BY DR. STEVE GONINAN

Most people assume or think that chiropractic is a club that’s for “adults only.” They assume that kids don’t have back problems. Well, the truth is, kids DO have back problems that start much earlier in life than you might imagine. What they don’t have, most of the time, is back PAIN.

As children grow and start to explore their world, they begin to crawl, walk, run, ride tricycles and later bicycles. They play sports. They jump on trampolines. They wear heavy backpacks and sit with bad posture. Along the way they trip and stumble. They fall. As a parent, you may not be able to remember every single bump and bruise because there are so many. In fact, the only traumas you remember are the ones that required trips to the emergency room.

Most times, after a fall, a child merely picks themselves up, dusts themselves off, and takes off again. We, as adults, just assume the child is okay and don’t worry about what could have happened to the child’s spine or how it might affect them years later. Instead our logic is that if the child doesn’t complain about back or neck pain there must be no problems.

But over the course of their lives the spine of a child has accumulated a lot of trauma and stress before puberty. Even though your child’s body has a tremendous capacity to adapt, uncorrected subluxations can set the stage for problems often seen later in adults.

Subluxations are misalignments of the spine that interfere with and distort the controlling nerve signals between the brain and the body. These misalignments may take years to cause pain but the resulting dysfunction of the nervous system may manifest itself in other ways.

Removing these misalignments through a procedure called a chiropractic adjustment has been reported to help children boost their immune system, alleviate growing pains, get better sleep at night, and prevent scoliosis. It has also been known to help with other childhood conditions such as asthma, ear infections and infant colic.

If you’re like most parents, keeping your kids healthy goes a long way towards keeping YOU healthy by reducing your stress and helping you get more sleep (without being woken up by hacking, coughing, throwing up or even a child with a fever).

If you are worried about chiropractic adjusting procedures on your child you should know that with the use of the Activator adjusting instrument, removing misalignments from a child’s spine is a very light and very quick process that involves virtually no discomfort for a child.

Regular chiropractic care for kids is an easy decision to make. Because their soft tissues are so elastic and because they don’t have decades’ worth of physical trauma built up, their spines go back to normal very quickly.

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