Chiropractic care helps to support childhood growth and development, especially the nervous system, and helps set kids up for lifelong health.
How can prenatal chiropractic care help mothers experience healthier pregnancies and support a baby’s optimal development even before birth?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Wow, that’s a pretty cool question to ask. Prenatal chiropractic will help moms experience a healthier pregnancy; that’s for sure. Because when the mom is healthy and proper alignment exists through the spine, obviously she’s going to have less pain and discomfort during the pregnancy. And when the mom is in more comfort and less stress, it really affects the growing fetus because the internal environment of the mom, what’s going on on the inside affects the baby because that’s the baby’s environment.
So, if a mom is stressed, her body chemistry has more cortisol and adrenaline in it, and that creates an environment that’s not so healthy. So, when a mom is more relaxed and there’s a better chemical balance, the environment that the baby’s growing up in is really a safe, calm environment.
They did some studies where they took some pregnant rats and they made all kinds of noise and stressed the rats out for an extended period of time while they were pregnant. And what they found was when the mommy rats were pregnant and they experienced an increase in cortisol and adrenaline, they had larger birth weight prodigy that came out.
So, it’s really interesting. And all the research shows that if you take care of a mom during their pregnancy, particularly with the Webster technique, it results in less pain during pregnancy, less pain during delivery, shorter delivery times, and most importantly, less need for interventions like the Pitocin epidurals and C-sections. So, during pregnancy, mothers are encouraged not to drink or take drugs and all these things during pregnancy because, again, the internal environment is the baby’s environment and the cleaner and the stronger that environment is, the baby will be healthier.
So, I want to make it clear that nothing I do, especially to an expecting mom, affects the child. I’m not adjusting or treating a growing fetus. The baby’s just in there. I’m really working with the mom, creating a better environment on the inside with more room, which hopefully leads to better baby positioning. And the better the baby is positioned, the less stress and worry the mom has to go through and the less stress they get from their OBGYN because if the babies are not head down, they start to sweat the mom that, “Oh, the baby’s not in the right position, or the baby’s too big or too small, or there’s not enough fluid, or there’s too much fluid.” And they really go about scaring the moms. And again, when mom goes into sympathetic overdrive, her body chemistry is different. When she’s relaxed during pregnancy, it’s a much calmer pregnancy, everything goes better for the baby.
You often talk about how chiropractic care removes interference in the nervous system. Can you explain what that means and how it affects a child’s ability to grow, heal and function properly?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Sure. A child’s earliest years are a time of rapid brain development, high neuroplasticity, meaning flexibility and adjustability in the nerve system. And that’s really the brain’s ability to change in response to experience and make the child’s brain especially receptive to learning and change and adaptation. And the ability to adapt is very important to one’s health, as we’ve discussed many times before.
And we said it in the past, that the failure for the body to adapt is the number one reason for ill health in children and adults. And adaptation occurs through the nerve system and the brain perceiving a threat or a problem, and then it executes certain physiological adaptations so the body can handle it better. Just like if a person has really great adaptation, when it’s really hot out, their blood vessels are going to open up and then the pores will open and they’ll cool off their own body. It happens naturally.
Children also adapt to viruses and bacteria by increasing their internal body temperature, creating a fever, because when there’s a fever, the bacteria and viruses, they don’t really function as well. So, the body intentionally raises the temperature and that’s one of the body’s innate defense mechanisms. Another show of adaptation would be like callous formation. Like if I’m raking leaves, every day as my job as a gardener, I’m going to start to develop calluses that protect my hand. And over time it’ll protect my hands from breaking open and starting to bleed and that’s just an adaptation to stress.
So, as a child goes through every stage of growth and development, the cleaner the communication in the body, the deeper the connections grow and lay the groundwork for better, stronger cognitive, emotional and social functioning for the rest of their lives. So, remembering that a child’s neurology makes them highly vulnerable to negative experience with altered structure and the altered function of the nerve.
So, we always want to make sure that a child is well-adjusted because trauma can disrupt the flow and how the brain is wired, leading to long-term issues with emotional regulation, physiological regulation, and learning to deal with their physical health.
How does teaching proper posture and correcting kids’ posture help create healthy kids? And what happens to adults if their posture goes unchecked?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: We cover this one a lot, but teaching kids about good posture really helps them develop healthy habits that better their physical and mental health throughout the course of their lives. During childhood, as we stated, the body and the brain are highly adaptable and proper posture supports normal development through the nerve system. There was a research study showing that when you bend or flex the neck and stretch a nerve as little as 20%, it can decrease the strength of the nerve impulse.
So, when the body’s alignment is distorted or subluxated, it puts pressure on those delicate spinal nerves and then improper communication occurs from the brain to the body and the body will have trouble regulating, healing and developing because there’s static in the communication center. A chiropractor will assess the alignment of the spine, clear any misalignments, or what we call vertebral subluxations to get the pressure off the nerves and then support the child through every stage of growth and development.
A child’s spine is still growing and developing, and good posture ensures that it develops with the proper alignment, preventing that abnormal position, reducing the risk of back problems such as joint degeneration, arthritis later in life. And really when the body is properly aligned, it prevents muscle strain and pain because the body can support its own weight more effectively.
And that’s why it’s so important to watch when your kids are slouching. It changes their posture when they’re slouching and it can compress the chest and the diaphragm and that can restrict lung capacity. So, teaching a kid to sit up and stand up straight, like our parents told us, they were right. It’ll let them breathe more deeply, efficiently, which supports better organ function with proper alignment.
So, all these things are so important for a child and not to mention the mental and emotional benefits because concentration goes up, it boosts their confidence and their moods are positive, more self-esteem when the kids are happier and better adjusted. And that way they’re able to do the things like they’re supposed to do because not every kid is designed to sit in a classroom for eight hours a day and then go home and do homework for another three hours a day. This digital world, our kids spend more time sitting and looking at screens, which then can lead to posture like tech neck or what we call forward head posture. And if these things are not taken care of early, they just get strengthened and solidified in the adult.
Now, many people seek chiropractic care only when they’re in pain. What are the advantages of introducing children to chiropractic care early before symptoms appear?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, again, Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist said that it’s easier to raise healthy children than to repair broken adults. And that statement holds a great deal of truth based on the extensive research in child development, neuroscience, and mental health. The quote highlights that profound and lasting impact of a formative healthy childhood experience on a person’s life. The statement doesn’t mean that adults can’t heal from trauma. Instead, it underscores that investing in your child’s health and positive development early is more effective than to try and fix a deep-seated problem that occurs and shows up later.
So, this relates to health and it’s important because it’ll ensure that their lives, they’re taking care of their spine. Because if you did nothing to take care of your spine for years and years and years, we’ve all seen that old guy with the unhealthy spine. And I promise you, he didn’t just wake up one day, look in the mirror and say, “Oh my, what happened to me? ” It didn’t happen right away. It happened slowly over time.
And if you ever watched a child learning to walk, they fall 20 or 30 times a day. Then as they get older, they participate in sports and they spend hours on their computers and cell phones and iPads and all the other devices that they’re on, racking up forward head posture and full postural habits, which ultimately will lead them towards misalignment of the spine or what we call subluxation. And when those bones are misaligned, putting pressure on the spinal nerves, it can cause pain, ill health, and dysregulation into the body.
All we want to do as chiropractors is to restore proper communication so that child can experience optimum health and have their best chance of living their best day every day. Because if your child is tired all the time and sick all the time and missing school, it just might be time to have your child checked by a chiropractor.
If more families focused on spinal health from an early age, what kind of changes do you think we’d see in the overall health and wellbeing of the older generation?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, we’re certainly seeing effects of technology on the younger generation. Currently, I’m almost 60 years old. I didn’t grow up with a cell phone, and I didn’t have a computer until I was almost 30. But again, when I got my first cell phone, I started to notice that I was changing the way I looked at things and it was kind of interesting and over time I seem to have lost a little bit of my cervical curve. So, I’ve had to increase my care.
And I used to think people could get away with getting checked periodically and stuff like that, but with all the stress and everything that we’re seeing on families and children and the older generation, I think it’s more important people actually need to get checked and adjusted more than they did even 20 or 30 years ago.
So if you teach a child to limit their use, teaching them the right postures when they’re using the devices, get your kids checked for scoliosis, make sure their alignment is checked by a chiropractor, chances are that the stresses that we see in early childhood and every stage of growth and development will have less negative impact on their health.
But if you wait till a child’s already in pain or discomfort or the problem’s built in, it really can happen over a much more significant timeframe and become more significant. There’s that old adage that we used to hear our parents say, “A stitch in time saves nine.” So, to repair a small, tiny tear in a shirt or a dress is a great idea because if you leave it alone, it’s just going to keep getting bigger and worse and then it’s going to take more stitches.
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To speak with Dr. Gregg Rubinstein, visit www.ChiropractorMidtown.com or call (212) 977-7094 to schedule an appointment.
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