Is Chiropractic Safe for Children?
In Burlington, I’m Dr. Jean-Marc Slak. A sweet article just hit the press. Let me give you some background. In Australia and now in Canada there has been a movement to assign some kind of a problem with adjusting children. Now in our office, we have a whole side of the practice that is children only. So it’s really something that is close to us and that we hold near and dear. We’ve seen amazing changes in literally hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of children, mostly infants. And throughout that whole time, over 35 years of practice, we’ve never had any kind of adverse event take place in our office. And so we own the fact that our care is safe.
The Canadian governing body ordered a study to be done to establish what the literature says about the safety of chiropractic services, chiropractic adjustments, on children under 10. These independent people looked at the literature from 2000 all the way to the middle of 2019. So, they look at 20 years of literature. They looked at everything, they did a pretty extensive review process. And what they found is that there is a very small amount of mild side effects. Sometimes, there was redness after someone touched the skin, or occasionally there was some soreness following an adjustment. Out of the hundreds of articles that they reviewed, they found three instances of moderate side effects. One rib was broken and one child complained of pain. That’s out of hundreds of thousands of patients included in the review.
When it came to serious adverse events, they couldn’t find any. So, their conclusion is that we don’t know. They don’t know because it doesn’t happen. There is not data. There’s no data, there are not sufficient numbers to have any kind of validity to support the case for any degree of danger to children. This new study just published a couple of days ago reaffirms the high-level safety of chiropractic care when done properly by qualified, especially, specifically, comprehensively trained chiropractors. There is such a thing as chiropractors who specialize in pediatrics. We have two in our office. Dr. Linda, Dr. Nicole. I’ve been seeing children for decades. There is something to be said for a high degree of specialization. However, the bottom line, chiropractic is really safer than just about anything else you can study in terms of health care service for children under 10. Can’t wait to see you and your kids right here in Burlington.
Source: https://chiromt.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12998-020-0299-y