Children and Chiropractic - Chiropractic Pediatrics

Children and Chiropractic
November 13, 2008
by Adam Rathfon
Examiner (Tampa Bay)

his article is in response to the wonderful question from Jayne. Chiropractic is a wonderful treatment option for children with certain conditions. I know that the common perception of chiropractic care is that it is for older individuals with the type of pain that I have mentioned in previous articles (like this one .) But if you stop and think about it for a minute, aren't kids falling and getting injured more often than adults are?

For many pregnancies the birthing process is difficult and causes strain on both the mother and the child. Often times the doctor will have to pull on the baby's head to get its shoulders out. This pulling can strain the neck and cause injuries that mimic those of whiplash. As many of us know, whiplash is not an injury that is easily recovered from by simply resting. This pain in the neck can lead to lots of crying, some even say inconsolable crying. Sometimes the baby will just scream. These are common symptoms of infantile colic. Now I'm certainly not suggesting that colicky babies all have whiplash, but many studies have shown that infants with colic respond very well to chiropractic treatment.

Colic can be associated with difficult childbirth as I mentioned, but as I also hinted at, it can be caused by other issues. One other very common cause for colic would be food allergy/reflux. Now conditions can be separate from colic and may present by themselves with symptoms of vomiting, weight loss, refusal to eat, irregular bowel movements, etc. These patients also respond well to chiropractic adjustments. Now I'm going to get a little technical for a minute, but hang in there. The Gastro-Intestinal tract (part of the body that digests and gets rid of dinner,) is extensively innervated by the nervous system coming from the mid-back region. Also found in the mid-back region is the sympathetic nervous system which is responsible for your fight or flight response. The fight or flight response comes from whenever we were nomads and were walking around the woods and came across a bear/dinosaur/lion/some other scary animal and our body responded by increasing blood flow to our arms, legs, eyes, etc. ( in case we need to fight the beast, or run from it.) What can happen is misaligned mid-back vertebra cause an over-stimulation of this area can cause long term decrease in blood flow to the stomach, liver, intestines, etc. causing normal digestion to be very difficult and sometimes painful.

Now since babies at first are very immobile, they can't work those kinks out of their backs, so they just suffer from the symptoms. The great thing about children is that they are very plastic. What I mean by that is that they bend a lot before they break, unlike the rest of us, if we fell down like they did we would break every bone in our body. This is good for children because they typically do not need many adjustments to fix their problem. Since they are so bendable, they can typically recover very quickly.

Now as Jayne also mentioned in her question, chiropractic is very effective for children with asthma. I'm sure there are quite a few of you reading this that had asthma as a child and just grew out of it. This is fairly common especially with childhood asthma. As I mentioned previously the sympathetic nervous system lies in the mid-back region. The lungs are also an extensively innervated area and can malfunction from misalignments in the area.

Usually childhood asthma comes from an impingement of the nerve that leads to the bronchioles, or wind-pipes. If the nerve cannot properly communicate with the wind-pipe to open up and let air in, you feel a tightness in your chest that leads to difficulty breathing. In fact many practicing chiropractors today chose to be chiropractors because of their success with childhood asthma.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to chiropractic and children although these couple of conditions cover some of the most stressful issues for parents looking to help their children. In my next post, I'll try and go over some more ways chiropractic can help children, but more importantly I will talk about how chiropractic can benefit pregnant women.