When chiropractic is mentioned, most people think of a natural way to relieve back and neck pain. Sure, it’s incredibly effective when it comes to pain relief but did you know that it can address ADD, ADHD, and autism?
Balancing the Nervous System
It’s our job as chiropractors to restore the nervous system and that’s what we’re working with. The nervous system has two divisions—the sympathetic and parasympathetic. When it comes to health, we need to balance them. You don’t want to be all parasympathetic all the time or all sympathetic all the time. Let’s take a look at each:
Sympathetic Nervous System (SNS) – The SNS is what we use when there’s a threat to our body. The term fight-or-flight mode is often associated with the SNS.
Parasympathetic Nervous System (PSNS) – The PSNS controls our body when we’re at ease or relaxing. Many people think of it as a rest and digest system.
An Overloaded Nervous System
When someone is dominating in a sympathetic state, it overloads the nervous system. It can be a physical stress, an emotional stress, or a chemical stress. In the ADHD and autism world, emotional stress comes to mind.
We also see physical stresses from birth or chemical stresses with kids who don’t deal well with gluten or intolerances. It’s vital that we look at all of them and balance the systems. Most of the time a child is in a sympathetic-dominant state. We like to call it “Raging Bull Syndrome“. What we do is use precise and gentle adjustments to “Pump the Breaks” on kids with the goal of restoring balance and removing stress from their nervous system.
Lots of times their brains are just locked in, and they’re like a raging bull with the foot on the gas pedal. With that foot on the gas pedal constantly we see many symptoms such as
- High anxiety
- Considerable aggression
- Sensory issues
- Inability to have bowel movements
- Social stress
- Inability to sleep
Calming the Nervous System With Chiropractic
Through safe and effective chiropractic care, not only are we reducing the sympathetic (which helps to ease the anxiety and sensory issues) but also increasing the parasympathetic which will help with immune function, proper digestion and more.
We do re-evaluations with all of our kids and families and every single child who has come into our office on every re-evaluation all write that they have less anger. Most of the time they say they don’t feel like they need to argue with their parents as much or they’re not fighting with their siblings. When we check with the parents, we hear the same thing.
Some Success Stories
We have one parent who adopted a couple of children, but they didn’t play together; they played separately, or one child tried to dominate the other one. Since the children came in for care, however, they now play together, and things have calmed down so much for the family.
Another parent remarked that their child’s teachers wanted to know what drug the parents put their child on. It wasn’t a drug that made the difference; it was pediatric chiropractic care!
Chiropractic care is about restoring hope. If your children have ADD, ADHD or autism, we encourage you to bring them in for an evaluation. We want to help.