Why do people bring their infants to a chiropractor? Dr Hulsebus discuss why people bring young ones to the chiropractor. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
Why do people bring their infants to a chiropractor? Dr Hulsebus discuss why people bring young ones to the chiropractor. #healthy815 #icachiropractor #palmerproud
www.rockforddc.com
- Hello, my name's Dr. Brant Hulsebus, chiropractor. And, welcome to another episode of "Ask the Chiropractor.""Ask the Chiropractor," is my little podcast that I do, where I help answer questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care. You see, if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the experts the chiropractor and somebody else. A lot of people mistakenly will ask your family physician or maybe a physical therapist or somebody else in healthcare questions they have regarding chiropractic care, instead of asking an actual chiropractor. You see, if I had a question about my teeth, I wouldn't ask my podiatrist, I'd ask my dentist. So, if you have a question about what chiropractic care is or whether or not this is chiropractic, or how does chiropractic work on different things, people come on, they ask me the question. So, today I had a patient in the office, and they saw a bunch of little kids come out one of the rooms, and they asked me,"Do the little babies like that, actually see the chiropractor?" So, I want to talk a little bit about babies in chiropractic. The answer is yes, babies do come in and see the chiropractic. Now, let me tell you a quick little story about my family. You see, my dad was in chiropractic school, just about ready to graduate when I was born. So, I was actually born in Davenport, Iowa, Because we all went to Palmer College of Chiropractic. And, while at Palmer College of Chiropractic, we get a brief class, not a brief class, but we get training on taking care of newborn babies, toddlers, and everything else. And so, when I was born, the next day my dad brought me to the college, and I saw Dr. Strang. Dr. Strang gave me my first ever adjustment. Why Dr. Strang? Well, Dr. Strang was teaching pediatrics at the time, so why not go see the pediatric teacher at the best chiropractic college is? So, my father brought me in, Dr. Strang adjusted me. So, I know firsthand that chiropractors not only get education on chiropractic, but they also get adjusted by pediatric chiropractors. And, today we have some post-graduation certifications you can get in pediatric chiropractic. One of them that I'm very partial to is the one from the International Chiropractic Association on Pediatrics. What does this mean? Well, every chiropractor gets a good basic education to taking care of newborns, and babies, and pediatrics going through school. It's on our national boards, we're testing on it. So, it's part of the standard chiropractic curriculum, knowing how to take care of kids. But, some chiropractors want to get more involved in different kinds of kids, like maybe kids with autism, maybe kids that were born prematurely, maybe kids with special needs. There's whole different areas you can dive further into and educate yourself more on. Just like today in medicine, you have doctors that know about shoulders, and then doctors that specialize in shoulder surgery. So, they're both doctors, medical doctors, but one of them has more of a specialty. So, some chiropractors have created more of a specialty when it comes into diving deeper into other issues with children. Now myself, I have four children. My first two were born, no situations, nothing odd or peculiar. But, the second two came 10 weeks early. They were twins, and they were, excuse me, they are twins, and they were born prematurely 10 weeks early. So, I'm up in the pediatric unit at the hospital. They have to stay in the NICU for about six weeks. And, at that moment I realized I had a pretty good grasp of pediatric chiropractic. But, now we have a unique situation, not just a standard birth delivery of the kids. And, I realized there was more I wanted to learn. So, once the two children came home, I was then, my wife and I got into our new life with having twins. Once all the, once they graduated past all the things that NICU kids had to do with, I had, weird act, I ended up having a massive arm injury, and I ended up not being able to work. So, when I couldn't work, I decided at the advise of one of my surgeon friends, to go back to school. So, I went back and took a whole bunch of pediatric courses and learned more in depth stuff. And so, as chiropractors you could ask your chiropractor whether or not they just have standard education of pediatrics or whether they've actually taken some more advanced training. I've taken a year to two years worth of advanced training on taking care of, not only newborn babies and toddlers, but also the Webster technique in adjusting moms that are pregnant. The Webster technique was originally designed to help flip a breached baby. Now, what we do there, because you might go on TikTok and see some crazy stuff, but all we do there is we adjust mom's tailbone, and we affect the nervous system, which then affects the womb, which it allows the womb to open and allow the baby to move. There's also some trigger points and other stuff involved in that. If you like to look that up, that's Webster, like Webster's Dictionary. You can find it all over the internet. There's tons of research and papers on it. It's cool stuff. So, I'm certified in the Webster technique, but I've also did the pediatric courses. And so, some of the reasons why people bring kids in to see a chiropractor besides just stuff you typically see, kids do fall, crash, and burn. So, the number one thing, when I have a newborn baby, I tell the moms to bring the child in. If, one, the child's not sleeping well, two, the child's not having issues with bowel movements. And, three, and lastly, colic. Colic is when the child's not sleeping. Cranky, fussy, basically the child has something wrong with them, and they can't tell us what's wrong. And, the beautiful thing about chiropractic is we don't really need to know things, like, my grandfather barely ever took a history. He did his chiropractic exam, an X-ray exam on you, and he would tell you what was wrong with you, because he could see it through your spine where the nerves went, and the body parts were evolved. Today, with the Affordable Care Act, we're no longer allowed to do that. We have to take a full medical history. But, it was a lot of fun before the Affordable Care Act when we were able to tell you what we saw wrong with you before you told us what was wrong with you. So, that's why I tell moms to bring in babies. Now, adjusting the baby, a lot of people have some nervousness about this, especially a small little newborn. Well, we do it a whole different technique, in a whole different style. What we do is we analyze the baby completely different than we analyze an adults. So, I analyze an adult, matter of fact, I was just traveling with a friend, and as we were walking through the airport, I would tell my friend,"Oh, that person has a right hip problem.""Oh, this person has this L4 problem. We can just tell by the way you walk and carry yourself a lot of times what's going on, that's part of our training. But, of course, newborn babies, they don't walk. They can't even hold their own heads up. So, we have a whole different way that we take care of them, whole different way to analyze them. And, this is part of more of that specialized training. So, now I have a newborn baby. A lot of times what we'll do is we'll look at the head and we'll see which way the head moves when we hold the baby upside down. Now, why do we do that? Well, the C1 vertebrae, the very top bone in your neck, it sits really wide and it sits on top of the second bone. The second bone is a little tree stump right there that sticks up called that odontoid process. And, the C1 wraps around that, and it tells people no that those of you who are old enough, like me, to remember Christopher Reeve, Christopher Reeve broke that process right there. That's why he was paralyzed. But, right here, the C1 rotates left and right, and that's where the majority of your rotational forces in your neck come from. So, let's say a little one has, during the birthing process, there was some pulling and yanking, maybe suction, maybe it was a cesarean birth, who knows. But, if the C1 should move left or right when you hold the baby upside down, if the C1 is stuck off to the side like this, the baby's head will turn away from that, and the baby will show distress. If the C, actually, the C1 and the skull itself has a misalignment on it, the baby will either hold its head up or forward and be in distress. Normally, if you hold a newborn baby upside down, they view it as a game. They don't view it as stress. So, if you ever hold a newborn baby upside down, and the baby's distraught and angry, it gives us big clues there could be something going around with the neck. Now, the second thing we check on the babies is their hips, because the hips can get pulled and yanked down too during their birthing process. And, to do that, what we know is that skin attaches the tissue, which is usually muscle, and muscle touches the bone. So, if skin attaches to muscle, and muscle touches the bone and the bone moves, that would pull the muscle that would pull the tissue. So, to see if a hip goes up or down, left or right, usually what we do is we pull the baby's diapers down and we squeeze their rear cheeks together, and if the crack obviously deviates left or right, that gives us bigger clues of which one to start analyzing. Now, that's not the end all be all. That's just the first step. Then the chiropractor will check the motion and stuff like that. Now, many of you know I take care of a AHL hockey team, the farm team for the Chicago Black Hawks. And, when you adjust a Black Hawk player, an ice hockey player, it takes a little bit of oomph to get them adjusted, because they're big, strong young lads. Babies are not. So, we don't even use the same techniques. Not only do we not use the same techniques to analyze the babies, but we also use different techniques to analyze, to adjust the babies. And, basically, it's called a sustained contact. And, what that means, I take my finger, I find the spot, I put pressure until I feel the baby relax and the bone move. There is no quick thrust like we do in a normal adjustment. It's totally different for newborns because we don't have to overcome their muscle tension and their resistance, because they don't have any. So, it's just a matter of just putting a little bit of pressure on there. Now, usually as soon as you get a little baby adjusted, you get an immediate reaction from the child. The child will laugh, giggle, and be at more at ease. And so, we pretty much always know when this occurs, because we see the baby go at ease. Now, with colic, this is definitely something, because a lot of times the baby has been angry or fussy, and these are usually the easiest ones to find when a baby has an issue. Again, why do babies have colic? Some doctors look at their stomachs, some doctors look at their headaches, some doctors look at this and that. The bottom line is the baby is in discomfort, and the baby can't tell us what's wrong. So, the baby's just mad and they can't, the baby can't relax, the baby can't take pressure off'cause there's something going on with the baby, and the baby can't communicate. That's my 2 cents, and that's what I talked to other chiropractors about. So, what we do is we find that misalignment, we help that baby out, and usually the babies bounced right back. I was actually at a party one night, and a guy came over and said that he wanted to make sure I had a great night, and I didn't know him, but it turns out his wife had brought their infant son in for colic, and I had taken care of him, and he had told me how him and his wife were under so much stress they couldn't sleep or nothing. And, he and the wife came over, and I instantly recognized her and we had a good chuckle about it. But, he told everybody at that party I was his hero, because I helped this little one go to sleep. So, and again, we talked about the colic a little bit. We talked about the babies not sleeping right. We do the adjustment in the neck, we usually get big results with that. And, then the one also with the bowels, if a child's not having normal bowels, I've had a lot of parents, you know, if you're a patient of mine, you have a child, I have a standard line. If you go to the pediatrician with an issue, you know, like, you aren't happy or satisfied with the answer the pediatrician gave you, then come talk to me afterwards. So, I had a mom in here, her little guy hadn't had a bowel in five days and the pediatrician says,"Yeah that just happens," you know, I don't know, I don't know if I could go five days. So, we looked at the little guy in here, we adjusted his hip. We were able to find the fixation, like I said, with the checks. And, we moved around, the hip was stuck. We did a little adjustment on that hip. The little guy had a diaper right there, had a diaper in the way to the car, had a diaper, said his mom got him buckled in, long story short, he had about eight or nine diapers that night after we got his hips adjusted. So, that's fun for me to get the quick response. It's not fun when dad calls me up and says,"Enough's enough now," this dad did call me up, and said "Enough's enough now can we, how do we turn it back off again? We want to get some sleep. He just keeps filling his diaper." But, to me that's a good kid that we just helped out get over a hump. So, and even my own daughters when they were in the NICU, the doctors there, our kids didn't do well with dairy to a certain age. So, they, when we weren't there, the NICU, the doctor decided to give him dairy base formula supplement as mom was trying to pump as much as she could, but with twins and NICU, and 10 weeks early, it was a struggle. We did the best we could. But, so they gave him some dairy in their formula and they got backed up, and I looked at my wife, I go,"well, let me adjust them, and we down have lunch because we don't want to be here." They told me they had a bowel after they gave the dairy. So I adjusted their hips and we came back up, and their whole isolates were destroyed, because after I adjusted them everything came out. So, definitely something we see a lot of as chiropractors to help out with that. So, but there you have it. Somebody says, "why would an infant get adjusted? Why have that little baby go to the chiropractor?" That's kind of the answer. Now, how do we transition them from adjusting like newborns to adjusting them like adults? Well, as they age and grow and change, we change our techniques as we go. And, the bottom line is we can always start off with the lighter techniques and see if they work. And, if they don't, then we get, treat them more like adults as they age, and kind of do that gap. So, if you bring a little kid in, like a two or three year old, you might see us start with this, and then say,"let me try it like this now,""Let me try it like this now.' The bottom line is we're starting off treating them like a newborn. I'm going to work our way up till we get there, because we don't want to overdo it too fast too quick. So, if you have a question about pediatrics, and you see a chiropractor, ask your chiropractor if they do any pediatric classes or training. Again, every chiropractor gets a lot of that stuff in chiropractic school, or at least at Palmer College. That's the only school I went to and that's the only school I can comment on. I'm not saying anything bad about the rest of 'em I can only talk what I know. So, at Palmer College we do a pretty good pediatric course, but again, that was an area of subject I liked. That was an area of subject that I wanted to get dive into, especially as I became a father. So, I took a lot more advanced training classes in it. You can ask your chiropractor what advanced training classes they've taken in that before you see them. You can also, a lot of times, find a pediatric chiropractor just by looking at their website, taking a look at it, and see if that's a chiropractor for you, or just go to the clinic. If you come to my clinic, you see I have little kids here. Not hard math to figure out. They must take care of a lot of kids here. So, there you have it,"Ask the Chiropractor." So, remember, if you have questions about chiropractor, or chiropractic care, always ask a chiropractor. If you want more from me, go to my website at RockfordDC.com. That's R-O-C-K-F-O-R-D-D-C.com, and you can submit a question there. We previously were able to host all of our blogs there. We're just having a little problems with our website. We'll get back on it soon, I promise. All these topics will go back. Otherwise, Facebook, YouTube, or wherever else you listen to this podcast, there's tons of more to dive into it. I know this isn't the first time I've done this question but I'll keep doing it every time I get asked. Alright everybody, thanks. Talk to you real soon.