Who Would Send Their Newborn To A Chiropractor?

In 2022, Natalie Mitchell welcomed her first child. A few weeks in, Mitchell’s pediatrician began pressuring her to get her baby to gain weight, but he struggled with feeding. “It was always kind of hard for him to eat. He was kind of an ineffective bottle feeder. [Our lactation consultant] was saying that she felt like he was scrunching up too much and that chiropractic could help to open him up, to be able to lay in a position to breastfeed more comfortably from the breast,” she says. The lactation consultant also recommended seeing a chiropractor for constipation, which Mitchell now believes was just a result of her baby’s body alternating between formula and breast milk. “They said that it would help with him being able to go more regularly, that somehow the alignment or something was throwing off his bowel movements.”

So, Mitchell did as any millennial mom would do: she looked up baby chiropractor videos on Instagram to see what it was all about. Her son was between four and five months old when Mitchell decided to give it a whirl, and she made an appointment with a trusted chiropractor who has treated a family member of hers for years. She confirmed the provider was specially trained in pediatric chiropractic care. “She would do a lot of cranial positioning. To me, it looked like she was massaging or moving the skull because the skull is so mobile for babies. When she would do anything along the spine, he was face up and then they would be feeling their hands along the spine almost like they were giving him a back massage, or holding him in their lap and massaging along the back of his spine. It was very gentle.”

After two or three appointments, Mitchell didn’t return with her baby. “We experienced no harm from any of the visits. However, I couldn't tell you if there were any medical improvements. Some people will tell you and all these Instagram pages will tell you, oh, they just do one adjustment and they're pooping right in your hand as they're being adjusted. But we did not experience that.”

It’s impossible to know precisely how many parents take their infants to a chiropractor because many will not admit it to their child’s doctor, says Dr. Free Hess, M.D., a board-certified pediatrician who specializes in injury prevention. Hess has been vocal about the risks and limitations of baby chiropractic care on social media. Her videos highlight that many of the problems and conditions chiropractors claim to treat are actually self-limiting, meaning they go away on their own with time, minus any kind of treatment. Even in limited surveys on the topic, she says parents have expressed they’re reluctant to tell anyone at all. But online, the interest is clear. Videos with the hashtag #babychiropractor racked up more than 26 million views in 2023, according to a Salon report (the app has since hidden such metrics). A Google trends report shows searches for “pediatric chiropractor near me” jump from nonexistent to fairly common by the end of 2020 — the year TikTok claimed us all as its captive audience during the pandemic — and they’ve been steadily increasing ever since.

Pediatric chiropractors claim to treat a huge variety of issues: colic, chronic ear infections, torticollis, difficulty sleeping, breastfeeding challenges, constipation, asthma, plain old fussiness, and even more. They believe that proper alignment — achieved by gently adjusting the baby's spine — addresses the root cause of these troubles. Many also tout more wellness-related benefits of chiropractic care, like boosted immune systems and somehow-optimized neurological development.

Fear not: you should not see any quick, forceful adjustments in baby chiropractic care, practitioners say. “Generally the techniques are very simple, gentle massage, stretching, and soft tissue work to the areas where we feel that manipulation will help with the baby's issue at the time. The same pressure you’d use if you were testing the ripeness of a tomato, that's the type of pressure we'll use for those adjustments,” says Jimmy Sayegh, DC, a chiropractor based in California (aka the @kingofcracks on Instagram).

As to whether chiropractic care is effective for treating the conditions it claims to, the research is inconclusive. More research is needed before practitioners can claim that the benefits outweigh the risks.

The risks, however, are well-documented. Chiropractic care has been found to cause delayed referral to orthopedic specialists, misdiagnoses, and injuries in the cases of infants and children with orthopedic conditions. Studies on the harms of spinal manual therapy have documented the death of a three-month-old who seemingly had pre-existing poor blood flow to the back of her brain that was made worse by having her spine adjusted. A four-month-old boy experienced temporary quadriplegia following chiropractic treatment for torticollis; an MRI later revealed he had a spinal cord tumor that was then surgically removed, and he regained most of his function, but his right leg remained mostly paralyzed. A 21-day-old infant with colic endured multiple rib fractures after a chiropractor used a spring-activated device to adjust her spine and, from the sound of it, her parents had to be investigated for child abuse to rule that out as the cause. Hess treated a four-day-old baby in the emergency room with a clavicle fracture. It’s not uncommon for these to happen during birth, though no injury was documented at this child’s delivery, but the parent had taken the baby to a chiropractor 24 hours after being born. No one knows whether the chiropractor caused the injury or adjusted the infant with an existing fracture.

Jennifer Brocker, DC, a Portland-based chiropractor and president of the American Chiropractic Association’s Council on Chiropractic Pediatrics, says complications from chiropractic care are rare, and it’s believed that most reported infant injuries and deaths were caused by a preexisting issue that was then aggravated by their chiropractic treatment. For this reason, Brocker says chiropractors should always get a thorough medical history on a baby to reduce the risk of anything bad happening. Doctors say that’s not enough.

“As a pediatrician, I just don't recommend it,” says Dr. Sami, one half of @thepedipals on TikTok. “Our job is to recommend evidence-based practices, which means things that have studies to back up their safety and efficacy — studies to back up that they are worth doing, that there's actual benefit, and that there's minimal risk. Because chiropractic care does not have the evidence to back up its benefits and can be high risk, can cause injuries, I just don't recommend it.” Her stance is in line with the American Academy of Pediatrics’ position, which states that while “adverse effects are rare” in the chiropractic treatment of infants and children, “serious complications are possible.” The AAP also notes that “a bias against childhood vaccinations has been shown to exist in chiropractic care; children 1 through 17 years of age in the care of a chiropractic practitioner were significantly less likely to receive recommended vaccinations, leading to higher risk of vaccine-preventable disease.”

Most parents treat their pediatrician as their go-to for questions about their child’s health. But in every family-doctor relationship, there’s an inflection point: a moment when your pediatrician can’t answer your questions in a satisfying way. “How do I get my baby to eat better?” “When will they sleep through the night?” “Why do they cry all the time?” These are questions that often plague new parents, and the answers could have a serious impact on their quality of life. But doctors can’t always answer them well.

“Sometimes, having a new baby just sucks. There is no workaround for that.”

Take colic, for example: It’s defined as intense crying for more than three hours a day, at least three days a week, for more than three weeks. It tends to start between four and six weeks of age, and then end suddenly between three and four months. In that two or three months, mothers of colicky babies are at greater risk of depression, anxiety, and stress, making it even more difficult to care for their children and themselves. The cause of colic is unknown, but pediatricians usually work with families to eliminate possible causes of GI distress by changing formulas and feeding habits. Often, doctors conclude that a baby’s GI system just needs time to mature, and that “parental support and reassurance are key components of the management of colic.” Essentially, keep suffering in the way that you have been, and one day — can’t tell you when — you won’t anymore.

“Evidence does not support [the use of] chiropractic or osteopathic manipulation, or infant massage” to treat colic, according to research, but the idea of going to an appointment and leaving with your baby’s problem solved is understandably enticing. It promises the kind of quick fix that rarely exists in most aspects of baby care. There’s no waiting to get a referral to a specialist, no medications or supplements that need to build up in their systems to take effect.

“Don't even get me into colic with respect to chiropractors, because colic is a self-limiting issue," says Hess. "It's normal baby stuff. Colic is going to get better on its own, regardless. Parents don't like to hear from pediatricians that that's the case, because they want an answer. They're sleep-deprived, they're exhausted. They have to work at the same time, because our society doesn't allow maternity leave, and parents can't stay home, and life is crazy, and they're exhausted, and I get it. And that's why they're looking for that quick fix and they don't want to hear the evidence-based answer, which is: there is no quick fix. This is something that sucks, but you have to just wait it out a little bit and it will get better.”

That frustration gap is fertile ground for non-medical providers to make a lot of money. (Brocker says chiropractors thrive in that gap not because they’re predatory, but because they have a different perspective than pediatricians. To Brocker, pediatricians are essential for kids: when they’re sick, need surgery, have a bad fall, “acute things.” “We all have our spokes on the wheel. And the more spokes, the stronger the wheel.”)

Hess also thinks parents are turning to providers outside traditional Western medicine more than ever before because of the pandemic. For the general public, watching science unfold in real time was deeply scary, and it led to the unsettling realization that even the best doctors in the world don’t know everything. “People expect medical professionals to just always know. And at the time, we just didn't know,” says Hess. “To somebody who's not trained in medicine, that can look pretty scary, and it can make you look like you don't know what you're talking about, and it can form a sense of distrust in the entire field.”

Chiropractic care may not be recommended by pediatricians, but it’s not disappearing from our feeds anytime soon. If you’re going to explore chiropractic care for your child, Hess says start by seriously interrogating any sources from social media. “The vast majority of people who are highly trained in their area will not only let people know exactly what they do, what their training is, what their degree is in, but they don't speak out of scope. Everybody has a place in health care and everybody is valuable in health care, as long as we stay where we belong in health care. It's when we start stepping out of our lane, and we start speaking and educating out of scope, that's when we become dangerous.” She likes Aaron Kubal, DC, a chiropractor who makes educational TikTok videos, for his evidence-based approach. You should also visit the American Chiropractic Association’s directory of members, Brocker says, or reach out to their main office. Visit the provider’s website and check their training, too. Ideally, they’d have a master of science degree in chiropractic pediatrics (MSCP).

As for Natalie Mitchell, now that she has a few years of motherhood under her belt and she’s removed from the emotional maelstrom that is postpartum life with a newborn, she says she's “way more discerning about the information that you're being fed by social media algorithms.” “As a new parent, I definitely was more susceptible to going down rabbit holes. I didn't realize having a newborn would be so challenging. When you see videos or articles online about ‘your baby's doing this and here's the solution,’ you really eat it up.”

In a social media landscape that tells parents you can optimize your baby’s sleep, ensure they never grow up to be picky, and perfectly curate their core memories, Hess says new parents sometimes need to sit with the uncomfortable truth instead of going down rabbit holes in the middle of the night: “Sometimes, having a new baby just sucks. There is no workaround for that.”