Safe Chiropractic Care During Pregnancy

Pregnant and wondering if it's safe to see a chiropractor? The answer is a resounding YES! Learn about the Webster technique and how chiropractic care can support a healthy pregnancy on our latest episode of #AskTheChiropractor. #healthy815 #palmerproud #icachiropractic

www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr Brant Hulsebus here, and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask the Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford Icehogs. Let's dive into it. Hi and welcome to another episode of Ask the Chiropractor. So today I want to talk a little bit about pregnancy and chiropractic. Can I go to the chiropractor if I'm pregnant? Should I be seeing a chiropractor if I'm pregnant? And the answer is yes, yes, yes, yes. So chiropractors have always taken care of pregnant women and chiropractic and pregnancy has always gone hand in hand. Number one reason is when you're pregnant, you can't take a bunch of different medications. That's the one time everybody agrees that you should not be doing a bunch of different meds. And so if you're having health care problems and you can't do medicine You don't want to go to a medical doctor because they give you medicine that's in their name. But you can go to a chiropractor. The chiropractor, there is no medicine. That's part of ours. Chiro means just hands and practice means the application of using just hands to help you. So chiropractic care is extremely safe and extremely effective for pregnant women and everybody, right? Everyone's safe to go to the chiropractor, but if you're pregnant, of course it's safe to go to a chiropractor. Absolutely. At Palmer College, that's where we all went to school, we had a whole class just on taking care of pregnant women. It's a big part of our education. We have tables that adapt to you being pregnant. They move out of the way. They help us out in order to make you comfortable. So the adjustment is great for you. Chiropractic and pregnancy is probably one of the most researched topics in our entire profession. We have multiple agencies that do postgraduate work, the even bigger depth of what we already learned in school and the bigger depth into chiropractic and pregnancy. And in order to get your finalized those classes, you either have to be part of a research project or you have to write a paper and get it published in the journal. If you go to chiropractic. org, there's an entire journal that gets published three, four times a year on Chiropractic care for newborns and pregnancy. It's just, the articles just keep coming and coming. Myself, I was involved in one group and I was part of a research project here where we gave moms questions to answer, gave the kids care, and then gave mom more questions, gave the kids more care, and mom filled out more questions. So it was data based research. But absolutely. See, in 2015, I injured my arm really bad. I had to have my elbow surgery and my elbow reattached. Kinda, not very much fun. But I couldn't work, so I went back to school. And I took all kinds of extra classes on taking care of pregnant moms. and taking care of newborn babies. And I did these classes on taking care of pregnant moms. One of the things that we learned was a technique called the Webster technique. Now the Webster technique was originally designed by Dr. Larry Webster. It's Webster like the dictionary. You can look it up the word. You can look up the technique if you want. Google search it because you won't find anything bad about it. But look at the Webster technique. And what does we do when we have a mom with a breached baby, meaning the baby is presenting feet first to the head first, and we don't really worry about this to the later pregnancy, like week 36, week 37. All we do is it's a five part adjustment with a six part that's attached to it. And the first part is we just look at mom's tailbone. We adjust mom's tailbone. And we use the table for that. Like it pops three times. We get in there and we move mom's tailbone. Cause the nerves coming out of the tailbone are the ones that help everything relax. And see if there's a lot of tension, a lot of stress in the womb area. The womb actually gets squeezed a little bit and baby can't move. And so baby's upside down. So we adjust mom's tailbone. One, two, three. Mom, we barely feel much on this at all. Then what we do is we do a trigger point on a ligament. There's a ligament on the backside. It's right here. between where you sit on it and where your tailbone goes. If this ligament is really tight, it can actually push up against the womb and cause problems. So we do a little trigger point on that. Okay. Then what we do is we flip mom over and we have mom reach above her head, put both hands above her head. And there we're looking for a tight hip flexor muscle called the psoas. P S O A S. If that muscle is tight, we can actually stretch and exercise it for mom to help that ligament relax. The next part we do is we look at the round ligament of the uterus. If the round ligament of the uterus is tight or having problems, we will go in there. We will find that ligament. We will do a trigger point on that ligament and help that ligament relax. You see the round ligament of the uterus is the only ligament all of human anatomy to have smooth muscle in it. So it has smooth muscle in it. It's capable of getting tight and locking up and having issues. So if we go in and do the trigger point on that round ligament, we can get that round ligament to relax again, just like we move the stretch, the SOAs muscle that's squeezing the womb, we take the ligament in the backside that squeeze in the womb. This ligament in the front can also squeeze the womb and baby can't get around and move. So we do a that to help it relax and so that way the womb can have open up and then baby can flip. I talked about five parts. The part we also like to do is always adjust the C1 because the C1 does the vagus nerve. Last week I talked a lot about the vagus nerve. The vagus nerve tells the body we're out of danger, it's time to relax. It generically does everything belly button up, but it has a little influence down there, too. So we always check your atlas bone, too, to get that adjusted. Basically, we're trying to turn off the fight and flight, the nervous system that's when you're in danger. Stimulate the opposite nervous system like this. It's time to grow, heal, repair. We call that the parasympathetics. At the same time, we do a couple trigger points to help everything else relax and get into place. Now we used to wait, I said, until like late pregnancy to be concerned about the Webster technique. But in chiropractic, we preach prevention, prevention, prevention, prevention. So why should we wait to the very end? So now the moment you tell us you're pregnant, the new research shows us we should continue to do this the moment you're pregnant through the pregnancy. That's what I told you, the research on chiropractic care for pregnancy just keeps growing and growing and growing and getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So the technique we used to wait to use until you had a problem, the research shows now don't wait until they have a problem, start it right away. So when should you go to the chiropractor if you're pregnant? Right away. Why have a problem and try to fix the problem? Just go get it adjusted right away. Now, If you're pregnant, are we going to take x rays of you? No. No, we're not going to take x rays of you. Because we're not using a very aggressive technique here. Not a very aggressive adjusting style. We're using a much more passive style. So we're able to take care of you. Again, we're not really taking care of you. We're taking care of the baby to come. Right? If you just mom, make mom feel better, great, but we're really more worried about having a normal healthy pregnancy so the baby can come good. So the main focus for us is the patient we haven't met yet, the patient that you're pregnant with and then, happy baby, happy mom. So that's our real goal, is to try to get mom ready for this. When it comes to the Webster technique, prior to starting it when pregnancy starts, and then when we used to wait until the baby presented for breech, or when a midwife will refer me a patient who's breeched and say, can you do the Webster technique? I've worked 21 for 22 on breech babies so far, myself. It's been really effective for us. Again, now that we started doing it the moment you're pregnant, we don't really keep count anymore because we don't let you get to that point anymore. We don't want to fix it. We just want to keep it normal the whole time. But when somebody comes in to me and they say, hey doc, I got a breached baby. Can you help me? The answer is always yes. We'll do the Webster technique. And again, you watch these crazy videos on TikTok and YouTube. Nothing like that. Absolutely nothing like that. We're not doing anything like those videos. Nope. And we're not grabbing the baby in the womb and trying to move the baby around. Not at all. We are just simply doing soft tissue releases and passive chiropractic adjustments to areas to make the womb area relax and make the baby flip. Now there's all kinds of research that shows that moms who are under chiropractic care have quicker normal births. I don't know how you compare that to maybe a mom who hasn't had them. I don't know that, I don't know how they come up with the number sometimes. But we find that typically when a mother is adjusted to her pregnancy, the odds of having a normal childbirth go way up. And being a more comfortable mom too, the whole time is way up. Now, if you're already a patient of ours and you become pregnant, then we can do a lot more because we previously have x rays of you. We previously know what's normal on you, what's not normal on you, so we can do a better job. But don't let that be a reason not to go. If you just find out you're pregnant, you've never been to a chiropractor before, absolutely go. Absolutely go and get checked. It would be a great thing to do. And then, like myself, I have all this knowledge from seminars I've gone to from different organizations on pediatrics and pregnancy, you're the chiropractor is going to have a lot of old school tips like, one of the tips I told a lot of people is red raspberry leaf tea. Red raspberry leaf tea is a great tea near the end of your pregnancy to stimulate contractions and get the ball rolling. And we have all kinds of advice like that and tips like that we've learned. And again, Red raspberry leaf tea is about the hardest thing I prescribe, right? You're not going to get a bunch of pills and drugs from us. You're going to get natural, holistic answers. And I don't know too many moms to be that don't want that for their baby coming. They want the natural, holistic things. And then when your baby's born, the chiropractor can do stuff right there, too. We've had a lot of moms On their way to the hospital, stop and get adjusted one more time before they went to the hospital. I did say there was an odd part about the web trick technique. There's a special part of that we do that can get labor going or stop early labor. I'm very proud to say in the 10 years I've never had to do that because our moms who were getting adjusted regularly, Don't have those problems. I like to think that's why. But I am trained. I do know how to do it. I got a little certificate on the wall that says I can do it. I've been trained to do it. If you're pregnant, or you have a friend that's pregnant, or you know someone in your family that's pregnant. They should really consider going to a chiropractor. Again, I have the Webster certificate. Other doctors here are all trained in it. We all learned it at chiropractic school. You just want to call a chiropractor and ask them if they're comfortable seeing a patient that's pregnant. Because, it might not be everybody's bread and butter. They might not be something you actually want to learn to do. My wife's had three pregnancies. We have four kids. The last two came together. So I helped her with all three of those. The best I could as her chiropractor and husband. Dr. Dase, he's gonna be expecting a little one here soon. So he's doing this right now with his wife. Dr. Hayes has got two little boys. He's adjusted them, and taking care of his wife through her whole pregnancy. So we all have had firsthand experiences with our loved ones and we can definitely do the same for you. Like I said I can't even count how many Pregnant moms I've taken care of in my practice over since 2002. Seems like I always have eight though, right? It seems like somebody gives birth, somebody else comes and tells me they're pregnant. For some reason eight's like my magic number. But again, eight for the last 20 years that's a lot of, that's a lot of pregnant moms that's coming out of my office. So if you're pregnant and you've got questions about pregnancy and chiropractic care and you maybe want to talk to the chiropractor more in depth, the chiropractor should be able to, I know we are able to sit down and have a consultation with you to make you feel more comfortable, more at ease, and go over it in more depth and more detail than I'm doing right now, but if you're pregnant, you should really consider chiropractic care. If you Should you ask your OBGYN if you consider chiropractic care? What's the name of this podcast? Ask the chiropractor if you have a question about chiropractic care. But it's okay to ask the chiropractor, are you comfortable taking care of pregnant women? Is that something that you like to do? Is that something that you studied and got involved in? Because some chiropractors will tell you no. Some chiropractors say, I just take care of athletes or I just take care of geriatric patients or I just take care of auto accidents. That may not be the right chiropractor for you. So you could ask the chiropractor that too. Are you comfortable taking care of children and taking care of moms? And you get your answer. So there you have it. So if you're pregnant, yeah, by all means you should definitely talk to a chiropractor. And if you have any other questions about chiropractor or chiropractic care, always ask a chiropractor. Thanks for tuning in.