Why Pregnancy Care Is So Important
Hi, guys. I’m Dr. Carrie with Mother Goose Chiropractic, and today I want to talk to you about something that is near and dear to my heart, and that is pregnancy care in our office.
Chiropractic care during pregnancy is so important, and I believe a chiropractor should be on every mama’s birth team for birth, labor, prep, and all that kind of stuff. I’ve done it three times myself personally, so I know from experience. I don’t know what I would do if it wasn’t for chiropractic care during that specific time.
During pregnancy, there’s so much going on in a woman’s body. There are different hormones that are released. Your body is constantly growing and changing. Your nervous system is constantly needing to adapt and grow that baby.
What chiropractic does for your body is help make sure that, one, your brain and your body are communicating at 100%—that there’s no interference from your brain to your uterus saying, “Hey, we’re going to grow this human. We’re going to grow a heart today. We’re going to grow lungs today,” and all these different things. We want to make sure that there’s no interference in that system.
Making Sure Everything Is Structurally in Place
We also want to make sure that structurally, everything is in place where it needs to be. This becomes super, super important, especially toward the end of pregnancy.
Why? Well, when babies are first developing, they’re head-up. But then what happens? Later on in pregnancy, baby needs to go head-down in order to be delivered. If baby doesn’t have enough room to make that flip, it’s not going to happen.
Then what happens? We end up with a breech pregnancy and interventions and things like that that mommy might not necessarily want. We try to avoid that at all costs. We try to work with mom on her birth plan and create all the goals that she’s looking for during pregnancy, especially during labor and delivery.
Common Issues During Pregnancy
There are tons of different common issues, you could say, related to pregnancy. One of those is obviously low back pain. We’ve got extra relaxin flowing in our bodies, so ligaments are starting to relax and get us ready for birth. But with that come different pains and things that can pop up.
A lot of people always think of the low back because you’re shifting, right? You’ve got that anterior shift going on. So there’s definitely low back pain, pain going down the legs, and just being uncomfortable.
A lot of times, too, we’ll get what we call “mom shoulders” because mom is starting to kind of fall forward as everything shifts forward. We like to address all of that.
Creating Space for Baby to Turn
The pelvis sits like this in there. Another part of pregnancy care is making sure that your pelvis is where it needs to be so that, like I said, baby can turn when it’s time.
Your uterus sits in your pelvis like a balloon, and it’s attached by ligaments. If we get a shift in our pelvis, it’s like twisting that balloon. What does that do? That makes it so there’s not much space in there for baby to move around.
When it comes time to go head-down, baby might be going, “Eh, eh, I’m trying here, Mom, but I can’t. I’m hitting a wall here.”
With pregnancy care, we make sure that everything is where it needs to be. We make sure all the ligaments are nice and loose so that there’s no twisting in the uterus and baby can flip.
A lot of people have heard about the Webster Technique and the amazing benefits that it has. We do practice Webster in the office, making sure that there’s space for baby. We don’t flip breech babies, but we create the space for the babies to flip themselves. We have a great success rate here in the office with doing that.
Of course, we like to see mom all throughout pregnancy so she doesn’t even have to worry about that when the time comes.
Helping Mom Feel Her Best
Common issues that we see definitely include back pain and breech issues. A lot of times, our moms come in and they just want to feel their best during pregnancy.
Especially down here in Southwest Florida, it’s hot. There are a lot of things going on. It’s kind of crazy and hectic, and we want mom to be able to optimally function.
We want you to be able to adapt to not only the changes in your body, but the changes that are going on around us—seasons, summer, and all these kinds of crazy things that come up. We want you to basically live your best life during pregnancy. Why not, right? We deserve it.
The Neurological Benefits of Chiropractic Care
The benefits of chiropractic care are not only physical and structural, but, like I talked about, neurological.
Your brain has to communicate down your spinal cord and out to everything in your body to be able to say, “Hey, we’re going to grow a heart today. We need to make sure we do this properly.”
What we don’t want is interference in that system, or basically something kind of like a tripped circuit breaker. What chiropractic does is work to fix and turn that circuit breaker back on.
In doing so, mom’s brain is able to communicate easily with the rest of her body and say, “Hey, we’re going to do this today. We’re going to make this body part today.”
Preparing the Nervous System for Labor and Delivery
It’s also important when it comes to labor. Labor and delivery come, and there’s a lot of stuff going on—a lot of hormones, and everything is kind of revving up.
We want your nervous system to be as calm and relaxed as it can be at the start of that process so that you have plenty of time to kind of have that give in your nervous system.
If you are already stuck here in stressed, maxed-out, “nervous system can’t take much more” mode, when you hit labor, there’s not much room for your body to go. This is where we see a lot of interventions happen that mom might not necessarily want.
We want to make sure your nervous system is idling down here. You’re in rest and repair. You’re as cool as a cucumber as you can get so that we have tons of space to go when it comes time for labor and delivery.
That just helps mom overall. It helps decrease the number of interventions that are needed. It helps create a smooth labor and delivery process and a smooth pregnancy. Mom feels her best.
We Love Being Part of Your Pregnancy and Birth Team
We love being a part of your pregnancy and birth team. If you have any other questions for me, I would love to answer them. Please feel free to reach out. Don’t feel shy. Ask a million questions. We love it here. This is what we do.
