world properly,” explains Anderson-Peacock, who also serves in the editorial board for the Journal of Maternal, Pediatric and Family Health. “The organizing system for us to respond to the world is the nervous system. The questions we ask are: if there is something going on with the nerv-ous system, what is it, and can chiropractic care help?” Anderson-Peacock now spends most of her time travelling around the world doing lectures and other speaking engagements. She also conducts seminars for the ICPA about chiropractic care for children and families. Ohm from the ICPA links chiropractic to the very moment a child emerges from the womb. “Birth can be traumatic,” she says. The event could cause physical damage that leads to difficul-ties later. So if a baby develops breathing trouble, “the real cause may simply be a misalignment to the spine from the birth process. Parents who get that will stop at the clinic on the way home from the birth centre to make sure everything is OK.” “I often refer pediatric patients to their medical doctors and we communicate clearly in the best interests of the child.” function or the joint alignment, and we address it early, it’s better. Once those postural patterns and habits develop as they grow, they can be much more difficult to change.” Dr. Liz Anderson-Peacock is a Barrie, Ont., chiropractor who focuses on care for children. She notes the link between the central nervous systems and various childhood afflictions. “Children may have symptoms like ear infec-tions, difficulty breathing, colic, attention deficit. We do not treat those things per se. We see those as expressions of the body not interpreting the www.canadianchiropractor.ca Myth #3 Chiropractors use the same techniques on children as adults. “That’s what terrifies a lot of chiropractors about adjusting children, as well as parents,” Ander-son-Peacock says. “They think we’re going to adjust them like an adult.” But DCs who treat children do not apply heavy pressure. “Often, it’s a matter of moving the child into a position of ease, holding that position and things will reset quite nicely on their own,” An-derson-Peacock says. Care, she points out, is no-where near as forceful as it may be for adults. “That’s why extra training is so crucial. These children are not like miniature adults. For exam-ple, spines are primarily cartilaginous until the age of six, and we know cartilage will deform when we have abnormal function. So we want to make sure that function is restored normally. And since the bones are immature, the alignment issues are different. We want to minimize rotations and trac-tion, because children have different needs, due to the immaturity of their musculoskeletal and ligamentous structures.” The ICPA aims to validate techniques for chi-ropractic care for children, particularly to help dispel the idea that DCs use the same pressure on May 2015 Canadian Chiropractor 25
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