Birth, Then Chiropractic

Imagine that you are floating in a dim, very warm, very comfortable place where your constant companion is the muffled sounds of voices and gurgles and the steady beat of your mother’s heart. You get pleasant waves of hormones, nutrition, and oxygen from your bloodstream. Now imagine your environment contracting, your warm liquid surroundings draining away, and finding yourself outside. Here, there are bright lights, there is harsh air filling your lungs, and your tiny muscles are exhausted from being pushed into the world.

There is quite the high level of sensory overload that happens in a newborn’s first days. Bright light, the sensation of skin being touched, sounds up close and personal, even the taste of milk is all overwhelming. Birth is a natural and beautiful part of the cycle of life, but it is still shocking and traumatic to both the new mother and new baby. A new infant is mostly sensory—just trying to regulate his or her little system and take in the world. On top of this—the equivalent of a splash of ice water to the nervous system—is the physical exhaustion from the birth process.

In a natural birth, something occurs that is like a skull “blowout.” A baby’s skull is not one hard globe of bone. The skull doesn’t totally fuse for a few years, in fact. The infant’s soft pieces of skull shift to allow its little head to become pointy and push through the birth canal. Then it balloons back out. This acts like a jump start to the newborn's brain and central nervous system. In a natural birth, there is tremendous pressure put on the head and body of a baby (and mother, for that matter.) This is why chiropractic care of a baby can help calm his or her system, encouraging better breathing and heart rate, less colic, and a more comforted first days of life in the big world.

Sometimes intervention is necessary in bringing a new person into the world. In a c-section, or even a doctor-assisted vaginal birth, there is even more pressure and irritation to the delicate new baby. Tugging on the baby’s head and placing IV needles, tubes, and foreign chemicals in him or her are all like an assault to a pure little nervous system. These babies need the gentle care of chiropractic even more.

A brand new human being will spend the next year, at least, learning how to make sense of images, sounds, smells, and touch. Their new little insides will be figuring out how to process food into nutrients and waste (and making for some interesting diapers in the meanwhile.) They will fall into their own circadian cycles of sleeping and waking, and learn how to distinguish sensations like hunger, discomfort, and contentment. This is all very complicated. The beauty of it is that you don’t need to instruct them on any of it. It is natural. You can help your little one on this journey with giving them the best start possible. Taking irritation out of the central nervous system with chiropractic adjustments will help.

Chiropractic and Earaches

Young children have a shorter and more horizontal ear canal than adults. This sets them up for a higher possibility for earaches, as fluid can build up behind the ear drum and cause misery for a child.

Chiropractic care of children can help. The simple action of realigning small neck bones has a myriad of effects. Chiropractic adjustments help neck, face, and ear muscles function better, they help lymph to flow and drain, and they allow your child’s body to effectively fight off infection. 

My recommendation for treating an earache in your child is a hierarchy of care. Start with the least invasive treatment first, which is the chiropractic adjustment of the upper neck. Some great home remedies include warm oil (not hot!) in the ear, increasing vitamin C and water intake to flush toxins and fluid and boost immune function, and limit sugar intake until the earache is better. (Sugar dampens the immune system and feeds bacteria.) If these things do not help after a few days, then consult the medical professional. It may be that your child has a bacterial infection that can be best treated with antibiotics. 

My dismay with the typical medical treatment of childhood earaches is that, more often than not, the child is given antibiotics right off the bat. Antibiotics are only effective if A) there is an infection causing fluid to build in the ear and B) that infection is actually a bacteria, not a virus. Antibiotics do absolutely nothing in the case of a viral infection, unless you count causing lethargy and lowering the natural fighting ability of your child’s immune system. If the antibiotics do not seem to do the trick in clearing up the earache, piercing the eardrum and inserting drainage tubes is the next step. I have seen lots of children do well after having this procedure, and I have never seen a child that I think actually should have had the procedure. The ear already has an internal drainage system. Helping this to work better makes more sense to me than putting a hole where there shouldn’t be one, opening up a sensitive area to outside infection.

The good news is that the American Medical Association has, in recent years, taken a “watch and see” approach, and more often anxious parents and kids are being sent home to let time work its magic. Most ear infections do, eventually, work themselves out. If your child has an earache, or if your child has experienced chronic earaches, get them to your chiropractor. A few cervical spinal adjustments may do wonders.

Pregnancy and Chiropractic Care

Pregnant women should be getting chiropractic care. There are so many compelling reasons for me to give such a strong statement. Here are a few: 1) Pregnant women’s bodies are changing on a daily, even hourly, basis. Unstable joints plus unstable hormones equal one very unhappy mama-to-be. Chiropractic can help. 2) This country’s standards for medically treating pregnant women are getting out of control. Pregnancy is not a disease! It is beautiful, amazing, miraculous formation of new life. Healthcare folk need to stop managing pregnant women and start celebrating them. Chiropractic does this. 3) Babies and children need chiropractic care even more than adults do. There is, literally, no time too early to start this care, including while a tiny new person is in the womb.

Hormones are flooding through a pregnant woman’s body, encouraging her uterus to grow, her joints to soften and widen, and her metabolism to ramp up to a desperate, instant, hungry craving. Pregnant women make more blood to carry nourishment to her little one. They are often tired, because their bodies’ resources are directed at growing a human being, and because sometimes they just can’t get comfortable to sleep. Chiropractic adjustments tone down sympathetic responses and stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system. Simply put, adjustments relax the tired, anxious woman. Also, keeping the joints of the pelvis properly functioning, moving, and supporting the new (heavy!) belly gives baby the best chance to grow without restriction. Ultimately, a properly aligned pelvis helps facilitate a happy, successful birth.

Currently, medical standards are obsessed with “treating” every stage of pregnancy as though it is a disease. (It makes me wonder how any of our parents and grandparents survived without obstetricians…they were clearly living in the dark ages, right?) Pregnant women should not be poked, prodded, made to wait for hours for medical checkups. Their babies should not be thought of and treated as a living tumor. They should be loved. The new life they are growing should be loved, and the bond between mother and baby should already be starting. In my own experience, it is hard to form a bond with an unborn child when medical folks treat the pregnancy like a disease bomb about to explode. It is no wonder that young mothers are afraid of natural births—they are effectively conditioned to believe that natural birth equals certain death or lifelong disability for mama and baby.  This could not be further from the truth. Look it up! Information is everywhere! Do an internet search on Ina May Gaskin. Learn about your choices.

Children flourish under chiropractic care. I and my siblings grew up with it. I adjust my own baby boy. I take care of other children in my office. I am witness to the health that adjustments bring: less colic, better focus and digestion, more alert babies, relief from scoliosis. I could go on with this list. Start your kids on a path to better health. Start researching and making better health choices for them while they are still young, and let me give you a hint: health does not come from a pill or a needle.