Treating Children’s Bodies with Care
The key to safety in pediatric chiropractic is education, says Dr. Petersen, DC. “It’s a completely different process when you work with kids, and you have to know what you’re doing in order to treat them appropriately. You need to know the proper techniques, contacts and depth. The contacts need to be smaller and the thrust more shallow with less force. Pediatric chiropractic is extremely safe if you know what you’re doing, but less so if you don’t.”
Children have the same joints we do, but they’re not fully formed yet. Their joints are still more cartilaginous than truly bony, so the adjustments have to be a little bit faster but with less force. This is due to the increased flexibility within the joint and the smaller surface area you are targeting. With kids, another option in certain cases is to mobilize joints rather than manipulate them.
Pediatric chiropractic also differs dramatically from treating adults when it comes to the nature of the complaints. Older children — middle schoolers and teens — may come in with musculoskeletal complaints that resemble those of young adults, particularly if they are involved in athletics. But younger children, toddlers and infants don’t usually arrive at the chiropractor’s office complaining that they threw their back out after lifting a really heavy Elmo doll or dancing too hard to The Fresh Beat Band.
Safe Care of Babies’ Bodies
“For young babies, the most common complaints are colic, sleep issues and nursing dysfunction,” says Dr. Petersen. “We also frequently see plagiocephaly and torticollis.”
“Even in utero, if there was any sort of intrauterine constraint, the baby can get stuck in one position, potentially for several months,” says Dr. Petersen. “Wouldn’t you be hurting if you’d been in one position for two months? From day one, they can have directional preferences, possibly due to shortened tissues during growth. The goal of treatment is to restore motion to the joints and balance the tissues to keep everything as biomechanically even as possible. Taking the tension off from day one can help allow for optimal growth and development.”
With respect to nursing dysfunction, Dr. Petersen says, “Every baby is born with an instinctive ability to suck. If the baby can’t latch on properly, there may be a communication problem between the brain and the elements of the suck-swallow reflex. I just get the joints moving again, clearing out the irritation of the central nervous system, which opens communication pathways that let the tongue and throat muscles work properly. If a baby has problems latching, there are normally very high rates of breast-feeding failure.”