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Finding out that you are pregnant is an exciting milestone in every expectant mother’s life, but it also presents challenges like nausea and back pain. Fortunately, pregnancy chiropractic care can help soon-to-be moms address and relieve these challenges and pains.
You may not even notice your spine is misaligned until your pregnancy begins to take a toll on your body, and these difficulties manifest in various forms (such as lower backaches) or if they were a persistent condition before your baby is due, such as leg numbness or sciatica.
Chiropractors have received training to assist in alleviating these issues by correcting and realigning everything altered throughout pregnancy, allowing both child and mother to feel safe and comfortable during those nine months.
You Do Not Have To Feel Pain At All Times
Many expecting mothers choose to endure their pregnancy-related discomforts silently to not worry their families or spouses, leaving them with aches and pains during the pregnancy. According to one study, nearly half of pregnant women suffer back discomfort during pregnancy, and 50% to 75% suffer backaches during labor.
However, just around a quarter of them seek advice from healthcare specialists to address these concerns. Those who did seek medical attention tended to favor alternative treatments during their pregnancies, with pregnancy chiropractic care ranking third behind yoga and massage in terms of natural treatment.
Pregnancy chiropractic care has included ensuring a comfortable gestation time and facilitating easy labor or delivery for the mother and child’s safety. Although the number of pregnant women seeking chiropractic care is still small, it is steadily increasing. This is because more moms are becoming aware of the numerous advantages and conveniences that it may provide.
Routine chiropractic adjustments during pregnancy give a safe and efficient way to relieve a pregnant woman’s strained joints and muscles, which are dragged in all directions by the developing baby.
Causes of Back Pain During Pregnancy
Before seeking pregnancy chiropractic care, it’s important to understand what is causing terrible aches and pain in pregnant women’s lower backs so you know when to get medical assistance or how to avoid it.
The following are the several causes of back discomfort during the 9-month pregnancy:
Structure Adaptation
Once a pregnant woman attains the 7-month mark, structural adaptation within her body occurs to allow more space for the developing baby, contributing to low back pain throughout her pregnancy. These alterations may also have an impact on the spinal column. It causes pain by affecting the load distributions within the motion segments of the sacroiliac joints (placed between the sacrum and the pelvis’ ilium bones) and the spine.
Pressure on the Uterus
Pain can be caused by stress or traction around your uterus and other adjacent areas, such as the pelvic structures and rectum.
Sudden Weight Gain
While a woman’s sacrum is big enough to allow for fetal carriage, drastic weight shifts exert extra stress on the sacroiliac joints in her pelvis, producing lower back pain.
Changes in Hormone Balance
During pregnancy, a pregnant woman’s hormone production shifts abruptly, increasing estrogen and progesterone. These changes can result in pelvic hypermobility (higher odds of the pelvic joints shifting or being trapped in an abnormal posture). This condition can impair spinal stability, resulting in pain and discomfort.
Strenuous Activity
A pregnant woman engaging in physically demanding activities during her pregnancy can result in back pain.
These variables can add to a pregnant patient’s back pain, prompting many patients to get pregnancy chiropractic care to relieve pain and discomfort.
Is It Safe to Seek a Chiropractor During Pregnancy?
Pregnancy chiropractic care is typically safe during pregnancy because it does not involve surgery or medication. It’s a type of physical treatment that improves overall well-being and health by reducing spinal nerve tension. Each day, more than a million chiropractic adjustments are performed worldwide, with very minimal problems.
If you’re looking for a chiropractor that specializes in pregnancy chiropractic care, you can always question your chiropractor if they have any training in this area, or you may ask your doctor for a referral to an expert who does. When conducting pregnancy chiropractic care, chiropractors typically use special tables designed to accommodate their patients’ expanding bellies, known as chiropractic adjusting tables.
Chiropractors won’t apply pressure to the abdomen and will demonstrate stretches that you can take to release stress or tension in your back, hence reducing discomfort and pain. Even though chiropractic care is generally considered safe during pregnancy, there are some exceptions. As a result, it’s best to seek your doctor’s consent before beginning pregnancy chiropractic treatment.
Pregnancy chiropractic treatment is not recommended for placental abruption, excessive vaginal bleeding, ectopic pregnancy, or mild to severe toxemia (a combination of albuminuria, edema, and hypertension).
How Chiropractic Care Can Aid Pregnancy
During pregnancy, the female body undergoes several physical, physiological, and emotional changes to produce the healthiest environment for the developing baby. Even though these merely cause brief discomfort and pain most of the time, they can sometimes put women at risk of having a more protracted labor or complex delivery, emergency C-section delivery, or breech birth.
By using chiropractic treatments and methods, a chiropractor can assist in reducing discomfort and preventing difficulties, lowering some pregnancy symptoms, and enabling expectant mothers to have healthier, happier, and better pregnancy and birthing journeys.
The following are the several advantages of pregnancy chiropractic care.
Improved Spine Health and Pain Relief
During pregnancy, a woman’s body produces a hormone called relaxin, which loosens the ligaments supporting her pelvis. This condition enables a woman’s pelvis to expand, allowing the baby to pass easily through the delivery canal. However, it also affects other parts of the body, leading to a ‘loosened’ overall body structure, which leads to spinal misalignments, which cause nerve sensitivity, muscular spasms, and pain.
Pregnancy chiropractic care and adjustments can help repair these misalignments during the first trimester and afterward, ensuring a healthy and balanced spine across the gestational period. When a pregnant woman gains weight, a functioning spinal column allows the body to make natural adaptations, reducing problems and back pain.
Reduced Nausea
Throughout the first trimester, dizziness, morning sickness, and nausea are common symptoms in pregnancy that can be exceedingly uncomfortable and difficult to deal with. Chiropractors can assist in minimizing vomiting and nausea by adjusting the spine to its optimal position and increasing your nervous system performance. These realignments enable the hormones to produce at a healthier rate, lowering or even removing nausea.
If you believe your nausea is not because of pregnancy but because of heartburn or constipation, pregnancy chiropractic care can also help relieve digestive difficulties and reduce nausea.
Optimum Baby Positioning
A breech baby isn’t in the proper position to be delivered head first during labor, which might result in serious problems, cord prolapse, difficult vaginal delivery, or an emergency C-section. Pregnancy chiropractic care assists an expectant mom in maintaining a good pelvic balance, letting her baby move head-first in the best delivery position.
Rectifying Pelvic Biomechanics
As previously indicated, pregnancy chiropractic care enhances the pelvis’s structure and healthy movement. Relaxin hormone is produced throughout pregnancy and is in charge of making your back and hips more unstable. This indicates that even minor bumps or microtrauma can shift the structure from alignment.
If the pelvis is misaligned, the baby’s passage through the delivery canal might be hampered further because of intrauterine constraint, which can cause significant discomfort during birth and increase the likelihood of using an epidural.
Furthermore, once the baby’s mobility is hampered, labor might be extended, increasing the possibility of medical interventions like forceps, Pitocin, or a C-section. There are numerous more reasons why labor might progress slowly, but by strengthening the pelvic biomechanics with chiropractic adjustments, you might reduce this chance even further.
Ensure That Your Nervous System Is Correctly Communicating
Pregnancy chiropractic care not only rectifies structural misalignments but also reduces nerve interference, which is a major goal of the treatment. Because the nerves that branch out of your spinal cord innervate every tissue and organ in your body, removing interference from the nerves that proceed to the endocrine, reproductive, and cardiovascular systems can aid these systems in functioning their best.
Improved Labor and Delivery
Fast labor or delivery without pain or issues is the best way to bring your baby into the world, instead of unpleasant and long hours of waiting to enter labor or a lengthy birthing process. Routine chiropractic adjustments throughout your pregnancy can assist in ensuring that your hips, pelvis, and spine are properly aligned, allowing the nerves to function properly. These nerves manage a pregnant woman’s contractions and dilation of her cervix during labor and delivery.
Optimal nerve health can result in a smoother, quicker, and more comfortable labor or delivery, with less discomfort and pain. Routine chiropractic care during pregnancy can considerably aid women who desire natural childbirth without medicines, improving and simplifying their birthing experience.
Pregnancy chiropractic care aims to relieve nerve obstructions in your spine that might limit a pregnant patient’s immune system and organs from functioning optimally, possibly leading to difficulties later in the pregnancy.
Healthier and Better Pregnancy Overall
Aside from that, the healthier and stronger your immune system is, the better your baby’s immune system will operate at delivery. Seeking a chiropractor during pregnancy can help enhance your baby’s overall health while lowering undesirable symptoms, allowing you a smoother, safer, and more comfortable pregnancy.
Expert chiropractors, like us here at Heart of Texas Chiropractic, can provide expert pregnancy chiropractic care to help make your pregnancy journey comfortable and delightful. Reach out to us today!