Sedentary Lifestyles and Spinal Health in Children

In this episode of 'Ask The Chiropractor,' Dr. Brant Hulsebus discusses why children might need chiropractic care, emphasizing the impact of sedentary lifestyles on spinal health. He covers the prevalence of spinal pain in children under 19, the role of chiropractic care in maintaining spinal health, and provides insights from a systematic review of 20 studies involving 90,000 kids. Dr. Hulsebus also shares personal anecdotes and professional observations about the importance of early and preventive chiropractic treatment for kids, and offers practical advice for parents.

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/59/6/409

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 Ice Oaks. Let's dive into it. Hi there. Have you ever heard of someone who took their kid to the chiropractor? Why would a child go with a chiropractor? Right? Why would any kid need a chiropractor? Here's a clue why a kid would need a chiropractor. They get a spine, right? They get a spine, they get in car accidents, they fall. They hurt themselves. Going to YouTube and typing kid. Accidents or kid crashes and it's crazy to watch these videos. I was involved in a auto accident deposition one time and they said, this kid can't have a neck problem. He's only 15. I'm like, what does that have to do with anything? He was in a car that got rear ended. What is it? Get 18 magically your neck can have problems, but before that you were indestructible. That's crazy talk. And I showed 'em the video of all these kids crashing. I, I did it by accident. But all these kids falling and wiping out and hurting themselves, and the jury started laughing at the videos. Kinda hard to say that a kid can't hurt their spine. Remember before they used to tell us that babies don't feel pain? Where'd that come from? Yeah, kids could definitely go to a chiropractor Now, should the kids go to a chiropractor for several different reason. And we have tons of kids that come in here. Number one reason. They don't wanna grow up crooked. They don't wanna grow up with problems. Maybe mom and dad have chronic back problems. And they don't like it, right? And they started chiropractic care too late because nobody ever told 'em to go to a chiropractor. And they're mad about that. They're mad. Nobody refer 'em to a chiropractor. So they brought their kids in. They start their kids under care. Kids come in for maintenance care. They come in like once a month. They come in once every two weeks, or they come in as they need it. If they're playing a sport. If you don't think a kid needs a chiropractor, go watch a high school basketball game. My daughter's a cheerleader. I watch these boys out there and they're running their tumbling. They're falling over the place, and now they're talking about just the basketball players. My daughter's a cheerleader, like I just said, but my daughters come home with black eyes. They're sore wrists. Those girls are tossing each other around doing jumps and everything on a hard floor with really bad shoes. It's about looking good. It's not about functioning good when you're a high school cheerleader. Yeah, kids need chiropractors. That's crazy talk. So kids come in the chiropractor all the time and there's, lots of people do research on this. There's tons of research on this. I'm part of the International Chiropractic Association and we have a pediatric council and they publish a journal just on pediatric care for kids in chiropractic and like I think every quarter, if not more. Don't get mad at me. Members of the pediatric CI don't know the exact number, but that's right on the chiropractic.org website. You can go on there and get a copy of that if you wanna look at it. And we have so many specialties in chiropractic when it comes to pediatrics. Myself, I did one 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I don't remember. I did a whole course on it. I'm certified as the Webster Technique. That's Justin moms who. The baby might be breached or upside down. We can adjust mom's tailbone and do a couple of trigger points and the baby flips over. It's really cool. I won't done a ton of 'em. I know I, now we do 'em the moment we find out mom's pregnant. But before we just do 'em once the ba like mom comes in, Hey, my baby's breached. Can you help me? I flip 21 babies. It's really cool in order to have a better birth for both mom and baby. So there's just tons and tons of it. But today I wanna talk about an interesting study. It's called the the link between Seditary behavior and spinal pain in kids right now. I'm a Gen Xer. I just turned 50 years old. I rode my bike places, I rode my skateboard places. I walked and ran places and after school my mother didn't get home till after dinner time. She had a job and my sister and I had to fend for ourselves, make our own dinner and stuff like that. That was my generation. And what we didn't have is we didn't have video games. It wasn't until like I was. Probably about 14 or so the Nintendo came out because that wasn't something a lot of us had. There was the Atari that some of us had briefly, but we didn't spend a lot of time playing that we were outside doing stuff, making forts and messing around playing the local park. So we were out running around with today's kids. That's just not the world we live in anymore. A lot of people want to blame the kids for loving their phone so much, but a lot of us don't wanna let our kids out 'cause of safety reasons. It's not only that, but we just had a pandemic, right? The kids were totally stuck inside. So there was a research that, that was like a review of all the different research papers out there, and I'll put a link to this. Paper, wherever you're listening or watching this, so you can check out the paper yourself. You don't take my word for it. Read the paper. And it is a neat paper. It was 20 different studies they reviewed to take all the literature from 20 different papers. And the question just became is does, does a sedentary behavior cause spinal pain in children? The systematic review, the metal analysis, and I think it was over like a 120 thou or 90,000 kids. We're in these studies. So it's a nice size population, right? 90,000 kids. And if you're under 19, 40% of kids under 19 are gonna have spinal pain at some point. So again, do chiropractors, should they see kids? 40% of them have spinal problems. I would think that would make sense. But they went through, they looked at all these different studies and they wanted to see if there was evidence that. We always say, sitting too long in front of your computer or in front of your tablet, or your phone's gonna cause spinal problems. We all say that, but is it true? It shows out that you're 25% more likely to develop these pains under the age of 19 if you have that ary lifestyle. So if you're just sitting in front of the screen all the time, the odds of you having back pain are go 25%. So one of every four kids is gonna definitely have problems with this lifestyle. So is that significantly important? But yeah, I got four kids that mean it's one of my four kids is gonna have spinal problems, that they have this lifestyle that's important to me, so what can we do about it? That's what we do as chiropractors. They say that when you sit, you roll your shoulders forward and your head comes out and you lose your neck curve. And the research shows that for every one inch forward, your head goes. Like 10 pounds more, pulling down between your shoulders and gravity.'cause you're not designed to hold your neck that way. And so the further out it goes, the more it pulls down. So we're seeing more and more kids a today that come in with bad neck posture. It used to be like, 'cause our practice has been open since 1949. So it's really cool because I can go back and tell you how people came in the sixties and the fifties compared to how they come into 2000 twenties.'cause back then they didn't come in until they got their job. So if I got a job or I sat behind a desk all day, then I lost my neck posture. But the people that were out working the fields out working manual jobs, or just kids out playing, doing, they didn't have these things, so this things weren't happening. So they weren't in this position for too long. They were outside having fun doing things. So over time we seen more and more of that sedentary lifestyle. We're seeing more and more kids come in with their neck curve shot. It was, I don't think my grandpa saw too many people at all that had this neck problem. Now I will agree that when you read a book, it's the same posture, but kids are kids. You get the kid that gets straight A's is gonna read books, but the kid that gets straight C's, he's out having fun, having a good time. So yeah, this is pretty cool research to look at this and to think about it. And it doesn't even get into the different things like as far as social interactions, mental health, and everything else that goes above the secondary lifestyle. So what's the takeaway from this? If you have a kid that's sitting too long and you try to look at 'em, you start to notice their neck's getting along, under their head, sticking out, a good trip to the chiropractor's, a good idea. Really good idea. Now, here in my office what we would do is we would take some x-rays if that was a significant problem with the child and just wanna see what's going on with their neck posture. I maybe, I, I don't know if I'd x-ray everything, but I'd definitely x-ray the neck to see what's going on and see what's happening. It also depends on the age of the kid and whether or not just obvious to me, we do an exam, find out what's going on, and then what we would do is we would start adjusting the neck to loosen it up and we'd send the kid home with an exercise program, posture exercises. If it's a severe case, I work with people down the street, my good friends at Movement Fitness, and they have, I send 'em over there to work with coach Mace, other people to work on their posture and their neck issues to try to get them to come happier, better place to get it back to normal again. But these things can be corrected, especially in somebody under 19, especially if we're still growing, right? If we're still growing, that's huge. We can make big changes, permanent changes. Again, when you think about it too, we talk about this other things. The spinal cord has these, last week I talked about the dentate ligaments. These ligaments that go straight out on the side and they hang out of the walls of the spinal canal. So the spinal cord can't go up and down. Those are hanging on. So as your neck comes more and more forward from a Cary lifestyle, it's gonna pull on it more and more, but it's not going up and down. So the only thing left to do is we elongate the neck, is to pull the midbrain down, and that creates all kinds of havoc.'cause your midbrain is your coordination center, more or less, sorry to my neurology teachers to simplify this, but it's basically your coordination center. So if that's getting more and more plugged in the whole, the foram and mag, the base of your skull, that's a lot of pressure. And then that can be all kinds of different issues. We're seeing, I got a friend down in Florida with a motion, MRI machine. He's doing adjustments and watching the midbrain pop back up when he does the adjustments. But we're seeing this midbrain stuff having a lot to do with people when it comes to just their overall anxiety, behavior issues. It's so powerful. So getting him in and getting'em adjusted is gonna be huge. And then, not only that after the adjustments are done. We gotta find something else to do. We gotta find a different activity, whether it's in the arts, going to here in my town, we have a place called the Studio where the kids can go over and do musicals and plays. They're running around, they're having a great time. They're learning social skills, interacting with each other. We have different sports, obviously. Everyone knows sports, get 'em set up for sport. That's easy to do too. But there's just so many more activities and things you gotta get 'em out doing. You couldn't have signed up for. Myself, I was a Cub Scout and all that stuff. We were always out doing things, trying to find ways to stay busy. We gotta get these kids out moving more. That's the real thing. We gotta get rid of the sedentary lifestyle the best we can. And I know like during the pandemic, nobody had a choice, right? But we gotta figure out ways to make up for that. So it's a cool research 'cause like I said, it's a big study and it definitely shows that 25% of the kids with a sedentary lifestyle does a direct relationship to having severe, having spinal pain. Again, 40% of kids under the age of 19 have spinal pain. So if your kid's complaining about it, you can ask your pediatrician or your family doctor, but they're not gonna tell you anything about chiropractic. You might wanna follow up with a chiropractor too, and ask the chiropractor for the homework. Ask the chiropractor for the exercise and the stretches, the posture stuff to work on home to help with this. When the kid's doing the posture exercises, the kid's away from the screen, right? That's enough reason alone to give a posture exercise. So the chiropractor should definitely be doing that. There you have it. Chiropractic for kids, I think it's a must. I think it's a definitely, he should. I have unique background. My grandfather was a chiropractor. My dad was a, he's a retired chiropractor and I'm a chiropractor. So my dad growing up his entire life got adjusted by my grandfather. I grew up, got adjusted my entire life, my father, and of course my kids, 19, 17, 13 and 13. They get adjusted their entire life by me too. It's fun to watch 'em stay healthy and stay strong. So again, if you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the only person qualified to answer, that's a chiropractor. If you want more information just on chiropractic, I recommend going to chiropractic.org. That's our national website, the International Chiropractic Association. There you can find that Peds council I told you about. Take a look at that. The research paper and stuff like that. We also have a sports and fitness council, which yours true is on the board of with more information there too about activities and things you can do. All right. Thanks for tuning in. If you have questions, please leave me a message. I'll see it and maybe next time you'll be the question of the week. Thank you.