Audrey’s Story – Pediatric Chiropractic
This is Audrey. She was born 11 weeks too soon in May of 2016. She weighed just a little over 2 pounds and spent 104 days in the NICU. At birth, she was diagnosed with infant torticollis (wry neck) and had many bradycardias which caused her heart rate to drop extremely low. Most of the time, the bradycardias occurred during feedings. Audrey would experience milk aspiration which caused the milk to enter the airways or lungs by accident. Because of this, she was not able to be released from the hospital. Her doctors decided to perform a swallow test, in which she failed. Every time they fed her milk, she would choke on it, was unable to breathe and her face would get extremely red. During that time, they also noticed that she had a huge knot in her neck and had extreme muscles spasms in her neck and back. They prescribed her physical therapy and decided to wait a week to perform a second swallow test to check on her progress. If she failed this test, they would have to operate on her and send her home with a gastroenteric feeding tube.
A few days before the second test was conducted, Dr. Ngo was asked to come in and look at the torticollis. Audrey was an extremely cranky, colicky baby, and she fought through the entire examination. Dr. Ngo found her left leg to be an inch shorter than her right. She had extremely tight muscles on the entire left side of her spine, and her atlas was also misaligned on the left side. It took two people to hold her down for Dr. Ngo to adjust her. Immediately after Audrey’s adjustment, she stopped resisting, her muscles calmed down, and she relaxed.
The next day, the nurses reported that she went from being the most colicky baby in the NICU to the calmest. A few days after, she passed her second swallow test. The doctors monitored her closely over the next two weeks to make sure she was drinking milk without any complications. She was released to go home shortly after without having to undergo an operation and a feeding tube. This May, Audrey turns four years old. She is a smart, witty and healthy toddler that loves to sing and dance.
Believe or not, most kids could be misaligned from birth. If you think about it, birth is a very traumatic process for both mother and baby. The extreme force being applied to push the baby’s head out of the birth canal, as well as the assistance of the doctor helping to pull the baby out, could be straining to the neck muscles. Many times, the baby’s head is used as a lever to pull the shoulders through the canal, which in most cases will throw the spine out of alignment. However, it’s usually undetected until later on in life when they start developing problems and health conditions.
One of the common signs of children being out of alignment is immune function. Most children do not understand what pain is or what it means to be in pain, or how to express it. Therefore, nerve interference is displayed in different ways such as a weakened immune system, which makes it harder for the body to fight off foreign invasion. A child that is out of alignment can have a lingering cold, flu, and/or allergies for weeks or months. Some children experience chronic ear infections, or in Audrey’s case, a child may be colicky and have difficulty feeding. Both of which may require surgical procedures. A child in alignment, having a healthy nervous system and immune system, can fight off foreign invasion quickly and potentially prevent the need for surgery and other procedures.
We encourage parents to get their kids checked, because at that young of an age, they can bounce back to normal quickly, and it also saves them a lifetime of suffering. For more information about Audrey’s story or pediatric chiropractic, give our Largo chiropractor a call or schedule for a complimentary consultation.