Guest post: Mindi on breastfeeding from a chiropractic perspective

Dr. Mindi Palmer Fried is a mother of two and a family wellness chiropractor with an office  in Easthampton, Massachusetts.  She specializes in the care of pregnant women, infants, and children of all ages.  She is board certified by the Academy Counsel on Chiropractic Pediatrics (CACCP). 

Many people react with shock and horror at the idea of taking an infant to see a chiropractor.  And most folks don’t see a link at all between chiropractic and breastfeeding.  I’d like to address those concerns in this post.  

I’d like to start with two premises that are central to chiropractic:

First, the nervous system is the master system of our bodies – it controls and coordinates the function of every organ, tissue and cell in your body.  Without the nervous system, our bodies are just organic blobs.

Second, our bodies are self healing and self regulating as long as there is no interference.  Our bodies are designed to be healthy and work properly   We don’t have to teach our bodies how to heal from a cut – we don’t even have to put a bandage on it – our bodies clot, repair and renew themselves totally on their own.

The interference to the life force (innate intelligence) that the nervous system carries through our bodies is what we call in chiropractic “subluxation." A subluxation is caused when your body is overwhelmed by stress, and like the circuit breaker in your house, something small has to “give” to protect the entire body.  The area that “gives” in the spine is a joint that stops moving properly or gets out of position. 

Stress comes in many forms, but can be narrowed down to three general categories:  Physical, chemical and emotional.   Physical stress happens when we fall down, get in a car accident, sit in an uncomfortable chair, always carry a 10 pound purse on one shoulder – things that happen to your physical body are physical stressors.  Chemical stressors are things that we take in – through our mouths like caffeine, drugs, fast food, and trans-fats, through our lungs like environmental pollutants, and through our skin – like the chemicals in the skin “care” products we use.  Emotional stressors can be work, relationships, death of a loved one, and can also be internal – how you talk to yourself.  (A good guideline – if you wouldn’t talk to your loved one the way you talk to yourself, you need to rethink your self talk!).

I can hear you say – “What does this have to do with babies?  Babies don’t get stressed!”   Sure, maybe they aren’t at work with a screaming boss, but they’ve just been through a very intensely stressful experience called birth – remember that?  Even the most natural childbirth can be traumatic, and for that reason, I recommend that EVERY baby, regardless of symptoms, be checked out by a chiropractor that is trained to see babies.

Birth can place a special stress on the upper neck, especially in instances where there are interventions used to help get the baby out like forceps or vacuum, and even when it’s just a practitioner using the baby’s head as a lever to help get the rest of the body delivered.  (Although most babies who have been delivered by c-section have the “perfect head” because they haven’t been squeezed through the birth canal, they often have more issues because they are pulled from the womb without the benefit of the propulsive forces called contractions pushing them out.)  These stresses can cause a subluxation in the baby’s upper neck, which can have a very close relationship with the process of breastfeeding.  When the joints in the upper neck aren’t working the way they should, a baby may have difficulty opening his mouth very wide or turning her head to one side or the other.  Some specific symptoms to look for that would indicate subluxation include latching well on one side but not on the other, a weak suck, difficulty opening the mouth wide enough to latch, Mom complaining of pain with a latch that appears normal (especially if it’s only on one side), and Mom noticing that one breast isn’t getting emptied as well as the other.

Of course, breastfeeding involves more than just the baby – don’t forget about you when it comes to chiropractic care.  Not only can chiropractic help with the changes from all the stressors that she experienced while pregnant and with delivery.  A study was published in 2007 about chiropractic care helping mothers with low milk supply produce more milk.  Given the premises I mentioned earlier – this makes perfect sense.  Chiropractic care was simply removing the interference that was not allowing these women’s bodies to produce the milk they needed.  Again, the nervous system is in charge here - it sends the messages to the brain to release prolactin and oxytocin, the hormones you need to produce and let down milk.

A chiropractor who has had special training on working with babies will know exactly how to adapt their care to fit the tiny body of the infant.  An adjustment (what we chiropractors call the correction for a subluxation) is often given with just a pinky fingertip, and so slight that it is imperceptible to most folks seeing it.  A good place to find a chiropractor who has been trained to work with babies is the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association website – www.ICPA4Kids.org.  There is a doctor locator button on the main page there. 

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