Chiropractic Care for Pregnancy: A Safe, Drug-Free Alternative

Concerned about taking Tylenol during pregnancy? In this special episode of Ask the Chiropractor, Dr. Brant Hulsebus discusses safe, natural alternatives for expectant mothers who want pain relief without medication. Learn how chiropractic care supports a healthy pregnancy, helps relieve back and hip pain, and why midwives often recommend chiropractic as part of prenatal care.

Dr. Hulsebus also shares his experience with advanced prenatal training, the Webster Technique, and research-backed benefits of chiropractic for moms-to-be.

🎧 Tune in to discover how chiropractic care can help you feel better naturally — for you and your baby.

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 there. So we have a bunch of podcasts already prerecorded, ready to go, but there's a hot topic going on right now. So we wanted to jump in and do a special episode, cut in line of the normal podcast that we do.'cause when the hot topic comes up that we want to dive right into, we don't want to wait for two months to get into it. So let's talk about this hot topic. Today is Wednesday morning and what happened on Monday was the President and Robert Kennedy and Dr. Oz came out with a statement saying that Tylenol or acetaminophen should be avoided if you can, when you're pregnant or definitely not overused when you're pregnant.'cause there might be a link to autism in the baby. The odds of autism go up the more that you take. So you don't want to just take it willy-nilly. Don't wanna take it all the time. If you have to take it, you should have a conversation between you and your doctor before you do it. And I don't want to get into'cause it because it's 'cause it's the president saying it. So it has to be a political thing. One thing I have learned since COVID came out, any more healthcare topics are not about healthcare anymore. It's only about politics. So if your political party says This is the safest way to do it and you dare question it, then other people who like to that party get mad at you. I don't want to get involved in all that. Okay. I just want to go back to. Being a doctor and reading research papers and talking about the science behind things. So on that note, we're not gonna talk about acetaminophin, we're not gonna talk about the autism rates. I, plenty of ideas. I've done a lot of research on this topic, but today I wanna talk about. Not so much about that topic, but about what chiropractic can offer as an alternative. So if you know someone who's pregnant or you yourself are pregnant and you've been doing a lot of acetaminophen to get through the day, and now you're concerned because they tell you there's a chance that this could be a bad thing. That's fight and daily, but what are you gonna do now? Okay, they told me I shouldn't take this. I still have aches and pains. What if I get a fever? What if I don't feel good? What can I do now if I'm not gonna do that? And the good news is there is an alternative. It's been around a really long time. And if I'm talking about it, it's chiropractic care. So we've been helping pregnant women forever. So chiropractors in pregnancy is going together, hand in hand. We're an all natural drug free healthcare option. Chiropractic is, and we know that when a lot of women are pregnant, they're really worried about their baby. They're gonna, they're making right, and they're concerned that baby could be influenced by things that they do, like where they eat, drink, smoke, whatever they might do. They usually go cold Turkey and all that because they're not doing it for themselves anymore. They're doing it for the little baby that's about to join their family. Is so the fact that we are a drug free healthcare choice, a lot of pregnant women tend to migrate towards us. Not only do pregnant women tend to migrate towards us, but also healthcare providers they might be working with also tend to gravitate towards us. Meaning that in my 23 years. If anyone's given to me a referral, if there's a certain type of healthcare provider that gives us referrals more than any other profession, without a doubt, is midwives. So when a woman who's pregnant wants to seek care of a midwife more than say a doctor of OB GYN, they tend to like the midwives better. Some women just prefer that interaction better. They feel like it's more personalized and less. By the book. So a lot of women choose to go with a midwife, and midwives tend to be more holistic, more natural as a whole. I'm not saying all of 'em, I'm just saying as a whole. And so as they do that, they've come to learn the value of what we do as chiropractors. They've been able to see it. Yeah, so when we go through chiropractic school, we take a class on adjusting pregnant women, so we get a good background and good education on it. We have two courses that focus on this area embryology, where we watch when the egg and the sperm first meat and the development. That's one of our first classes we take at school and we learn how the baby is developing and things that we need to consider as chiropractors with our patients who are going through this. We also take OB, GYN, talking about childbirth. We talk about adjusting women who are pregnant again, and we talk a lot about newborn care. So these are required courses that every chiropractor has to take. I was really lucky I got to take it with some of the greats before they, they're, no, these two doctors are no longer with us, unfortunately. I got to take it with some of the best ever to teach it. Dr. Maxie McMullen was my OB g my anti trial was in our last class, unfortunately. And then we had ti for our embryology and he was one of the funnest teachers and he has been there forever. So he was a wealth of knowledge. So I had two awesome teachers at Palmer College that taught me this stuff, but Palmer gets new doctors, new professors to replace 'em. There's always great professors there. So we learned a lot of cool things, but I had a unique experience to me. About 10 years ago. I had muscles in my bicep all rip out of my elbow. And I had to have major elbow surgery, but they had to reattach the musculature to my elbow. As a chiropractor that uses manual adjusting, that meant I couldn't work. I was outta work. So what I did, because I couldn't work, is I went back to school and I took more advanced studies on this topic. So when as a doctor, you have to continue to take education. As you go through your career to keep your licensure and so as my life has changed, so as my postgraduate education, I had twins that were born 10 weeks early and spent some time in the nicu, and I realized that there's a lot more pediatric chiropractic and newborn pregnancy chiropractic that I wanted to learn after going through this experience with my wife. And so I went back and started taking the. Pediatric courses again, and I got a lot more in depth. I became certified in Webster technique like the dictionary, Webster's dictionary. The Webster technique is a safe, gentle trigger point table popping, not. Twisting and turning the patient adjustment that we do when a baby is breached. And we've been extremely successful in adjusting moms in order to get the baby to be unreached. We don't grab a hold of the baby and move the baby around inside of mom. There's crazy videos out there that show that there's, it's gonna be, could it be more different? We just, mom's tailbone and we do some trigger point work on mom in order to get. The womb to relax so the baby can move. That's all it's about. It's about getting the womb to relax so the baby can actually move. If the wombs not relaxed and it's contracted, there's nowhere for baby to go. Baby gets stuck, breached. So if you can help fix the wo open up the womb and the baby can move. But that's just one of many. Topics we learn about taking care of pregnant women. So if you're pregnant and you want to go to the chiropractor, it is extremely safe to come see us. There's absolutely no contraindication to going to see a chiropractor when you're pregnant. A matter of fact, when you do these PE Extra pediatric courses, there's a couple of different ones, but all of 'em require a research project at the end, either writing your own research paper and publishing it, or being part of a project. Personally, I was part of a project where we did surveys and questionnaires with our patients who were coming in with their children and while they were pregnant, outcome assessment stuff to see how they, did they feel better after they got adjusted? Did you find this valuable worth your time? And they all, it was a hundred percent the answer was yes. And those research papers are published if you go to chiropractic.org. chiropractic.org. You go to the International Chiropractic Association, which I'm a proud member of. If you go from there to the councils, you'll see there's a pediatric council. Now, to get your a certification with this group, you actually have to publish a paper in your journal, and their journals are online. It's free. So you go to the council website, you can see the journal, and you can do your own homework, your own research. Just if you're really confused about this Tylenol, acetaminophen situation, just go to PubMed, type in Tylenol, acetaminophen, autism, PubMed, and do your own research. It's there for you. It's there for the taking. I know a lot of people like to do research on the internet, but they're not sure which research can I trust? Which research can I trust? So there's a couple research that I always go to. I always rely on PubMed and then chiropractic.org to get more information. So those are great ones to look at. But if you're pregnant, you're having. Aches and pains, discomfort if you're having, lower back and hip situations. If you're having knee, ankle situations, man, we take care of that. We've been doing that forever. And there's a thing called bra carpal tunnel when you're pregnant, brachial radiculitis when you're pregnant, because when you're pregnant, your rib cage will change shape. It'll expand and open and come up to make room for the womb. And if you've got lower neck situation going out prior to this to start having your hands fall asleep and going numb. Boy, we take care of that. We take care of that when you're not pregnant. We take care of that when you are pregnant. So if that's something you have going on, that's just right up the chiropractor's alley. And if you're getting headaches, there's tons of research about chiropractic care for headaches. So we've been doing that forever too. And, fevers and immune system stuff. Since 2020, we can't talk about it. We're not allowed to bring it up anymore. We're still, yesterday Google and YouTube just admitted that they censored videos talking about this topic, chiropractor's talking about the immune system. So we're not gonna talk about the immune system. I will tell you that I've been censored. I know this is a real thing but you can come in and discuss other things with us if you'd like. Wink. Okay? But no, chiropractors have been doing these things all along. So if you're pregnant and you are upset that you can't take your acetaminophen or you're nervous about taking it 'cause of the research and the topic, go see a chiropractor now. For the most part, if you talk to your OB, GYN, should I see a chiropractor, I'm gonna, I'm gonna tell you right off the hand, the majority of 'em have no idea what we do. They're not educated in what we do. They don't understand what we do, and so they shouldn't give you an opinion of whether you should go or not. They should give you the name of a respected chiropractor in your community to go talk to and have a conversation. But for the most part, you, they really don't know. Now, a lot of midwives, that's a little different, midwives actually come in, they learn what we do and they get involved with us. We have conferences with midwives all the time. There was midwives at many of my conferences, so there's a little bit more. Idea what they do. If you want to ask, if you don't wanna ask a chiropractor whether you should get chiropractic care, which is crazy, but let's say you want ask somebody else first. I would tell you, ask a midwife way before you ask a doctor of OB GYN, because the odds are the midwife's gonna know a lot more about it. Just statistically speaking. There's always exceptions, always. There's some really awesome OB GYNs out there that really understand what we do. Even come and lecture at our conferences, so not always. But if you asked me, I would talk to a midwife, but I would really, if you have questions about chiropractic or chiropractic care, the best qualified person to answer these questions is obviously a chiropractor. So if you're listening to this or watching this and you have a question, maybe you're pregnant, maybe you want to help find somebody in your area that has some more training in advance like we do. Feel free to leave a comment below. Feel free to shoot us a message if you'd like to go to our website, we have tons of information on our website about chiropractic care for pregnancy, and you can learn some more care. Alright, thanks everybody. And again, subscribe, all that fun stuff. And if you have a question, leave it behind for me. And please remember the title of this podcast. If you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care only a chiropractor. It's really a certified the answer. Thank you for checking us out.