Chiropractic Care Supporting Nursing Moms and Babies By: Lawrence Hauptly, DC, CACCP Flow Chiropractic

Breastfeeding is one of the more natural and beautiful ways to nourish a newborn, but that doesn’t mean it always comes naturally. For many moms, challenges like latching issues, discomfort, cracked and/or bleeding nipples, mastitis, and more can make the nursing journey more stressful than expected. This is where chiropractic care can offer powerful support for both moms and babies.

Why Breastfeeding Can be Challenging

Successful breastfeeding requires a coordinated effort between mom and baby. Mom’s body needs to receive input from baby as to what baby needs. This is far more than just milk supply, although that is a big deal in and of itself. Baby’s saliva tells mom what nutritional needs baby has. Nursing also allows for mom to literally share her immune system with baby, which is why it is common for the whole family to get sick, except for the baby who remains healthy through the whole ordeal.

In the early 1990’s Dr Heiner Biedermann published his estimate that approximately 80% of newborns had K.I.S.S. – Kinematic Imbalance due to Sub-occipital Strain. Without getting caught up in the weeds of scientific literature, KISS syndrome is when that infant’s neck and head mobility is reduced due to neck injuries that occur during the birth process. Further investigation shows that since the 1990’s, this occurs even more often than Dr Biedermann’s original estimate of 80%. Even in normal, physiological, and gentle births have a high chance of birth trauma occurring. The good news is that the vast majority of these birth traumas are minor, like strains and sprains. The bad news is that even in these mild cases, the baby’s brain and nervous system become affected, which has huge implications for decreased health and function for the infant including their ability to breastfeed.

What is Normal?

To better understand what is happening with all this, let’s look briefly at what normal health and function look like when it comes to nursing. In a typical pregnancy, at approximately 24 weeks (just halfway through the pregnancy), the baby will instinctively start sucking its thumb. This means that for months before birth, baby has been practicing and strengthening everything needed to be able to feed once on they are born. It takes over 21 different muscles, all working together in a coordinated way for nursing to occur. It makes sense baby needs to practice, even before birth, to make this a reality.

How Can Things Go Wrong?

If mom is stressed during this timeframe (I haven’t met a mom that isn’t stressed in this modern day) this stress can interfere with the baby’s neurological habits that are just starting to be made. On top of that, a significant number of babies have an overgrowth of midline tissues that lead to lip and tongue ties, among other issues. If all this sucking practice that baby is doing is with a tie, or even just under an abnormal amount of stress from mom… well, let’s just say that this practice is less than optimal, and there is an increased risk that baby will struggle to nurse.

Birth also has a major impact on a baby’s ability to feed normally. Long labors, epidurals, premature rupture of membranes, Pitocin, vacuum and forceps, and fast deliveries are just a few of the common birth occurrences that impact baby’s health and function. Even in an unmedicated, non-intervention birth, it is still hard. They say that the energy expenditure of giving birth is equivalent to running a marathon for mom and running 3 marathons for baby. No wonder birth, while amazing and beautiful, can be overwhelming.

With all the complexity of breastfeeding, common challenges include:

For Baby

• Poor latch, leading to nipple trauma, pops and clicks, gassiness in baby, and poor stimulation affecting milk production and let down
• Baby favoring one breast over the other or favoring one head position
• Fussiness, reflux, colic-like symptoms

For Mom

• Nipple trauma such as sore, cracked, or bleeding nipples
• Breast engorgement, plugged milk ducts, and mastitis
• Low milk supply, especially from poor stimulation

Chiropractic Care for Moms

Pregnancy, birth, and the postpartum period place a lot of strain on a mother’s body, especially her nervous system which is supposed to coordinate and control every function in her body. These stresses placed on moms often overwhelm her brain’s ability to function normally. If her brain and body cannot communicate effectively, her body function decreases, leading to more and more stress on the system. If not dealt with, this downward spiral of stress and decreased function will have an impact on the mom’s ability to produce and deliver high quality milk for her infant.

The goal of chiropractic care is two-fold. First and foremost, a chiropractic adjustment is to replace the abnormal, compensatory patterns within the nervous system (mostly brain) that were needed during times of high stress with normal, healthy patterns of coordination and appropriate adaptation. Secondly, chiropractic adjustments restore normal biomechanical motion within the joints of the spine, allowing the brain and body to work more efficiently.

Chiropractic Care for Babies

When a postpartum mom is adjusted, her brain and nervous system are shifted from the stressed mode of fight or flight, into a more relaxed state of rest and digest. This is also the mode the body needs to be in to produce milk. When a newborn is adjusted, this same shift happens, turning on the digestive system and allowing their body to fully utilize the nutrients that are provided. That’s not all however. 80% of our ability to rotate our heads happens between C1 and C2, the top two bones in our neck. If these bones are not moving properly in the infant, they have a hard time aligning their head the amount necessary to nurse properly on both sides. Adjustments also reconnect their brain to all the musculature of the head and face, allowing them to be more coordinated and controlled in their nursing efforts. Lastly, adjustments can reduce the amount of dural and fascial tension in the neck and spine that may be limiting both connection and motion.

Lip and Tongue Ties

When looking specifically at lip and tongue ties, which is a whole additional topic, the research is quite clear. They have found that when the tie is sufficient for a revision to be needed, the combination of the revision itself, plus consulting with a trained lactation consultant to retrain the baby, and chiropractic care to deal with the soft tissues and neurological issues involved is where the most success lies. For those of you who read the literature directly, they use the term “bodywork” in place of chiropractic care, for political reasons. Ask any of the researchers directly and they all will point you to chiropractic care as the intended professionals. This of course, doesn’t mean that cranio-sacral therapist, massage therapists, and other aren’t beneficial, they just weren’t the primary focus of the research like chiropractic was. These three professionals: revision dentist, lactation consultant, and pediatric chiropractor from a solid, three-legged platform for mom and baby to base their nursing on. Pull out any one of these three legs and the task of nursing is not nearly as successful.

Taking that research even further, some lip and tongue tie dentists are now requiring that infants receive chiropractic care prior to the revision. What they have found is that there is a reduced need for some of the revisions that were on the fence (more mild and not as sure the revision was even needed), and even more exciting is that the babies recovered faster and were more likely to have improved nursing post-revision.

Find the Right Chiropractor

Finding the right chiropractor to help your little one is important. Not all chiropractors have the additional training in how to handle the nuances of these cases. A baby’s spine is not a smaller version of an adult’s spine! Most pediatric chiropractors have hundreds of hours in additional training, focused on helping these young patients through their unique challenges. For starters, the force of an adjustment should be very, very low… about the amount of force you would use to check the ripeness of a tomato without bruising it. This means there is no popping or cracking involved. In fact, in the hands of a trained chiropractor, a lot of infants relax and start to fall asleep as the adjustment takes hold. A good resource to find the most trained chiropractors for pediatric care can be found at www.icpa4kids.com/find-a-pediatric-chiropractor. 

Better Together: Mom + Baby Care

Breastfeeding is a journey, and every mom-baby pair deserves support to make it as smooth and stress-free as possible. Chiropractic care offers a natural, safe, and effective way to help both mom and baby feel their best—so they can focus on bonding, nourishing, and thriving together.

Curious how chiropractic care could help you and your baby? We’d love to chat and answer your questions. Book a complimentary consultation with us today!

Lawrence Hauptly, DC, CACCP
Flow Chiropractic
325 E 100 N, Ste B
Lehi, UT 84043
385-389-6200
www.getflowchiro.com