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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