I get asked how chiropractic care can benefit infants and children. Actually, I get asked this question a lot.
The way we help children is the same way that we help adults. Infants are basically little adults and their nerve system and spine does the same thing that an adult nerve system and spine does. Your nerve system basically runs everything and coordinates everything that goes on in your body and then the bones of the spine are actually designed to protect your central nervous system. They protect the central nerve system by completely encasing the spinal cord. It also allows for the exit of the spinal nerves coming off the spinal cord directly in between two adjacent vertebrae.
Stress, tension, poor posture, accidents and falls (and we all know that kids fall an awful lot) can throw the bones out of alignment and start to put pressure and irritate the nerve system and that allows for pain and dysfunction. When things aren’t functioning correctly, every stage of growth and development, which is regulated by the nerve system, can start to go wrong. So it’s really important to make sure that your baby’s nerve system is functioning at 100%.
So when you have a newborn and you watch them learn to walk and play with their other brothers and sisters, they get banged around a little bit. That can create misalignments or what we call subluxations. As a chiropractor, my job is to remove those subluxations, realign the vertebrae gently, get the pressure off the nerves and allow that infant’s or child’s nerve system to function optimally.
So anyone can benefit from chiropractic care because if you have misalignments in your spine, it’s going to be choking off that nerve system flow and it can cause problems. So why would you want anyone walking around with pressure or irritation on their nerve system. It doesn’t matter how old you are. It doesn’t matter if you have pain or not. Keeping the spine and nerve system healthy is paramount and that’s what a chiropractor does. And if you start kids early, you teach them at a very early age that they need to care for their spine and as they grow older, they’re going to care for their spine.
Think about it. If you never did anything to care for your teeth, your teeth would be a horrible mess by the time you were twenty or thirty. If you never do anything to care for your spine as an infant or a child, when you’re twenty or thirty all those knocks and bumps and bruises and all those things are going to add up and can create alignment issues later in life and that can manifest itself as pain, discomfort or other health issues and dysfunction of the nerve system.
So that’s pretty much what I tell people when I’m describing why an infant should get checked. The only way we help anyone is by getting pressure off the nerve system. By doing the chiropractic adjustments which eliminate that nerve interference, this allows the body to restore normal function.
So chiropractic can help kids who are colicky, having growing pains, all these different things. People bring their children to chiropractors to get checked because they know that the nerve system controls a lot of those other things. So it’s just a way to keep the spine and nerve system healthy and everyone should be doing it no matter how old or young you are.
Dr. Gregg D. Rubinstein, D.C., is a midtown Manhattan chiropractor with over 20 years of experience providing customized chiropractic treatment services to a wide range of clients in the Midtown Manhattan/West New York City area. Dr. Gregg Rubinstein and 57th Street Chiropractic can be reached at (917) 534-6484 and is located at 119 West 57th St. in New York, NY.
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