Your Child See’s a Chiropractor? |fastpitch health and wellness

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So, Your Child Sees A Chiropractor!?

When I am educating my patients and my community about Chiropractic, it is common to see the look of surprise and disbelief when I tell them I am a pediatric Chiropractor. Many people consider this taboo because they think Chiropractors are just back pain doctors. Yes, it is true we help with pain relief, but we also help with repairing and maintaining a healthy spine and nerve system. As a former Division I athlete, Chiropractic care was crucial in not only preventing injuries, but allowing me to perform at my optimal level. It comes down to three simple words, “Structure Equals Function”, or what I tell my athletes, “Optimal Structure Equals Optimal Function/Performance”.

Before I go into how critical it is to have an optimal structure for optimal function/performance, let’s go into the science of what happens when you get what Chiropractors call a “Vertebral Subluxation”. Scary word isn’t it? Well, if left uncorrected it can turn into something scary, but for now let’s give you something so you can have a point of relativity of what’s going on. A Vertebral Subluxation is nothing but a sprained or stuck spinal joint.

As parents you may be thinking, “How does my child get a sprained spinal joint or Subluxation?” There are many ways a child can get a Subluxation. One of the first ways is the delivery process. Being born is hard. Most of the moms out there know from personal experience. In some situations, we have moms lay on their backs to deliver babies, even though the natural way is to do it in a crouching position, on all fours, or even sitting up to allow the pelvis to be tipped properly and have gravity help the birth process.

Think about it, “Would you take a poop lying on your back?” We laugh at this, but think about it. Would we? Absolutely not! Why then would you ever want to deliver a 7lb-10lb baby lying on the back? When delivering on your back, the baby may get stuck and then medical intervention occurs: pulling on the infants head, c-section, forceps or vacuum extraction. All of these can cause a spinal injury.

Let’s say your little miracle made it through unscathed. Then we have to go through all the trials and tribulations of learning how to walk, which they say the child falls on average 13 times/day learning to walk. Can you imagine as an adult falling that many times? I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed. These little micro traumas start to add up and then we add in bike crashes, collisions in sports, car crashes, falls down stairs, play ground mishaps. The list goes on and on. You may be thinking, “Well, yes my child had their falls and tumbles. They cried for a bit, but they were never in any “real pain”.

This is true. Your child should not be in “real pain” from most of these traumas. If a child comes into my clinic experiencing pain in their spine, a red flag goes off for me because they do not have adult pain receptors yet. This does not occur until the late teenage years. Society thinks that “true health” is an absence of pain. This is not true. Just because you don’t have a symptom doesn’t mean you are healthy. Dorland’s Medical Dictionary states, “True health is a state of optimal, physical, mental and social well being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmities.” Pain is a very poor indicator of true health.

Let’s now look into the science of what happens when you get a Vertebral Subluxation. When you get a sprained/stuck spinal joint (Subluxation), it can heal in one of two ways. The first way is it will heal in normally, which is obviously the ideal way. No harm, no foul. The second way is it will heal in abnormally and become stuck (Subluxation), which is detrimental to the stability of an ideal structure. Spinal Pathophysiology refers to the osteoarthritic degenerative changes that occur in a spine that has lost its normal range of motion. The journal Clinical Biomechanics reported as far back as 1987 (issue 2:223-229) that joint immobility, such as that which occurs in the Vertebral Subluxation Complex, can lead to permanent damage in as little as 14 days.

According to Dr. Tapio Videman, Heritage Senior Scholar of Rehabilitation Medicine at University of Alberta, author of the study, “The evidence in this review shows that immobilizing healthy joints in experimental animals can lead inexorably to osteoarthritis. With respect to [human] patients, it can be postulated that immobilization, for whatever cause, will initiate a pathogenic [disease producing] chain of musculo-skeletal degenerative changes.”

And it doesn’t take long for the joints to be stuck, either. A joint immobilized one day a week for 14 weeks shows the same amount of damage as one immobilized for 14 days in a row. The damage accumulates over all the time the joint was immobilized.

How does this relate to Chiropractic? When a spinal Subluxation occurs, the joints become stuck or immobile, unable to move in their normal range of motion and the degenerative process known as osteoarthritis begins. According to Dr. Tapio Videman, if this immobility is not corrected within 14 days, the osteoarthritis becomes permanent. Let’s say this again so it sinks into your head… according to Dr. Videman, if this immobility is not corrected within two weeks, the osteoarthritis becomes permanent. Think of osteoarthritis as rust on a frame. When you get rust on a frame it weakens it, which will allow the possibility of that frame to weaken and break (injury).

What does this mean to your little athletes? If your child has Subluxations, then joints that are made to move are not moving and they are accumulating rust, which will weaken their frame and hinder the performance of the athlete, thus not allowing them to reach their fullest potential and have the possibility of an injury.

Your child’s spine is the frame of their body.

Think about it. Your child is a Ferrari. Is that Ferrari going to perform better with a straight frame or bent frame? Many parents invest their time and money into high octane fuel (nutrition), paint jobs (clothes and equipment), time at the track (practice and camps), which don’t get me wrong are pieces of the pie of “optimal performance”, however, the frame is half the pie. And it is not until you invest into the frame and straighten it out, that all the other pieces of the pie will fall together and your child will perform at their highest potential.

Chiropractors are the mechanics of the spine. We are your child’s pit crew. We can restore the frame to its normal position if we catch it early enough. If we can’t repair the spine, we will keep it from getting worse by restoring the mobility to the stuck joint. Either way your Chiropractor is going to allow your children’s aspirations take root, legacies grow and family trees flourish for generations to come.

Dr. Garrett L Soldano D.C. is the owner of “Soldano Family Chiropractic Center”, which consists of three clinics and four doctors in the Kalamazoo, Michigan area. He is a published author and his book, “God’s True Law, A Parent’s Guide to Raising Successful Children” has reached the Top 15 books on Amazon Kindle in child development. He resides in Mattawan, Michigan with his wife, Jennifer, and two sons, Jackson and Alexander.