Pediatric Chiropractic Adjustments?

Dr. Miles and Dr. Ray,

Since you all have experience in pediatrics and in chiropractic, I wanted to ask about chiropractic adjustments for infants.

Someone close to me had their newborn (<1 month old) have their first adjustment since their sacrum was determined to be “out of alignment”. I did a preliminary search of chiropractic evidence for pediatric populations and did not find much in terms of helping or harming. I told this person that “I would love to see research on this topic, if the chiropractor would be open to share” but did not get a reply.

So my questions are:

  1. What are your thoughts and do you know of other research on the harms/benefits of pediatric chiropractic adjustments?

  2. While I obviously cannot prescribe to a parent how to care for their child, how could I tactfully share information or get them to ask questions to evaluate if chiropractic is beneficial for their child?

Thank you as always for sharing and engaging on this forum!

Its horseshit.

So I’ll defer most of the ranting on this to Mike and my tl:dr is akin to what Dhruv just posted in reply. There is not good research on the topic and it often devolves into a discussion of benefits versus harm with there being ABSOLUTELY no benefit established in the research for chiropractic adjustment for infants. I want to be absolutely clear on this. The counter you will often here, is that there also is no research saying it is harmful. This is absolute bullshit.

​​​​​​Chiropractic Care for Children

The second one is interesting when you approach the problem from a cost analysis when it essentially concludes “we make a lot of money from it but we don’t know if it works”

@jshiekhy thanks for the questions.

I’ve publicly ranted about this previously: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/jor…?autoplay=true

  1. There is no good quality evidence stating joint manipulations by anyone is necessary for prognosis (likely clinical case outcomes) for any issue - especially in this patient population.
  2. Depends on the willingness of the person who you are conversing with to hear opposing opinions and if they are open to changing their minds.

Here is an additional thread for references: https://forum.barbellmedicine.com/fo…al-realignment.

I’m going to take some time to look deeper into the risks for pediatric patient population but I’m skeptical much data will be turned up. Often interventions are adopted into practice as the “norm” well before such questions like risks vs benefits are asked and answered. To @Derek_Miles 's point, cost is an obvious unnecessary risk in addition to the unnecessary conditioning that the clinician’s intervention is necessary, it isn’t.