Is pediatric chiropractic care safe for my child? It’s a question that Active Life Chiropractic fields several times a week from curious parents. And of course, it’s a good one. After all, on the surface it may not appear to some people in Charlotte that chiropractic adjustment is appropriate for children. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find that not only is it safe and beneficial for adolescents and pre-adolescents, new benefits are regularly discovered. This fact explains why pediatric chiropractic care’s popularity has grown exponentially in the last 20 years.
The Statistics Tell the Tale
The increased acceptance of pediatric chiropractic care, and the acknowledgement of chiropractic care as a better option than pharmaceuticals, is borne out in the following statistics:
In just nine years, the number of pediatric visits to chiropractors more than doubled, from 30 million to 68 million
Amongst all of these visits, only around 1 percent resulted in mild adverse events related to pediatric chiropractic manipulative therapy
In the 115 years since chiropractic records first started being recorded, there have been millions of pediatric chiropractic visits. Out all of these, and based on analysis of peer-reviewed literature, only nine visits resulted in a serious adverse event. No one should ever downplay the occurrence of a serious adverse event to a child or an adult. Our purpose in mentioning this statistic is to illustrate just how safe pediatric chiropractic care is.
Earaches are the most common reason why parents bring their children to a chiropractor. The other option is antibiotics. In a recent review of 585,000 pediatric adverse drug events that required medical attention, 27.5 percent of these adverse events were caused by antibiotics. This number dwarfs the corresponding percentages of a child experience a mild or serious adverse effect during chiropractic care.
In the U.S. chiropractors have the lowest malpractice rates of all primary healthcare providers. In fact, most pediatric chiropractors have the same interest rates as their adult-focused counterparts.
Special Care for Developing Bodies
Working with children in a chiropractic setting is completely different than practicing on an adult, and our chiropractor serving Charlotte knows this as well as anyone. The contacts, techniques, and depth-of-approach are different. Obviously, children have the same joints as adults, but they’ve yet to develop fully. Adjustments are faster and less forceful because children’s joints are more cartilage than bone. This also makes them more flexible than adults, which is why mobilization is sometimes a better option than manipulation. The nature of a child’s chiropractic complaints are also markedly different than those of an adult, and require a different approach than that which would be used for an adult who threw out his back or has frozen shoulder.
The overall point here is that pediatric chiropractic care is exceptionally safe when done by experienced professionals who understand the special approach necessary for children’s developing bodies. This describes Active Life Chiropractic to a T. Contact us today for more information on our pediatric chiropractic care and to make an appointment.