Colic is sadly believed to affect up to 1 in every four babies. This is a nightmare scenario where your beautiful baby cries non stop for up to 3 hours, for three days a week for three or more weeks. This disturbs the baby’s sleep, ability to feed adequately and often its digestion. And as a parent this creates immense stress and lack of sleep and rest for you too. Amazingly, there is no real consensus as to what might be the cause, and there is no definitive answer! Now this is sounding particularly dreary! I promise there is hope and it might be simpler that you ever believed.
It is heartbreaking and soul destroying as a new parent to be in this situation.
These babies seem to be incredibly unsettled, fussing a lot, unable to sleep, they can seem to have trouble with wind, often burping and kicking their legs frequently.
The common clinical triggers can be prolonged, or very quick labour. An assisted birth with intervention. Often the mother will have been under stress prenatally, or anxious during her pregnancy.
Birth is a highly intricate and complex process, in which the baby endures enormous physical and sometimes chemical stress (induction drugs, epidurals, antibiotics). This influences the functioning of the autonomic nervous system, often causing less than optimal functioning. In order to flourish in life a baby needs to have an optimally functioning nervous system. This is achieved by ensuring the spine is moving well and able to properly protect this nerve system.
Birth places a massive burden on the upper neck region of the baby, and this then can go on to influence the functioning of the vagus nerve. This incredible nerve gives vital information to the brain from our heart and stomach and digestive system. When there is interference to this information this can result in a baby who is unsettled, cries, has trouble with wind, and digestion.
When we check babies at the practice we first want to understand the different stressors that your baby has endured, we will take a thorough look at your health prior to pregnancy, during pregnancy and the birth. We also will take heat rate variability scans, which look into how resilient and adaptable your baby’s nervous system is. This wonderful scan is done by placing a small clip onto your baby’s ear (comfortable and non-invasive). We also will do a thermal scan, which assesses the state of your baby’s autonomic nervous system. This is done by rolling the thermal scan down the baby’s spine (a quick and comfortable test). Once this information is gathered we will do a hands on check of your baby. This is using pressure no more than you would to check the ripeness of an avocado. This will reveal if there are any areas of the spine or cranium which are not functioning optimally. The correction or adjustment is also done through light touch.
This allows the spine and nervous system to function optimally and allow the baby to be at ease.
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