Chiropractic adjustments for babies are extremely gentle, often while the baby is held by a parent, and are tailored to each child’s age and behavior. These early adjustments aim to support a baby’s nervous system, improving functions like sleep, digestion, feeding, and developmental coordination by removing nerve interference and enhancing the body’s natural ability to adapt and heal.
Let’s start with the basics. What does a chiropractic adjustment look like for a newborn or an infant, and how does it differ from adjustments performed on adults?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, the looks can be very different depending on the child too. Sometimes with an infant, it’s easiest, especially when they’re very young, just to have the mom lying on her back and swaddling and holding the baby. And most of the time for an infant adjustment, they don’t really know that they’re getting adjusted, they’ve only been on the planet for a couple of days or a couple of weeks.
So the mom is just holding him, we’re checking him, when we do the adjustment after the analysis, the adjustments are so gentle on these tiny little newborns, and not because you need to be so careful with them. It’s actually safer to adjust infants than it is to adjust adults because an infant is mostly cartilaginous, they haven’t been exposed to stress, tension, poor posture, accidents, falls, and those types of things. They just haven’t been on the planet very long so there’s not a lot that can go wrong with them and it’s just a very gentle light finger touch. Usually about the same amount of pressure you would use to touch your own eye is about how much force is needed to make the adjustment in the babies.
I’ve adjusted infants on their mother’s laps while they’re nursing. Some kids, as they get older, want to be independent and they can climb on the table by themselves. Some kids are so antsy and wound up that we end up adjusting them in the waiting room while they’re sitting and playing and doing a seated adjustment because some kids just don’t have the bandwidth to sit still for that long.
So it’s a little bit different for every child, but on average, most of the time, any kid under 3 is usually attached to a parent, just sitting there and the parents holding them and talking to them and it’s very calm, very gentle, and most of the kids really love to get adjusted, so it’s kind of a cool thing.
In what ways gentle chiropractic adjustments help support an infant’s overall health in those critical first months of life, such as with feeding, sleep, and digestion?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Chiropractic can affect all things because chiropractic really works with the child’s nerve system. I know that the common perception is everyone thinks chiropractors are back doctors, and if you have back pain and neck pain that they’re the place to go. And don’t get me wrong, I understand we druglessly play a role in helping people with their back pain and neck pain, and I take that along with me.
But really when you look at what chiropractic does is we’re making adjustments to alleviate pressure and irritation from the nerve system, and since that nerve system controls sleep and digestion and the baby’s ability to eat, chiropractic can help with a lot of those things indirectly. Issues like asthma, allergies, digestive issues ranging from colic to constipation, acid reflux, autoimmune problems like ear infections that we see, and tons of other health issues are usually just a problem with the child trying to adapt. The nerve system is really what allows that baby’s system to adapt to whatever stresses or strains are put in front of them. So, chiropractic works to affect the nerve system, and if your child is amped up and in sympathetic overdrive and antsy and crying and screaming and yelling his head off, we can stimulate the parasympathetics, which is the opposite of sympathetic, bring that child to a lower neural resting tone. And when that baby’s tone is more relaxed, everything just seems to work better.
We stimulate the parasympathetics, they secrete less of the stress hormones, less cortisol, less adrenaline, and then they sleep better, they digest food, they’re just more connected to their own body. Remember, these kids don’t come with a manual, but they have an innate intelligence that runs, regulates and actually heals their own body. I have a lot more trust in the creative intelligence that built that baby to run and regulate that baby than any doctor, any pill, any potion, or lotion.
How can early chiropractic care benefit a baby’s physical development, for example, head control, rolling over, or hitting developmental milestones on time?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, that’s really cool because you’re talking about coordination. The first time I ever tried to pick up three balls and try to learn how to juggle them, it was a mess. I kept dropping the balls, I was spazzing out, and I was having all kinds of trouble because I didn’t have that coordination. Coordination is learned by repetition over and over until eventually my brain is out of it and it becomes reflexive.
Well, all these things like head control, rolling over, hitting a developed milestone, all those different things are products of coordination. So those pathways start to get learned, and the more you practice it, the easier it becomes until it becomes automatic. We have an autonomic nerve system that handles most of the other stuff, but coordination is learned. So as long as there’s no interference or pressure or static in the line, because if a baby has irritation to the nerve system, it creates static in the communication center and then there’s a lack of ease, especially when these subluxations are present. And everyone should know if they’ve ever been listening to our podcast that a subluxation is just a misalignment that irritates the neural structures. So that lack of ease or incoordination, the body’s more haphazard, less organized, and it’s truly the organization of the body that keeps it adapting, growing and developing more complex moving patterns and coordinating the efforts of the immune system. So, coordination is learned over time.
A clear nerve system is much easier to teach. Just like if I want to teach you a lesson and we have a staticky, cruddy phone connection and you can’t really hear me, well, you’re probably not going to learn that lesson too well. Or maybe you’ll get little bits and pieces of it, but I’ll have to keep repeating myself and it’s going to take much longer for you to learn that lesson. That’s the best analogy I can give, because once that nerve system is clear, then the body will develop and learn those patterns and coordinate all on its own without any help from the outside.
What other positive results have you seen with your newborn chiropractic patients?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, we’ve seen some amazing things. And what I love about chiropractic is the approach is the same, to find out where those misalignments are, remove that interference, and open up those nerve channels. And whatever happens after that is not really under my control. However, we’ve had kids who are colicky, struggling to feed, struggling to latch, and when you get the pressure off the nerve system, those connections are stronger, and these kids do better.
I’ve had instances where parents brought kids in who are wetting the bed, and it wasn’t that there was something actually wrong with the bladder or anything like that, but really what was going on there was a disconnect between the brain and the body. The child didn’t know at night that the bladder was full, it wasn’t getting the proper messaging. Very often we can do a couple of adjustments and reconnect that kid, and now that kid can go on a sleepover because he’s more connected to his body. And so, the results can be anything.
But parents say, “Oh, it was a miracle.” And really what I try to explain to them is that it’s not a miracle. The miracle is life and the miracle is the complexity of the nerve system. But really what they’re seeing is just a return to normal physiology, normal monitoring of the body. And that’s what I hang my hat on because I just want that kid to be normal. It’s not a miracle. I don’t have any kind of control. I’m not a magician. I’m not Jesus Christ by laying my hands on people and they just heal. The body is designed to do that. All I want to do is coax more of that proper nerve system function out so the body does that better.
Could you walk us through a typical visit? What can parents expect during their baby’s first chiropractic appointment and how should they best prepare?
Dr. Gregg Rubinstein: Well, the best preparing I find is that educated parents seem to understand our chiropractic principles. So, if you’re coming to a chiropractor, you might want to take a look at their website, you might want to read some of information, find out what this individual doctor is all about so you’re informed before you even get there. Then you can ask better questions.
But as far as the physical examination, what people to look at, as long as the baby’s got a diaper on, that’s really all we need. We’re usually going to strip the kid down to the diaper and then we’re going to take a look at their posture. We’re going to look for any asymmetry in posture or in their movements, reluctance or an inability to turn the head fully in both directions. When you’re looking at the child, are the shoulders and the hip heights different or are they the same and even and balanced? Is there incorrect positioning of the feet when the child is standing still? Is there asymmetrical muscle tone in the back or shoulders?
And so you do a pretty detailed inspection, but you’re also getting a lot of information from the parent. We’re finding out what the child’s struggles are, what’s working well for them, what are they are having trouble with. Are they having trouble latching? Is it trouble rolling over? Are they lying on one side and getting a flat spot on their head?
The other thing we do is we really look into the nerve system. We have some heart rate variability technology, which really we’re learning to use with the infants and children because they can’t give us as much feedback. So, we have to look at things like heart rate variability, thermography, objective findings that can’t be skewed by the doctor or by the patient, and that way when we run that, we can get a good idea of how well the baby’s nerve system is working. And if it’s not working and we’re seeing evidence of interference or subluxations, then we do the proper adjustments to clear them and then we’ll recheck them with the scans and see if there’s actual improvement. I love using the technology because it’s completely objective whether I think the baby is better or I think it’s this or that, it doesn’t really matter. The objective findings when we do those scans and the changes that we see after are truly what I hang my hat on.
There’s a lot of different things that go into examining a child. There’s palpation, actually feeling the joints, making sure they’re moving properly, but it’s all so gentle. 90% of the time the infants and children have no idea what’s even going on, and that’s really how it all works. So, we’re using a lot more objective findings along with our palpation and our chiropractic analysis to determine what’s going on, and then, again, making those gentle adjustments to remove the nerve interference and really make sure that that baby is functioning on or as close to 100%.
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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