ score sheet that helps readers assess their assets and liabilities, optimize their environment, and rewire the thoughts that harm them.
Whether fostering a highly anxious, traumatized child, or guiding a friend through a healing journey, Leah Wilson believes the body repairs best when one prioritizes the nervous system. A body stuck in stress cannot fully heal; it must be allowed to exit fight-or-flight mode long enough to restore itself.
“Anxiety isn’t a drug deficiency; it’s a signal the nervous system needs rest and recalibration,” Wilson says.
In their book [ [link removed] ], Leah and her husband break down the “three T’s” that govern their approach: thoughts, traumas, and toxins—three interferences the Wilsons believe trap people in chronic stress.
Their philosophy is simple and transformative.
“Health isn’t something you chase, it’s something you cultivate by becoming the kind of person who lives vitalistically,” Wilson says. A vitalistic lifestyle, the Wilsons believe, is built through conscious food choices, movement, breathwork, alignment—and most importantly — rest. Sleep, Leah emphasizes, is a “gift.” It’s the body’s chance to repair itself.
“Most people live backwards,” she notes. “They think ‘when I have health, I’ll do the things I love.’”
Her solution is what she calls the “be-do-have principle”: “The be-do-have principle flips it around,” explains Wilson. “Who you choose to become determines what you do, and what you do determines what you have.”
Sayer Ji, founder of GreenMedInfo [ [link removed] ], recently applauded Leah’s activism, stressing that the MAHA movement wouldn’t be where it is today without her.
“Leah Wilson is one of the most extraordinary grassroots leaders of our time—brilliant, principled, and deeply humbled in a way that reflects genuine service rather than self-promotion,” Ji said.
“She has quietly midwifed some of the most consequential victories for parental rights, religious freedom, and medical autonomy in modern American history, long before these issues became culturally safe to champion,” added Ji.
Among the most important victories for Leah and her husband: the outcome of her approach to Lad, the foster boy they took in.
For Lad, true healing required an environment designed for recovery. Every part of his nervous system was considered. It is important to Leah that the home environment is conducive to health and healing. Lad benefitted from that in a big way.
“It’s the little common sense things that moms might not know that make a big difference,” Leah said. “When your child is symptomatic, lower the lights, minimize noise and keep activity to a minimum so that the nervous system can focus on healing.”
Leah remembers how sweet it was to see Lad re-balance and melt on a tough day when they played the worship song, “Good, Good Father.”
“This child was belting out worship songs,” she remembers. “If he was having a bad day, you’ll just turn that song on and he’d light up.”
Lad’s body and spirit slowly began to recover in a home where every sensory input and meal supported nervous-system-first care. It was a radical approach to foster care, one that emphasized healing the whole child rather than masking symptoms with pharmaceuticals.
It worked. During-the course of a year, Lad’s inflammation began to subside, and the once-traumatized infant was finally finding calm. One afternoon, his transformation became undeniable. Nick drove up in his GMC Acadia, and Lad, then two years old, ran straight toward him, wrapping his arms around his foster dad, joy written across his face.
It was a breakthrough moment. Looking back, it is one story of how immersion in a healthy environment changes things, even for those with major setbacks and less than ideal situations.
“His healing was insane,” Leah recalls.
Just before his third birthday, the Wilsons returned a changed Lad to his mother, who was living in a Salvation Army shelter.
The foster agency took notice: they were impressed by the the baby’s transformation and began recommending the Wilsons for new placements.
Enter Vaccine Mandates
As they prepared to welcome a second placement into their MAHA-friendly home, Indiana issued a new mandate: all children in the home had to be up-to-date on vaccines. Leah tried to use a religious exemption for the new placement, like she had before, but such exemptions no longer applied.
“They just pointed to an Indiana regulation that said that no family member can be a threat to the welfare of the foster child,” Leah said. “And they’re now reading vaccination status to indicate threat to the welfare of the foster child.”
The agency delivered an ultimatum: walk away, or have their foster license permanently closed.
Leah looked at her husband in disbelief.
“This is nonsense that kids are sleeping on the floor at the Department of Child Services tonight, yet our safe and loving home is available,” Leah said.
The state prevented the Wilsons from taking in a second foster child but it motivated them to expand their activism. Leah said she couldn’t reconcile a system that punished children in need while ignoring the harm of the mandate. She called the issue “too big not to fight, but also too big to fight,” and began asking the question that would shape the next chapter of her and her husband’s advocacy: Where do we go from here?
From that day forward, the Wilsons worked tirelessly to overturn the vaccine mandate in their state. One day, their advocacy inspired statewide systematic change. Foster homes in Indiana were no longer required to provide vaccination records.
“I think Covid was such a gift,” reflects Leah, “because it blew those conversations wide open and allowed people to assess: how is vaccine status being weaponized?”
In the wake of the 2019 measles outbreaks, the Wilsons, along with Sayer Ji and Dr. Joel Bohemier, formed Stand for Health Freedom [ [link removed] ], their non-profit. It soon expanded nationally, securing 146 wins across the U.S. and empowering thousands of new families looking to reclaim agency over their health.
“In 2025,” Wilson reflects, “the era of medical mandates is over. And it’s an era of restoring and honoring the discernment of a mother as not quantifiable but paramount, and the highest authority when it comes to the health of her children.”
Leah brings a focus on parental rights, informed consent, and privacy, strengthening these protections so people can pursue vitality and care for themselves in ways that align with their cultural norms, beliefs, and overall well-being. Nick approaches health from a natural perspective, drawing on his experience as a physician to guide thousands of people through their healing journeys. Together, they complement each other—combining legal advocacy and clinical expertise to empower families and promote holistic wellness.
Through foster care, advocacy, clinical work, and writing, the Wilsons have built a movement that inspires families to reclaim vitality, autonomy, and freedom. It begins with children like Lad and extends to millions of sick Americans desperate for healing.
For Lad, and for every child the Wilsons reach, transformation is possible when care is rooted in the three principles of vitality.
“We want that for everyone,” Wilson says. “We want people to have that opportunity to restore their birthright of vitality.”
The Wilsons hope their book [ [link removed] ]helps Americans divorce themselves from the lies they’ve been sold about conventional medicine, and empowers them to take that first courageous step toward reclaiming their health.
“Together we can build this strong army of vitalists,” Wilson believes, “and when people understand the truth, they won’t be able to be tricked into bad healthcare decisions anymore.”
And that first step, she emphasizes, starts at home.
“That’s when MAHA truly succeeds,” Wilson says confidently. “At home.”
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