You may not know, but outside of medicine Chiropractic care is the most commonly used type of care for babies (1,4).
Now you may wonder why!? Why would your baby benefit from chiropractic? After all he or she just got here and didn’t spend the last 9 months staring at a screen all day.
Unfortunately, though very well protected within the safety of their mother’s womb, infants are not immune to internal and external forces. There are various causes of trauma before, during and after pregnancy (5).
Prenatal trauma might be caused, for example due to a mother’s pelvic distortion or the baby’s position within the uterus.
The birth process itself is probably one of the most strssful events of our lives that we as humans (but really all mammals) must go through. Even a normal natural birth involves a combination of compression, contractions, torques and traction (5). Even more so with assissted birth and when something goes not as smooth as we would like it to go.
And while it is relatively easy for us to mentally grasp the effects of physical injury, even chemical and emotional stressors are known to cause nerve irritation. We all know that stress is one of the greatest factors influencing our health today by causing our mind-bodies to go into the well-quoted „fight-or-flight response“, causing our bodies to undergo significant physiological changes.
That doesn’t just happen when we enter adult life and the working environments, but really as soon as we enter this world.
A study of over 1500 babies (2) checked within the first 5 days after birth showed that only approximately 10% of the newborn babies were perfectly healthy; 10% had severe trauma to the head, evident even to the lay person; and 80% had some strain pattern in the cranial mechanism!
Yet, very few health professionals are trained in the management of those kind of issues. General practitioners usually have more concerns about life-and-death situations and little education on dealing with injuries of the child that they might not consider problematic enough (3).
That is one of the reasons why we believe that, ideally, all babies should be checked (and if necessary adjusted) as soon as possible after birth to help alleviate spinal problems and nervous dysfunction.
Chiropractors are able to palpate tonal changes and find areas of nervous imbalance. The point is to remove those imbalances in the joints and soft tissues and therby restore normal movement patterns and thus neurological development.
We don’t want to scare anyone. Women are still THE specialists at giving birth. We have gone through thousands of years of evolution and a woman’s mind-body is designed to give birth to healthy babies.
In the end, we need to ask ourselves, how can I provide my kids with the best environment possible so they can grow up as intelligent, strong and healthy as possible? Instead of, how much we can get away with, not harming our kids?
If you are a mother, a father, a midwive or other health professional or anybody who has questions regarding this topic, please don’t hesitate to contact us. I am trying to keep things short here as our attention spans today seem to be all over the internet at the same time. Consequently, these blog posts are, by necessity, incomplete. But please follow this chiropractic paediatric series as we will dig deeper into it.
Dr Simon
Gewoon Chiropractie is conveniently located just on the border of Den Haag and Scheveningen and is 20 minutes away from Den Haag Centraal train station by Tram 1. Through a vitalistic approach to chiropractic, we view each patient as a whole, rather than as a single symptom to be treated. We know that chiropractic is so much more than back pain, neck pain and headaches. There are multiple techniques we use to detect, find and correct nerve impingements, that we call subluxations. We believe chiropractic care is a lifestyle & recommend regular spinal checks for you and your whole family. Give us a call! 070 204 41 34
For More Information or to Book your 1st Appointment Click Here!
1.) Black, L.I., Clarke, T., Barnes, P.M., Stussman, B.J., & Nahin, R.L. (2015). Use of complementary health approaches among children in the United States: National Health Interview Survey 2007-2012. National Health Status Report, 78, 1-19.
2.) Frymann, V.M. & Springall, P. (1992). Effect of Osteopathic Medical Management on Neurologic Development in Children. JAOA, 92:729.
3.) Jandial, S., Myers, A., & Wise, E. (2009). Doctors likely to encounter children with musculoskeletal complaints have low confidence in their clinical skills. Journal Pediatrics, 154, 267-271.
4.) Kemper, K.J., Vohra, S., & Walls, R. (2008). The Task Force on Complementary and Alternative Medicine, the Provisional Section on Complementary, Holistic and Integrative Medicine. The use of complementary and alternative medicine in paediatrics. Pediatrics, 122(6), 1374-1386.
5.) Rabelo, N.N., Matushita, H., & Cardeal, D.D., (2017). Traumatic brain lesions in newborns. Arq Neurosiquitr, 75(3), 180-188.