Chiropractic Care of Children With Colic

October 12, 2021 Posted in: ASK AN EXPERT

In December 2008, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released the National Health Statistics Report on the complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) use by adults and children in the United States for 2007. The authors—Patricia Barnes and colleagues—found that when it comes to children, the most common CAM therapies are natural products and chiropractic spinal manipulations. These findings are not surprising to most chiropractors and their patients. Chiropractors attend to the care of children for a variety of conditions, including asthma, ear infections, ADHD, autism, and the focus of this article: colic. Commonly defined as “unexplainable and uncontrollable crying in babies from 0 to 3 months old, more than three hours a day, more than three days a week for three weeks or more, usually in the afternoon and evening hours”, colic is such a common condition of childhood that it is said to affect some 16 to 26 percent of children in their first year of life. Mistakenly identified as a benign condition of childhood, the condition is stressful to both parents and healthcare providers alike. Parent-child interactions have been found to be less than optimal when a child has colic. Afflicted families experience more problems in their daily functioning than families without colicky infants. Further, colicky infants may be at greater risk of child abuse and Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Given the lack of effectiveness of various pharmaceutical interventions in the treatment of infantile colic and concerns about adverse effects of these drugs, parents are turning to chiropractic for an alternative approach to care. Pharmaceuticals like simethicone, dicyclomine, and methylscopolamine have been found in randomized controlled clinical trials to be either ineffective or unsafe for use in infants with colic. Adverse effects associated with these medications include drowsiness, constipation, and diarrhea, as well as more serious effects such as apnea, seizures, and coma.

A number of case reports have been published in the biomedical literature describing the successful chiropractic care of infants with colic as well as a large number of children undergoing chiropractic care. Nilsson, in a retrospective uncontrolled questionnaire study of 132 infants with colic, found that 91 percent of the parents reported an improvement following an average of two to three patient visits and one week after initiating care. Klougart and colleagues described 316 infants suffering from colic receiving chiropractic care. Based on an analysis of diaries kept by their mothers and parent interviews, 94 percent of the patients benefited from chiropractic care.

In 1999, Wiberg and colleagues published a study examining the short-term effect of chiropractic treatments on children with colic. In a controlled clinical trial taking place in private chiropractic practice, children were randomized into two groups. One group received chiropractic care for two weeks while the other was treated with the drug dimethicone for two weeks. Changes in daily hours of crying were monitored and registered in a colic diary. By the end of the first week of care, the number of hours of crying was reduced by 1 hour in the dimethicone group compared with 2.4 hours in the chiropractic group. In the second week of care, crying remained reduced by 1 hour in the dimethicone group, whereas crying in the chiropractic group was reduced by 2.7 hours. This study demonstrated that chiropractic was superior to dimethicone in the care of children with infantile colic.