Parents need to know that chiropractic care is safe for infants and children. Ensuring that a child’s spine is healthy early in life will allow the nerve system to function without interference and allow the body to develop properly.
How does chiropractic care for infants and children differ from treatment for adults?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, the elephant in the room there is, it’s funny, people come in and get adjusted, and sometimes when we make adjustments, there’s a release of gas from a joint and it makes a little click or a pop sound. And some people have an unfounded fear of that sound. They think bones are cracking, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
But what I want to share is that the reason to check a child is the same reason that you would check an adult. We’re looking to get the spine to a state of what we call clear and pressure off the nerve system. And these are caused by something called vertebral subluxations, which can be caused by the birth trauma, infants get dropped, falls when they’re learning to walk, rough housing with their brothers and sisters. There are so many different things that can create these misalignments, or what we call vertebral subluxations.
When we get pressure off the nerves and clear a nerve system, we get a better expression of life. And the odd thing that I’ve talked about before is most adults will wait until they’re in pain before they ever get their spine checked. But the one thing that I always quote and I say, is that it’s easier to raise healthy children than to repair broken adults. So, checking a spine early and keeping that nerve system clear, and making sure the mechanics are all smooth is the primary reason for checking a child.
Now, the adjustment requires a lot less pressure. And it’s actually safer to adjust infants and children than to adults, because adults have stress, tension, poor posture, they’ve been on the planet longer, they’ve had more injuries, and their spine is fully ossified. When I look at an infant’s spine, it’s cartilaginous, it’s soft, it’s malleable, it’s designed to be compressed, and all it takes is enough finger pressure, about the same amount of pressure you would use to touch your eyelid to correct the child’s spine.
So, it is super safe, it’s super gentle. The reasoning behind it is to detect and remove those vertebral subluxations, but the actual techniques vary quite a bit when we’re working with infants and young children. So, there’s a big difference in the way you adjust a child and the way you adjust an adult, but they’re both extremely safe.
And the last thing I always want to talk about when we talk about safety, is malpractice insurance. It costs me about $2,300 a year to insure my practice. It costs more to ensure my car than my practice. So, what chiropractic does is very safe because these insurance companies are really smart people and they base the fees, how much I get charged, on risk. Because chiropractic has such a low risk, they can’t charge a high rate. Medical doctors pay tens of thousands of dollars for their malpractice insurance. OBGYNs pay $200,000 or a quarter of a million. Anesthesiologists and surgeons pay a much higher rate because what they do has much more risk.
There is very little risk for children getting injured. I’ve never even heard of a case or anything that gets reported. I think chiropractic is about as safe as it could be for infants and children, much safer than putting off-label medications into kids to try and help them get back on the right track, especially when they’re dealing with colicky babies and things like that.
How early can chiropractic care begin for infants, and what would the chiropractor be checking for?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Those are good questions. And again, having a strong understanding of what chiropractic is, chiropractors are always checking the spine for the same thing. It’s what we call that vertebral subluxation or those misalignments. And so, what’s important to understand is that when we have those misalignments, it irritates the nerve system, it creates static in the line, and that’s important to understand.
Kids, they seem kind of rubbery and almost indestructible at times, but we can actually start working with kids from the minute they’re born. The earliest I’ve ever adjusted an infant was about six hours old. I was invited by the parents to come to the home and check the baby after the home birth. I’ve gone and checked my staff after they had their kids.
There’s really no too early, no too late. You’re always going to benefit by checking the spine and making sure that these kids get off to a healthy start. Because remember, it’s their nerve system that controls every stage of growth and development, all their neurologicals, all the development happens within the nerve system. When that nerve system is healthy and free flowing, everything happens on schedule and on time.
Can chiropractic care help improve a child’s development and overall body function?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Yeah, Liz, we kind of touched a little bit on that, and that’s really the main thing and the main way chiropractic works. Childhood is a key time for postural habits to develop and those postures to start setting in, and kids just want to be like their parents.
I can tell you that there was one time this guy came in, and he was probably in his mid-30s, and he had his son with him who was probably three or four, and they were dressed exactly the same. They were wearing the same khakis, the same shirt. And this dad had a very interesting way of standing, where both his hands were in his front pocket, his shoulders were rounded, and his head was kind of dropped down a little bit. And I literally took a look down at his son and it was looking at like mini-me. It was like a carbon copy of the dad. He had the exact same posture.
We forget, these kids are watching us, they’re watching us in every stage of growth and development. They just want to be like us. So, if we hold our head a certain way, our habits about how we use the phone, all those things, they’re looking to us. And the developmental years are a perfect time to make sure that we preserve the abundant health habits of our kids, and we need to teach them how to have healthy posture. We need to teach them about exercise. We need to teach them that misalignments can put pressure on the spine and that it’s important for them to have chiropractic care, because what they learn as kids, they’ll continue as adults.
And it’s really important, when we talk about development and body function, when these kids are so young, they can’t really communicate what their needs are. So, it’s just so important to maximize and make sure that that nerve system is running at its best and running like a DSL or a T1 line, not that crummy dial up we started with 30 years ago. It’s so important to make sure that every stage of growth and development is accompanied by proper nerve system function, proper alignment, and healthy habits.
What are some common pediatric conditions that chiropractic care helps with?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, chiropractic can help tons of different things in infants and children and adults. And what’s great about chiropractic care, is most of the things that we help kids with, we can also help adults with. Because again, it all goes back to nerve system and removing nerve interference.
When I talk to moms, the common things that people bring in, there’s a laundry list, but it can boost immune system function, colic relief. We get a lot of kids that are sick more frequently with ear infections. It can help improve breastfeeding and latching and turning the head.
A lot of moms come with kids that are colicky, and they’re in sympathetic overdrive because their nerve system is so jacked up and sympathetically overdrive that they don’t sleep. Improved sleep is another thing that we see with infants and children. It helps a lot with reflux. I can’t tell you how many times I see infants, kids that are six months old that doctors are prescribing off-label Prevacid and different types of things to help them with digestive issues that they’re having at six to eight weeks. It’s just crazy. Sleep disorders. Kids who are fussy. It improves post-birth recovery for both mom and the child. Torticollis is something we see a lot of infants and children with.
Chiropractors will adjust babies just to improve overall health. Kids suffering with asthma, it helps improve healthy brain development, physical development. We see constipation cases all the time where the kid hasn’t pooped. I actually have a colleague out on Long Island and he is nicknamed The Poop Doctor. A lot of these moms have these constipated kids and they look him up, and they go and they bring their kids from far and wide for this guy to check their kids. And a lot of them go and take care of business as soon as they see the chiropractor.
It encourages healthy growth. It can help with irritable infant syndromes. It just aids in physical development. The laundry list goes on and on and on.
Since the nerve system controls everything, anything that the nerve system controls, if we can get pressure off that nerve system, we can see a return to normal physiology and function, and that’s what we’re always looking for. It’s not a miracle by any ways, it’s just a return to normal function. Kids are designed to be healthy, and that’s how they should be.
What should parents expect during their child’s first chiropractic visit?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: The first chiropractic visit always kind of consists of two parts. We’re going to start off with a detailed consultation, and we’re going to explain to them what chiropractic is, and more importantly, what chiropractic is not. Some people think it’s like this panacea, that anything that we do on a kid and all of a sudden tumors are going to fall off their face and they’re just going to turn around right away, and it doesn’t really work like that all the time. There are a lot of these things that are seemingly miraculous, but it’s really just a return to normal.
We go through the consultation, we ask about the birth history, “Was the birth traumatic? Was it a C-section? Was it a vaginal delivery? Were there complications? Was there gestational diabetes?” So, we really dive deep into mom’s health history and then whatever happened at the birth. We will find out that information, and that’ll help guide us into the examination.
With the examination, the big thing is, remember, kids can’t tell you what’s going on. An infant is not going to be communicating what their issues and what their potential needs are. So, we use a lot of thermography, which can tell us a lot about where the misalignments are and how severe they are. Sometimes we will do x-rays, even on infants and children. I tend to be more sparing with that, unless I really think it’s important to help me find out where the problem is coming from. But to see is to know, and to not to see is to guess.
We are very thorough on the initial examination and the history. The more we know about that infant and more we know about the parent’s goals, the more we can really help them. So, it’s really a lot of explanation, because people aren’t that familiar with what we do in chiropractic, and that’s why I love doing these blogs to get people information. Obviously, I can’t tell everyone everything on these blogs and these phone calls and these conversations, but if it guides them to our website, everything is all spelled out there. There’s hundreds of these blogs and articles that I’ve written, and interviews with other doctors that you can really gain a lot of knowledge.
And then once people have knowledge, then they can make the decisions for themselves. It’s not a totalitarian thing where I just tell parents what to do. I invite them to participate and to learn that there’s a natural, holistic way to maintain the health of your spine and your nerve system. And the healthier your spine is, the healthier your nerve system is when you’re young, the healthier it’s going to be when you’re older. And a lot of these problems that people experience later in life can be staved off.
And that’s why with chiropractic care, we joke around and we say it should be from the womb to the tomb, but it’s really not a joke. If you care for your spine for your whole life, it’ll be healthier. If you care for your teeth your whole life, they’re going to be healthier. If you exercise your whole life, you’re going to be healthier. Anything that you need to do to keep yourself healthy, you need to do consistently, repetitively, and throughout the course of your lifetime, and chiropractic is no different.
Learn More
To speak with Dr. Gregg Rubinstein, visit www.ChiropractorMidtown.com or call (212) 977-7094 to schedule an appointment.
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