If you have ever been around a colicky baby you know it isn’t pleasant. No matter what you do, pick them up, put them down, let them cry it out, they can not be consoled. Imagine hour after hour and day after day of crying. It becomes pretty nerve racking and pretty stressful for parents, grandparents and siblings, sometimes leading to family dissention.
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Colic typically begins within the first month of life and sometimes goes away around 3-4 months, but often lasts much longer. The technical definition of the condition requires crying for at least 3 hours a day, 3 days a week for at least 3 weeks, but many who report having colicky babies may experience more or less crying and varying degrees of spitting up. It is believed that the nervous and digestive systems are not quite mature enough to handle the food being put into the system.
Traditional medical intervention used to be gas drops but now infants are more commonly prescribed reflux medication. That’s correct, if your baby is spitting up frequently and crying a lot they are probably going to get a prescription for a proton pump inhibitor medication. Since only invasive tests can confirm or deny the presence of acid reflux, this diagnosis is simply a guess.
Most parents don’t want to put their infant on medication, but at their wits end without any other known alternative they see it as a last resort! Perhaps this is why there has been such an alarming increase in prescriptions, because medicine doesn’t know what else to do for this condition. Chiropractic adjustments have demonstrated significant relief of colic symptoms. A Danish study had over 85% success rate as measured by the duration of crying following adjustments to the spine.85% with literally no side effects.
It makes sense, since it is believed colic is related to the nervous and digestive system, that normalizing nerve flow by adjusting the spine would help to relieve symptoms and improve development. In 18 years of practice I can’t think of a case of colic that wasn’t improved with our adjustments. Chiropractic for kids is safe, and works pretty fast. Make sure to let your friends with small children know about this treatment, as it can truly be a life saver. While you are at it, remind them that conditions like torticollis, ear infections and asthma also respond very well to chiropractic adjustments.
Related articles
- Acid reflux drugs called overprescribed in infants (cbc.ca)
- Healthy Neurological Development for Kids (geneva-chiropractor.com)
- A Crying Primer (enfamil.com)
- Infacol release first ever series of Baby Massage mini-films (your-story.org)
- Your Newborn’s Digestive System (enfamil.com)
- Are Too Many Babies Getting Acid Reflux Drugs? (webmd.com)
