Episode 71: Chiropractic for Babies & Breastfeeding

Jacqueline Kincer  [0:03]

Welcome back to the breastfeeding talk podcast. I’m your host Jacqueline Kincer. And today, I’m so excited to bring you an esteemed guest, Dr. Martin Rosen. He is a 1981 Summa Cum Laude graduate of Life Chiropractic College. And since 1982, before I was born folks, he has maintained a private practice in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Besides his practice, he’s traveled nationally and internationally, teaching chiropractic technique pediatrics, cranial, adjusting chiropractic philosophy, and practice management. And with his wife, Dr. Nancy Watson, they also run the peak potential Institute, offering premier educational programs for healthcare professionals.

 

Their most recent book, it’s all in the head, was written to inform and bring awareness of the implications of growth and developmental challenges in the early stages of childhood development. Their book empowers parents with the ability to understand normal developmental milestones and to recognize problems in the earliest stages, allowing them to seek appropriate care before problems become entrenched and create diagnosable disease processes. I have gotta say, I love this book way more than the Wonder Weeks. I mean, Wonder Weeks is fine, it’s totally fine. I just will say that.

 

I love Dr. Rosen’s perspective because he understands normal infant development and reflexes, and neurological issues. And he’s just a wealth of information he shared so much on the interview that I’ve done with him. So I can’t wait for you to listen. And if you’re a provider out there, especially a chiropractic provider, the Peak Potential Institute also offers other educational tools, including hands-on and online workshops and seminars, guest lectures, instructional videos, written books and articles, published research papers, and one on one interviews. So he’s really dedicated to giving chiropractors, healthcare providers, and parents a new perspective when it comes to children’s health.

 

And as parents of two daughters, doctors Rosen and Watson have been committed to helping other parents to learn from both their personal and professional experiences. Through their combined 80 years of teaching, writing and clinical experience, they have brought unique insight, motivation, and support to 1000s of lay and professional individuals in numerous fields. I have to say, I really just enjoyed my conversation with Dr. Rosen, in which you’re about to hear his personal experience, the reason why he got into this work, and I think you’ll find that chiropractic has gotten a really bad reputation because there’s a lot of charlatans out there.

 

This is true in many different fields, right? I mean, I think we can all sort of think of examples, whether it’s, , a used car salesperson, or it’s, , someone else, right, we’ve all had our bad experience of things. And I really am so glad that you get to listen to Dr. Rosen because he shares a perspective of what true chiropractic medicine looks like, what real clinical practice looks like, and how to appropriately utilize those tools and those modalities to improve breastfeeding for infants, and just overall health for infants. So without further ado, here’s my interview in conversation with Dr. Martin Rosen.

 

Welcome to the show, Dr. Martin Rosen. I’m so excited that you’re here. And, , you have been in clinical practice for 40 years now. Congratulations to you and for teaching for 39 of those years. And you’ve really done a lot with your practice. It’s very family-oriented. I know you told me your wife was also a chiropractor. She’s since retired, and now your daughter is a chiropractor. So I’d love for the audience to hear more from you about your experience and everything that you’ve been doing.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [4:33]

Sure. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. I’m glad to get to speak to your audience and to speak to you as well. We’re a family-oriented practice. We take care of infants, mothers, fathers, dogs, cats, anything that pretty much has a spine that belongs to a family. That’s what we’ve been doing for the last 40 years, and I also teach with my wife at a company called the Peak Potential Institute, our company, and we teach chiropractors we specialize So in teaching pediatrics, and we have a pediatric certificate program that we teach chiropractors. But we also teach adult adjusting protocols, but we focus a lot on teaching pediatrics because it’s one of the things we feel in chiropractic education, it’s lacking as far as experience working with infants and young children. So we felt like we needed to fill this niche. And that’s what we’ve been doing for the last 39 and a half years is kind of filling this niche in teaching pediatrics. And it’s also such a great population to work with, we have right now in our office, we have three generations of mothers, grandmothers, and little infants. So we’ve had four generations, one of them just passed away. So now all families are three-generational, so it’s awesome to play to watch these people grow up and be connected to them through years and years and years. So that’s what we do. That’s amazing.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [5:48]

That’s amazing. I love that  your family caring for families. And I just find that so great. Because clearly, this is just what you love doing. I think that’s really what counts in a lot of ways. Yep, it is. Yeah.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [6:04]

Yep, it is. Yeah. I mean, that’s how our family lives, too. I mean, I have two daughters. And one that said, as a chiropractor, I have another daughter, who lives out in Colorado, and that’s how we raised them, , take care of themselves take personal responsibility, God adjusted, , we homeschool them for a while my wife, nurse for a number of years for that we did family bed, so we kind of walked our talk, that’s kind of how we live our lives. So it’s really easy to translate that into practice.

 

It also was helpful to give people because we’ve seen all sides of it, we worked a lot of homeschools is we have a lot of people,  lactation consultants, we lack a lot of midwives, doulas. So it’s great to be able to have that experience and share it with other people in our office and to help parents because sometimes it’s tough, and parents are looking for answers. And, , sometimes raising children is a difficult process. Sometimes it’s an amazing, beautiful process. But a lot of times, it’s challenging. So we are there as a place for them to get some help, as well as not just get the chiropractic care, but at least information as well, and support.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [7:04]

And yeah, that is so important. And just because you get through the newborn period doesn’t mean you’ve got the rest of this parenting thing figured out.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [7:15]

Oh, my children are 35 and 40. And I still haven’t figured it out yet. They still bring new challenges and new experiences to us.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [7:24]

Oh my gosh, I’m sure that gives me hope with my six and nine-year-old because I for sure don’t have it figured out. So yeah. Well, one of the things you mentioned was specifically pediatric, and, , sometimes in my work with clients and my team, as well, for recognizing the need for chiropractic care. And sometimes, parents aren’t as familiar with what that looks like when we’re talking about infants. And they’ll say, oh, yeah, I have a chiropractor. I’ll just take my baby to him. And I’m like, Well, does this person specialize in infants and pediatrics? So I would love for you to just chat a little bit more for the listener who might be new to this and explain why is it important that someone sees a chiropractor that specializes in pediatrics and then infants as well, and what are some things they might want to look for when they’re looking for someone local to them?

 

Unknown Speaker  [8:16]

So I mean, chiropractic, just like any other health care field. You wouldn’t bring your child to a geriatric cardiologist, you would bring them to the pediatrician, chiropractors who specialize in pediatrics do that because they want to specialize in that, and they have special training. So as I said, a little bit earlier in chiropractic school, they’ll be getting a good education, and we do a lot of clinic time, we don’t get a lot of chances to adjust pediatric patients. I’m not quite sure why the schools are like that. I think probably it’s because they’re open clinics, maybe people don’t come in there. Maybe it’s insurance reasons, whatever it is, you don’t get a lot of pediatric chiropractic adjusting skills when you get out of school.

 

It’s something that you have to take postgraduate, or while you’re in school, we offer classes, also in school, part of the curriculum as electives. So it really is something that you have to be trained in because the pediatric spine, the pediatric cranium, is very different than the adult’s middle cranium. And we don’t do the same type of adjusting protocols.

 

What I learned in school to get out when I got out of school, and one of the reasons I got into pediatrics is I met my wife in chiropractic school, we got married, and then , as what happens often when you fall in love, , your eyes take over, and you don’t really think with your head, and we decided to get pregnant right away. So when she graduated from chiropractic school, she was seven and a half months pregnant. And we had this little baby that came out, , to a month and a half later, and we realized that we had a chiropractic philosophy and ideology or healthcare philosophy that we were following and living, but we really didn’t have a great skill set to implement it with our little baby.

 

We didn’t really know how to do it. So that was what started me on the pediatric trail. I needed to find ways to be able to take care of my daughter, my first daughter, in ways that I thought would be appropriate and help her nervous develop. And so we’ve also in within that period of time, we met a lot of people in different birthing communities.

 

We moved up to Massachusetts, and we met midwives and doulas, we met nurses. And there were a lot of issues sometimes during the birth process that people didn’t know how to deal with, even during the pregnancy. So we were seeing a lot of these kids who were coming out, and people were bringing their children to us, , because maybe the parent had a difficult birth, or maybe the child was in the sleep was angry nursing, or Aaron Finch a whole gamut of stuff that was coming up, and that they really didn’t. No one understands why it was happening, and number to has an alternative venue to deal with these issues. And in many cases, if they weren’t severe enough, the medical profession would often say, Oh, don’t worry, your child will outgrow it.

 

For some people, that was not a comfortable place to be, especially if your child is not sleeping at night, screaming, and crying. And it takes him nine months to outgrow, and the parents are exhausted by that point in time. So we continually try to add on different protocols and different skill sets, doing research, studying, working with other chiropractors that we knew that had been out in practice long to do pediatrics to help develop not only our skill set but develop an entire pediatric program that we can bring to the profession. Hmm,

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [11:17]

yeah, that’s, that’s incredible. And like you said, you went to school for this, but you came out of it going, I don’t know, even how to really implement this kind of thing with my own child. And, , I think you and I kind of have a similar background there to Why I didn’t go to school to become a lactation consultant. The body makes milk, and whether you want it to or not, you can suppress that if you’d like after birth, but what do I do with that? Just because my body has this function doesn’t mean I know how to use it. A bit of a parallel there because, yeah, you don’t know what you don’t know. And I love that you and your wife went down this path of pursuing that. You mentioned something interesting about kind of getting involved in this network of midwives and doulas and birth workers specifically. Difficult birth was one of those things you had said, and you and I know how that can affect breastfeeding and just its child overall, what are some of those things that you do see as a result of a difficult birth or what types of things happen in birth that creates things that someone such as yourself can help with?

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [12:19]

So there’s so number one when people think of difficult or so of course, they think of C section, Villar deliveries, forceps, deliveries, vacuum deliveries, those kinds of things extremely long labor, maybe cords wrapped around the child’s neck, heads, hitting gets the pubic bone, all that stuff that causes an incredible amount of stress on not only on the mother during the birth process, but also on the child. So if we take the simple statement that structure and function are related very often when these kids come out because of the amount of stress, especially, let’s say, a C section, where there’s an incredible amount of stress on the neck because of the child’s not even getting the contractions to help them push them out or down the birth canal. It puts a lot of tension and stress on the spinal cord. C-section deliveries do those forceps deliveries back, and deliveries and the child’s spine is extremely, extremely delicate, and it’s vulnerable to basically traction forces, , you always think of chiropractors are taking care of pinched nerves. Well, that’s not the case in pediatric practice.

 

In pediatric practice, what we’ll often look at is hypermobility in joints and traction. In other words, too much pulling attraction on the joints, and that affects the nerve. It also affects the cranial bones. They did a study remember years ago in England, and they found that one of the main causes of stress on an infant’s spine and cranium was spending too much time in the birth canal, that there’s a certain amount of time that seems to be more effective for the child. But if they spent too much time in the birth canal, because the contractions increased tenfold.

 

Once the child leaves the uterus and goes down the birth canal, the pressure of the contractions literally increases from 10 millimeters of mercury to Jahangir millimeters, so tenfold. So any distortion going down the birth canal, right? And so when these children come out, , one of the reasons they do Apgar scores is to get an idea of how stressful the birth was for the baby, right? An Apgar score is basically a monitor of is your baby is breathing well is their color right on the reactive. And so, if they come out of the birth canal, with a very low Apgar score, that means it was a stressful birth for them. So that’s one of those monitors that we look at.

 

The other thing that happens, and you see this often when the kid comes down on the birth canal, the whole idea of the cranium or the kid, a child’s cranium, is that it’s allowed to almost collapse on itself. It has these giant sutures, and you see when kids come out and have those soft spots. Those soft spots are not born yet because they allow the cranium to contract as the child goes down the birth canal.

 

What’s supposed to happen in the next seven to 10 days is that contraction is supposed to reverse itself, or the cranium is supposed to expand again. The reason for that is that in the first year of life, the brain is going to grow 100 percent. So it’s going to literally double in size. And the whole idea of a child or an infant’s cranium is to allow for that brain to grow. That’s why you have those soft spots before the bones start to fuse or become what we call sutures. And all those soft spots stay open for approximately two years. I mean, there are different timeframes for different ones. But so we’re talking about the first few years of life.

 

So if the baby comes out of the birth canal, or if during development, you see like flat spots on the baby’s head, or the baby’s head starts to be misshapen, that’s telling you that there are some abnormal growth patterns that are going on inside the cranium and can affect not only the brain that can affect what’s called the journalist’s soft tissue system, that also affects the palette and the palette is the thing. If that’s not functioning correctly, that can affect nursing issues. So think about this, what if your baby came out, and the hips look crooked, and your babies started to crawl, and they crawl quickly, and then when they stood, they stood in one hip was higher than the other, and they were walking funny, you would notice that immediately, they’ll Oh, that’s not normal, my baby’s hips aren’t supposed to be twisted one leg is not supposed to be shorter, or boating than the other, you notice that?

 

Well, the cranium also protects the nervous system. So it’s the same thing if you look at a child’s face, and the jaws pulled to one side, or one eye looks a lot smaller than the other, or they can turn their head more easily to one side than the other, or they don’t like tummy time. All these things are signs of functional and structural issues that may often need to be addressed. Like lactation, it’s all we talk about. We lookfor the three things we talked about, the position of the jaw, does it open and close normally, is it twisted to one side? The size of the eye sockets, is one size smaller than the other? And the ability for the baby to turn their head equally.

 

If any of that one of those three things is an issue that can affect how the baby can nurse, for example, very often, we see parents come in that the baby can nurse better on the right breast but has a really difficult time on the left breast and have to hold them in different positions, or the baby just doesn’t like that. Well, it could be because the baby’s head doesn’t turn easily to one side, or that suck is actually stronger on one side of their mouth than the other, that’s part of what the tongue tie issue can be a part of is if they suck is not strong enough where they can’t seal the nipple against the roof of their mouth, because they have a tongue-tied, that will affect the way they nurse too. So nursing issues are literally kind of that red light, in most cases, that there’s some kind of issue with the baby that is not happening or is not making that process easier to facilitate.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [17:36]

Hmm, absolutely. I definitely see this a lot. You take a similar approach to what we do here at my company, which is looking at function. So and how does that structure impact the function? I’m not the one to correct the crooked jaw. So I always have to tell families to look like, yeah, he is going to nurse better on this process. Because look how his jaws askew, I can’t fix that. I mean, sure, you can massage it all day long. But you got to see somebody like, talk to Rosen because I don’t do that. And sometimes families look at me like I have two heads. And I’m like, let’s look together. Right? You see it, right? And you feel the impact of this.

 

Unfortunately, I think one of the questions I get asked and I get it, right? We don’t. We’re protective of our babies, we don’t want to do more than we have to, , so parents will be like, well aren’t they just gonna outgrow it or, they get bigger, it’s gonna get better. And I’m like, Well, I mean, to me, I haven’t seen a baby outgrow it yet. They tend to grow into it. As you said, if they have a crooked hip, they crawl crooked. Now they stay on crooked. Now they walk crooked, and it just perpetuates. So I mean would you say you agree with that you don’t see this just sort of self resolve.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [18:51]

That’s one of the things that scares me the most is when people say, Oh, it’ll just get better. Oh, it’ll just go away. So we as individuals are very fault-tolerant, which means we can take a lot of abuse and bounce back, basically. Otherwise, we’d all be dead by the time we’re three years of age. Right? Right. Well, you have compensatory patterns, so you may adapt to them, but you adapt your compensatory pattern with a compensation.

 

So what you’re saying is, they may outgrow some of the functional aspects of it, or you may just get through it, or you may just suck it up. Or like some others. I’ve had mothers who have gone through tears in their eyes because they’ve given up nursing, and they didn’t want to because that five months, that child still wasn’t nursing, was a struggle. They couldn’t do it, their nipples were really painful. The child wasn’t happy, and they had a switch to a bottle, or the child had the version issues. And that was awesome because there was a functional issue with the child that no one told them about.

 

I had a mom come into me, and it was the exact same thing. She was four months old. She hadn’t been able to nurse for the last two months. And the pediatrician just said, , it’s not a big deal. You can use the bottle don’t worry about it. It’s not gonna affect the child, but it will be not only affecting the child, but it was also affecting the relationship because the mom literally was, came in with tears, I can’t nurse my baby anymore.

 

I really want to do those kinds of things, I get scared when people start to accept things that are common as normal. Just because it’s happening a lot doesn’t mean it’s a normal thing that’s happening. The American Pediatric Association has accepted, basically, head distortion, they say 47% of children have some type of head distortion. That’s their number 47%. And they feel like only 10% of those kids need to be treated. And to me, that’s very horrific.

 

Those are horrific stats and saying half the kids that are born have some kind of head distortions, but we’re only going to treat 10% of them because those are the ones that we think are bad enough. And what about all those other kids who create compensatory changes, but as you said, breastfeeding is not just a functional issue, it’s an emotional issue, it’s a connection issue. It’s about connecting with your child, it’s a very special time for parents. And if that becomes a struggle, or difficult, or there’s resentment, or whatever happens around that process that’s going to affect your child. So saying that they’ll get through it is almost like saying, Well, if you’re in an abusive family, that your child will be fine.

 

When they get older, they’ll get through it. I’m not saying that distortions are abusive, I’m just saying that things are compensations. And if we push that compensation without correcting them, we just piling up the compensation on top of it, which is often what happens when you see kids like you’ll see a little kid who comes in on maybe they have some trouble nursing, maybe they end up with they have some ear infections when they start out because , the sinuses don’t drain well. And then the ear infections come, but allergies and the allergies develop into eczema, and then eczema develops into asthma. And you can see the process breaking down as your immune system has to compensate more and more and more. The same thing with neurological development, you may have a baby that maybe misses some of their milestones, and they go, no big deal, they didn’t crawl a creek, and then when they’re two years old they’re not walking as well, they trip a lot. And then we’re three years old, , they start to not be able to integrate their nervous system.

 

Then by the time they go to school, they’re extremely frustrated, because now what they’ve done is compensated so many times, when they have to use their brain and more of their brain, it’s already in a compensatory state, and they can’t take in that information. So they act out in school, when they get diagnosed with on the spectrum, when they have ADHD, or whatever the diagnosis comes in. If you ask a parent, they’ll usually tell you, I noticed there was something weird about Johnny when he was like 12 to 18 months, but the doctor said, he’s fine, will outgrow it.

 

The problem is, is that these compensatory patterns tend to show up as we start to develop more and more and use more and more of a nervous system. So I get scared when they say, Oh, it’s fine, leave it alone, elaborate all this is common. So we just accept it as normal. Those are the things that really scare me. That’s kind of why Dr. Watson and I wrote the book, it’s all in the head because we really wrote about, , common versus normal. And I think it’s really important when every parent wants the best for their child and wants their child to express their full potential. And compensation is not full potential compensation.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [23:11]

Ah, oh, my gosh, you’re speaking my love language. Heck, yes. It is true, right? Like when we’re looking at this from the subjective standpoint, from this, this clinical expertise that we have, and we’re saying, Yeah, but this is not normal for human development, right? This is not normal for infant development and doesn’t mean your baby’s a bad baby, or you did something wrong, right? Things happen. But there is a fix, right? And so I think, a lot of times these pediatricians, they don’t have that skill set to be able to fix this other than maybe a helmet on the head or some reflux medications or what have you. I guess that kind of leads me to a question about this is, there’s kind of this perception of things. And this is your area, not mine. But we’ve talked about the cranial plates and the sutures and how those are meant to contract and expand. Now we want to make sure everything settles back into the right place after birth, and all of that, and sometimes parents will say I’ll notice it sometimes, too, or the pediatricians. Yeah, the back of the heads are a little flat or what have you. And then it seems to get worse over time. But it’s not always. It’s not always noticeable right after birth. So, so a parent will say, well, it couldn’t have been the birth because his head only started getting flat around three months, and I don’t leave him to lay down on the floor all the time. Why is this happening? So why does that happen?

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [24:32]

Okay, so think about this. The easiest way to explain it without using visual prompts, I think, is this so if you think of this tube that’s attached all the way to your child’s tailbone and us to coccyx all the way in comes all the way up the spine, comes into the cranium, attaches around the cranium, or at our, Atlanta attaches to the bones and then actually comes up through the little sutures, those sutures in the stone and attaches around the skull and this tube. It catches all the way down. And Its job is to do two, three main things.

 

One is to maintain a proper tension along with the growth plates in the bones. So they grow normally, too, because the nerves attached, which means proper tension in the nervous system, and three to allow the movement, what’s called cerebral spinal fluid, which is basically like your lymphatic and blood supply for you while you’re in Phatak system to your central nervous system. So it has three tubes. So the tube has attachment points.

 

What happens is sometimes during the birth process, or during the kid growing up the first couple of months of life, but often during the birth process, parts of that too get torqued, and they create more tension on one area than another. And what happens is when they create that more tension, you may not notice it right away. But as the child starts to grow, so remember, this tube is now going to have to expand with your child as this tube starts to grow. If there’s a kink, for lack of a better term, in the tube, let’s say it attaches to the back of the skull, if there’s a too tight, to begin with, and you didn’t notice it, as the child hits about three months of age, then and that cranium, the back part of the cranium is going to start to fuse. If that tube says tight, it’s going to have to distort to do that.

 

So it’s like if you have a muscle that’s too tight, that’s a tax, let’s say from your shoulder to your elbow, and that muscle is too tight. And what happens is as you start to grow or use your arm, the muscle doesn’t give it doesn’t let go, your arm is going to have to distort to deal with that. And that’s what happens. It’s called the Darrell meningioma system or the data. And again, it could get traumatized during the birth process or early childhood, or get traumatized anytime, but don’t get traumatized in those points. And it won’t show up until the child starts to basically grow. Well, as you said a minute ago, the cranial is supposed to push back or come back into its normal position. If we can’t do that because that tube that attaches bone is too tight, it’ll start to show up. So the trauma usually happens earlier, namely some scar tissue. And then as the system has to become basically more flexible and get longer and bigger. That’s when those issues will show up.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [27:04]

Oh, wow, that is so eloquently explained. And even though it’s just a verbal explanation, I feel like I could create that imagery in my head. And so, so easy to understand the way you explain that. And it makes sense. Because I will say like kind of unrelated, but I was in a really serious motor vehicle collision. A couple of years ago, I was still dealing with issues with my spine I have a ruptured disc, and what have you. There were things that were obvious right away like whiplash and neck pain, and then there were things that became obvious later on that you’re like, Oh, well, I didn’t realize that the spine would affect XY and Z, and still dealing with some effects a couple years later, because it was very serious. So, I can see what you’re saying about babies, right? And babies and humans, we are resilient, right? As you said, we would just we wouldn’t be here if we couldn’t handle the stresses. So the body finds a way to adapt. It’s fascinating.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [28:02]

Yeah, I mean, that was approved. I mean, we have the term post-concussion syndrome, which basically means you had a concussion, and it didn’t resolve, and now you’re having downstream effects from it. So it’s the same thing that happens. These are traumatic incidents that happened. And we all, like I said, kids, if they didn’t adapt, if 90% of the stuff that happens to them, or 95, even in their body couldn’t correctly adapt, we would be dead by age three. I mean, I remember when my little daughter as she was probably two, maybe two and a half. And this was way back in the day we had TV, Sony Trinitron, these big TVs, I remember she pulled it off the shelf, literally on top of her. And so yeah, you said the kids fall, they fall downstairs.

 

I had a mother come in once that she was walking down the stairs with a baby and a nightgown. And she stepped on the edge of the nightgown, and she started to fly forward. And just reflexes she threw the baby dropped the baby, the baby went flying down the stairs and fell down like eight eight stairs. So it’s kind of traumas happen if you just let them go without correcting as you said your car accident. If those things underlying issues are uncorrected, then the body will develop scar tissue compensatory patterns and all those things that we do not want for our children. We want him to start out as healthy as possible. That’s also why so many diagnoses of different conditions don’t occur to age four and five because nobody is paying attention to those really first two years. I shouldn’t say nobody now we’re starting to pay more jangid will run paying attention those first few years seeing the signs we have things like primal reflexes, they are set to go off at specific times.

 

We have milestones that are set to go off at specific times go off and on at specific times or reflexes. If they maintain too long or don’t come at the right time. That’s a glitch in the nervous system.  the same thing milestones, those are developmental think about this. You have a set of milestones where you’re supposed to be able to pick your head up that allows the child to lay on their tummy without their face buried in the ground. It also helps them be able to turn over. And then from turning over rolling from side to side, then you want to be able to get the baby’s , muscles strong enough so they can then sit up. And then, from sitting up, you want them to be able to creep and crawl so they can develop the nervous system. And then they can stand and then eventually walk by themselves. All those things are pre-programmed into the back of the brainstem.

 

So if babies because we keep our children in a safe environment, if they miss those milestones, they can survive. But think about this an animal in the wild, one of their first milestones, when they’re born, is to be able to get up and walk because if they can’t, if you’re an animal in the desert in the Serengeti, or in the jungle, and you can’t get up and walk, you will die. Your food. Yeah, exactly your food. So it’s really important that they make that first milestone because they can’t be protected from that, again, in our world, we can protect her afterward. So not having those milestones. But it’s really something that, as a monitor saying, hey, there’s something wrong here. There’s a neurological glitch. This is supposed to happen within a certain timeframe. And if it’s not, if it’s not, I may seek help.

 

I was talking to a doula on one of these podcasts a couple of weeks ago, and she said something which I thought was brilliant. We talked about primal reflexes. And she said for her, she thinks one of the first primal reflexes is for the baby to be able to turn head down in the uterus to cut out the birth canal. She thinks that’s actually a normal reflex, and that kids who don’t do that, then there’s also already something wrong given barring the fact that maybe the cord is too short as placenta previa, or something like that going on.

 

But ideally, she thinks it’s a reflex ability for the child to be able to feel gravity know well how to flip, know how to get their head down, so they cannot the birth canal, because we see a lot of kids, and I just had a new patient come in today whose baby is transverse, and she’s 34 weeks pregnant 34 weeks long. So we have to do some work to help the baby be able to turn within the uterus so that she can deliver vaginally because that’s what she wants to do. She wants to do. She had a C section, and she wants to do a VBAC. And those are the kinds of things that we’re looking at.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [32:06]

Right? Yeah. Now, there’s some signs and clues there along the way. And, and I’m glad we’re having this conversation today. Because I think one of the things that I encountered, especially having a somewhat large social media presence and being really active there is there’s this idea that depending on who you’re speaking to, it’s one thing one on one with a patient, it’s another thing when you’re trying to get this message out on a more public platform and to say, , something that’s common, may not be normal. And they’re like, you’re saying there are so timeframes for these reflexes to initiate to integrate, and all of these developmental milestones, but then we’ve gotten into this place and society where people say, Well my baby didn’t walk till he was 16 months, and he’s fine. How dare you tell me something is wrong with my child, it’s like, whoa, whoa, so I’m gonna front to you. It’s not a comment on your parenting. It’s not any of that, right?

 

But what we are saying is, biologically, okay, there is something that is expected of our species. And whether or not we live in a safe world, , where we can protect our babies from harm has no bearing on that our DNA doesn’t understand that we live in modern homes with air conditioning and clean water. Okay, so all of these things still count, and they still matter. It’s an important conversation in my mind because I think a lot of things are getting neglected. Because there are pediatricians that are too afraid to tell parents something’s wrong, right? And then parents are too afraid to hear that something’s wrong. I don’t know if you have any answers on that? But my gosh, how do we get through to people? Because we don’t want to tell them you’re doing it wrong. That’s not?

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  33:46

Well, so one of the answers is simply this. That’s exactly why my wife’s kind of product, they have to write the book. It’s all in the head. Because I’ve written a number of technical manuals, I could teach chiropractors and technique manuals. And we really didn’t reach out a lot to the lay population because we’re so busy trying to train chiropractors, and we saw exactly what you just said, , these kinds of issues that people are either feeling affronted, or the pediatricians afraid to tell them, or they just say, Oh, my baby’s fine, it’s you. So we wrote the book to give people kind of a baseline when should these things happening? So within the first 18 months of life, you should hit all those baselines, all those milestones. That’s like you said, , we talked about primal brain midbrain and forebrain. Well, the primal brain, as you said, it’s a brain that’s been around forever and ever and ever. That’s our primal brain. That’s, that’s kind of those basic instincts. That’s the reflex of the brain that’s the brain that protects us.

 

And it’s not to even get to the midbrain where we start to make emotionally based decisions. And finally, when we hit the forebrain, we make conscious based decisions, but all that stuff that’s happening in the midbrain sets the roadwork and the groundwork for the rest of the brain to work. If you’re not getting the proper information into that, that back part of your brain into that primal brain in the back. final install, and it’s not processing right, then the rest of the brain will suffer because it’s not getting the good luck, correct information.

 

So what we try to do with parents, what we do is, we talk to them and we give them charts, and we tell them where to look up on the web, that these are the normal milestones that we’re looking at. And if your child didn’t reach those normal milestones, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. That doesn’t mean there’s a bad child. That means that we can still help them integrate these milestones, you can still help kids. And I’ve helped work with kids who are three, four, or five years old and help them kind of reprogram their nervous system.

 

I have a great case this little girl little baby came in. She was almost 1819 months old. And the parents brought her in because she was very difficult to take care of she didn’t she was eating well, and she didn’t sleep well. She had very aggressive behavior. She just was a very difficult child. Her mom called that she said that. One of the things she also said when we talked about the history is that she never crept her crawled. When she was little in that seven to nine-month period of time, she never did that. She had all these other health issues. When she came to our office, we started adjusting. And about four weeks into the adjustment program, a man came in and said I couldn’t believe, but I went downstairs, and she had an older brother who was about four or five years old.

 

And he was I went downstairs, and my daughter was crawling around on the floor with her brother. And they said, she goes yeah, she never called before. And now she was going to she was actually resetting her nervous system herself. She was backtracking it and reinstalling basically the groundwork that she had missed. So we see that kind of stuff all the time. So it’s about a conversation with parents. It’s not about blaming them. It’s about pointing out that, , these things are not normal, and there is something that we can still do about it. That’s the other part that’s really important your child may be fine. And I don’t know what fine means. It’s probably one of the worst words in the English language.

 

You’re fine. That means what? You’re horrible. You’re terrible. Leave me alone. I mean, a lot of kids. Yeah, I know. Sometimes when I say fine, it’s me. I don’t want to talk to you, that’s what fine means. To me. It’s like, I don’t want to talk to him. Fine. Why if someone insults you, yeah. So anyhow, I don’t want to go off on fine. But the bottom line is, that means nothing that , and again, is trying to be okay its okay, if that’s if you want to keep the bar that way. But I feel, and I’m sure you have that experience. It’s my experience that parents want to raise that bar for their children, whether it be socioeconomically, emotionally, physically I said to a friend the other day, the CDC, I don’t know if you’re, I’m sure you’re aware of it, but CDC released some new guidelines or support. It’s new guidance and actually dumbed down to milestones. And it’s terrific.

 

I said to my friend, I said, we watch the Olympics. I really like it. My daughter was a gymnast, , we really, we still watch them. He said, If we were watching the Olympics, and every year, people got slower, perform less, didn’t jump as high, couldn’t do as much as they usually did the year before, and said, well, would that be acceptable? If athletes kept getting worse and worse and worse? I said, so why is it acceptable that now we’re saying, Oh, it’s okay for kids don’t reach milestones later on? Or if we skip a few milestones? Because we decided that because it’s happening, it’s okay. I said, No, that’s, we would not accept that for athletes, we’d not accept that people wil, in the outside world, why are we accepting those kinds of things for our children? So if your children are having these issues, and a practitioner are willing to make you aware of this and not make you aware of it as a chastisement will make you aware of it because we want to help you increase your child’s functional potential? It’s really that simple.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [38:48]

Yeah, absolutely. And we’re advancing in so many other ways. As a society, some could argue we’re going backward in some ways too. But, like, technologically and all of these other things, right. So why would we advance in terms of our biology and our health status, not just longevity, number of years we live but, the way in which we live and so it’s like, wow, that’s a that’s definitely, definitely odd. And, and it kind of ties into one of the other big topics that I know you work with and I work with a lot is tongue-tie. And there’s this, whole controversy that is just completely unnecessary surrounding this, because some doctors just choose not to get on board with things but and , it just hurts the families right, but like, , this is not a new issue. We can find, history of this and medical literature and midwives with long picky nails slice and tongue ties after birth and what have you. So, now we better understand because there have been advances in science and medicine and all of these things, and people like you have tried to, understand the human body better. And so what is, what are you seeing from a chiropractic perspective with that.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [40:02]

So I think just one thing that you pointed out, which you said really good, you could go through history and see that our tongue tends to also as we get either more advanced is the word is awareness. And we become start to become aware of different things that we need to look at and look for. So I’ve been in practice for two years. And I can honestly say that in the first 30 years of my practice, I didn’t really even evaluate for tongue-tie. It wasn’t something that was in my in my consciousness, it wasn’t something. So did I miss some of them? Probably, and in the last 10 years, it’s become more prevalent.

 

Every child that comes in, I evaluate for it. So do I find it a lot more? Absolutely. But I’m looking for it. And, and what the difference is, though, is that there are a lot of dentists out there who are, just taking courses in laser revision, because now, when I first started working with tongue-tie, it was basically a surgical procedure was a knife, it was cutting it. Now it’s a laser, it’s still cutting, but his laser. And there are a lot of dentists who are taking seminars, and they just kind of randomly cutting everybody’s tongue-tied, again, you talked about, and I talked about it, it’s also not just structure, its function. So there are some cases we divide tongue-tie into three areas, posterior, middle, and anterior.

 

And so depending on where the tongue tie is, and depending on how the child’s functioning, and offending, if they’re making compensatory changes, we recommend or not recommend the tongue tie just had a woman actually today, whose baby was eight months of age, when she came in, I think I’ve been taking care of the kid now for maybe two months. And one of the reasons she came in to see me was because the child has nipple aversions, you could nurse a child, and the child had really bad sleep patterns. And so the aversion is gone. And the sleep patterns are better. But the child’s still not nursing as well because she does have a tongue-tied, she was afraid to do the revision because she was afraid that the version would come back again. Now the child is just starting to heat solids at nine months of age. And she’s doing better.

 

But I evaluated Jay, and I said to him, I know that get this was recommended 10 times Tongue Tied I trust, I say, I think it’s time to do the revision because now it’s starting to affect her as she’s getting stronger, she can’t get the back of her tongue up against the roof of her mouth. And so when she’s nursing her, she’s sucking in air. And that’s why she’s uncomfortable. So it’s really about timing. It’s about knowing how to evaluate it. And it’s been knowing when it’s effective to be done. And when it could be a problem. Sometimes posterior tongue ties do not cause any functional issues. And if you cut them, they actually make it harder. And I’ve seen this happen for the baby to nurse only because they can’t control their tongue as well. So it’s really about bringing you to awareness, evaluating it properly, number one, where the tongue tie is, and number two, how that’s affecting the child’s function.

 

Yeah, it because sometimes getting tongue-tied, especially anterior tongue tie, which I almost always recommend being, not only affects function, but it affects the growth of the jaw. If there’s an anterior tongue tie, the child can’t move the jaw bone out far and back. And these are the kind of kids when you look at them, they have this deep crease, like across the chin, and they have what we call a posterior mandible, or what people used to call a weak chin with a jaw that looks really small and pulled back. And that’s because they can’t push the jar out with the tongue tie or the anterior tongue tie. So yeah, we look at all these signs of fat looking to cranial bone growth, we look at the palate, how that’s developing, we check the child’s suck and see we have a nine-point test, that we look inside the mouth and see if the sucking reflex, the gag reflex, and the biting are all equal on these nine particular points. If they’re not, when they don’t change, then we basically make a decision at that point in time. If the function of that tongue-tie is inhibiting that process, then maybe the child needs to have that done. Or if we do the evaluation, and the child, then over a period of a couple of weeks, two months of care, those parameters start to change, then we may suggest not doing the tongue tie, but you have to have some kind of baseline.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [44:02]

absolutely, yep, you have to have that functional assessment. I mean, that’s what I do. And what my team does is,our I love it when someone  they send us a little DM, a picture of the baby’s lip or the tongue, is this a tie? And I’m like, first of all, I do not diagnose via Instagram message. But second of all, it’s all about the function, I look at a still photograph of a friend Ulam not in motion, I have no idea what is going on with that tongue motion with the mouth, the jaw, all of that movement. So I love that you mentioned that because you have to have that baseline, right? And then you do an intervention, right? So you do whatever treatment you’re thinking needs to help this child. Does it improve, or do you think stays the same, or does it minimally improve, and we’re not getting the results we want?

 

Well, now we know right now we know but rushing into, I think the problem is like  a lot of parents they post these photos on a Facebook group somewhere someone says oh yeah, it’s a tongue tie. You go to this dentist right like you said, the dentist releases it, and whether or not, I mean, it could be a tongue tie that is creating a very functional impact. But you went and got this procedure done, and no one’s evaluated the function, there’s no baseline established. And you’ve never been given any direction on how to improve the function other than changing the anatomy. Well, what are we expecting to happen there? Because so many things like the jaw and the palate have been impacted?

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [45:24]

Exactly. What do you do after the tongue tie revision? If let’s say the child is seven or eight months old, and you do revision it, okay, they’re nursing better, but what about the structural implications that could have the seven months of who’s correcting that correctly, the power who’s correcting the job motion, who’s helping them retrain their job, who’s, doing or who’s helping them a lot of times tongue ties, if it’s severe enough could affect the neck, they affect the tension if they affect what’s called the fascia, and it could cause tightness in the neck. So who’s correcting that who’s correcting the imbalances so that you write all that has to be done in the other piece around it? Is that Yeah, you may have a tongue-tie. But you also may have a lip tie or a blue tie. And it’s maybe it’s what we call like a perfect storm, it’s those three things together, that is causing the problem, like if you look at the tongue, and you go, Oh, that’s not a bad tongue tie, but then tie it then add in a lip tie and a vocal tie.

 

And now you’re getting a child whose entire lips structure and facial structure is unable to nurse or to grab onto a breast or even a bottle correctly because they have all these restrictions. So yeah, you have to be able to look at I think we have to be able to look at it, you have to have a baseline, it’s simply called outcome assessment, we have a parameter that we look at, we do, like you said, an intervention or supportive care. And then, at a certain period of time, we looked again to see if that supportive cat had changed the outcome. If it does it, then you may need to do something else. And that’s just standard care. I mean, that’s kind of how you live your life, isn’t right.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [46:49]

It’s like one on one like this is absolutely what is supposed to be happening. Yeah, exactly.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [46:55]

I go out to dinner in a restaurant. And if I eat the food, and I get the bill, and I go, Oh, that bill isn’t worth what I just ate. I’m not coming back to this restaurant. That’s a simple outcome assessment. Yeah, we got every day in our lives. You do that every day in our lives.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [47:12]

We do write it. Yeah, there’s constant decision-making that’s happening. And yeah, you’re doing so much, I would love for you because you’re so skilled with, all the stuff that’s going on cranial Lee and in the mouth, and that oral structure. What are those things that you see tongue tie related or not that are causing so many breastfeeding problems? Because I think back to what we said about the primitive reflexes and things like that, like, babies, human babies were mammals, right? They’re meant to get their food, their source of sustenance, from the mammary glands. No, it’s not some babies are meant to breastfeed, and some aren’t. Some moms are just cut out for it. Some are no, like, we’re all designed to do it. And yes, there are other medical issues that can impede breastfeeding from this standpoint, like what is happening? Why is it so hard?

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [48:06]

So functionally, one of the common things we see is the palate. If the palate is too high, now the palate is inside the mouth. So you put your finger inside a baby’s mouth or an adult’s mouth, and the pallet should be kind of U-shaped. And the sutures in the pile where the bones attach because the pallet is actually made up of four separate bones. So when we go and feel the pallet, we want to see a U shape. If you see a pallet that’s V-shaped very means very high and narrow. That’s also very difficult for the baby to nurse well on because they can’t seal they can’t make a seal with the breast and their tongue because of the pouch right now, so they leave an air pocket. And what happens is when they leave that air pocket, they start to suck, they start to suck air, so they get colic-type symptoms with that, or they can’t get a good letdown.

 

The other thing is that we see it very often as a hypersensitive gag reflex. So there’s a nerve called the vagus nerve, which comes out from the skull and goes down the side of the neck, but part of it feeds back into the cranium and lifts the soft palate. If that nerve gets irritated, the soft palate will not lift as high. And so when the baby is nursing, they kind of choke a little but they can’t especially if there’s a strong letdown or choke. The other thing we see is if there’s a hypersensitive gag reflex, as I said, the palate Senator before bones, so what often happens is the babies nursing very well the first couple of months, and then somewhere around the third month when they’re sucking reflex gets really strong and they can suck the nipple further back in when they pull the nipple further back into the mouth that hits against further back in the palate. And that area’s hypersensitive, and it causes them to get those to be the kinds of babies that all sudden they start to nurse and they pull their head off, right, or they make clicky noises or they start to get really irritable.

 

And that again, is because they’re actually getting stronger. Their nursing capability or functional Bill functionality is good but the palette is not performing correctly and hypersensitive and that’s calling them cause See them to basically gag or pull off the nipple, the other thing we see is an imbalance on one side of the palate, as far as the bite strength or the sucking strength, so one side of the palate is stronger than the other, they will then tend to want to nurse much more on one side than the other. So those are some of the main functional issues we see. , besides the lip and tongue tie is distortions in the palate of beloved palette, or hypersensitivity in certain areas of the palate, due to certain neurological issues that are occurring or growth and developmental patterns in the cranium.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [50:31]

Oh, yeah. So well put in and I think that, it’s like a perfect storm of things around that three month timeframe, like you said, because so many parents, they, they know that they’ve heard somewhere, about milk supply regulation, and it happens, by that timeframe. And so they go, Oh, my baby’s pulling off, they’re fussy at the breast, must be because I’m not making enough anymore. And then you hear this sad story of, oh, my milk just dried up at three months. Note that probably spent most one. And now it can also, there can be the flip side of that is, an unaddressed tongue tie, they never achieve great suction in the oral cavity. And then, when they’re when you’re dependent on that ability of milk removal to maintain milk supply, it doesn’t maintain it. So there’s that, but so, these palatal distortions that you mentioned, what can we do about that? Basically just comes to you, right?

 

UDr. Martin Rosen  [51:21]

I guess what I’m gonna say? Yeah, I mean, chiropractors are trained in pediatric cranial just think that’s what we do. That’s our thing. That’s what we evaluate different than, if you go to regular carpet, they always evaluate your cranium. So it’s only people who specialize in. So carpet and cranial adjusting is a separate skill set within the chiropractic profession. So there are people who do cranial adjusting on adults, but they’re also a pediatric chiropractors almost always do cranial adjusting on the pediatric practice, because the pediatric cranium is growing so fast, and has such vast implications if it doesn’t grow correctly. So yeah, those are the kinds of people you want to see, I know there are other professions that do that. I know there are people who do cranial sacral therapy. But again, you always have to be careful when you’re looking at different vessels. So many thinking the cranial sacral therapy seminar, they can call himself a cranial sacral therapist.

 

So you want to make sure when you’re looking for somebody, we say, carry your baby, that they have a skill set that they can take care of pediatric patients, I say I tell people, one of the first things you can ask if you’re unsure of them says, oh, yeah, I take care of kids. They say, Well, what percentage of your practice is children? Oh, 2%. Yeah, well, you don’t take care of kids. You take your child once in a while, it’s like, I used to do sports injuries. When I started practicing, I was really into running and I did triathlons. So I did a lot of sports injuries. And that was a big part of my practice.

 

In the beginning, I don’t do that much anymore, just because it doesn’t interest me. But if someone came to you and say, I heard you do sports, and , injuries, and I want to do this, and retrain and blah, I’m giving this whole list of I went to refer them out. Because it’s not what I do anymore. , can I take care of you with a sports injury if you want to come in and get adjusted, and you have a knee or hip problem. And that’s what you consider a sports injury great. But if you want a whole retraining program, and all this other stuff, that’s not what I do anymore. And it’s the same thing with pediatrics, if I’ve taken care of one or two pediatric patients, that doesn’t make me a pediatric chiropractor. So those are the kind of things parents hate to look for.

 

We have our website called Dr. Martin rose, and Dr. Martin rosen.com. And on that is a list of all the people who’ve taken our certification courses. So that you can get a list is another chiropractic organization called the International chiropractic Pediatric Association. They have a list of people taking their courses. There’s also a group called the International Chiropractic Association, the ICA, they have pediatric program. So there are people who have pediatric programs that run certification programs, and that list of graduates who have graduated from their courses, and least , they have taken the time and effort to study the pediatric cranial and pediatric spine and put in the extra effort.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [54:00]

Hmm, yeah, absolutely. And I’ll make sure to link those up in the show notes, because I definitely was, I had seen your pediatric referral directory. And like I mentioned at the beginning episode, I mean, you’ve been teaching for 39 years, so you’re not, you’re not a spring chicken, and you can just tell by how well versed you are in all of this stuff how much experience and knowledge you have. And that’s what’s important, right is, is that if a family, or or their lactation consultant, or someone recognizes the need for, chiropractic, or there’s some cranial issues, you’ve just gotta go to the right person, because it makes all the difference. It’s kind of like if you suspect your baby has a tongue tie, and you go see a lactation consultant that quote unquote, doesn’t believe in tongue ties. Well, you’re not gonna get some great results right? And unfortunately, I don’t think there’s like really a tried and true trusted directory for those of us out there. There’s like maybe one I could kind of think of and I’ll link that up but, it’s it’s tough. So having these resources and websites because there’s a lot I can do virtually to support people. When we do that, on my practice by what you do cannot really be done virtually. In person.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [55:06]

We don’t have a virtual way to do and, , the other piece is you have to understand, and I know you do. So and I’m sure you’re listening too, but this is extremely intimate relationship, someone is bringing your newborn baby to you so you have to also connect with the practitioner, there is a different, a different a much different space that we hold in our office, when we’re dealing with infants and babies. And so I’ve been in practice a long time, we have what I would call a waiting list practice, like, we don’t take a lot of new patients.

 

But I will guarantee you if someone calls my office and my wife who runs the front desk answers, and it’s a baby in distress, or a pregnant mom and distress, you will get in. But if you’re if some person with a low back pain or neck pain, you may have to wait three, four weeks to get in the grave but we understand that. So it’s a very intimate relationships. And I remember what it was like having my babies and there was not a lot of people that I would trust to take care of them babysit them even forget about actually doing a health care procedure on them. So yeah, so that’s, that’s an important thing.

 

And I think when you when parents are looking around, they have to make sure that yeah, they found somebody who is skilled, but also someone who they can connect to and feel comfortable to talk to about stuff because I mean, I’ve never breastfed, I don’t know what it’s like, but I can see the frost, I’ve watched my wife do it for many years. But I can see the frustration in some parents when they come in, and they , the process is not happening, or the baby’s not sleeping, or we have, we all have expectations. And you probably know now and having kids or six and nine, that some of those expectations are not going to be met because your kids didn’t have the same expectations. And so you have to be able to be flexible and change. And you have to have someone there who can kind of guide you through that process.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [56:52]

Mm hmm. So true. So true. I know it takes a lot for us to trust our babies, especially newborns are very young babies with someone in someone’s very capable hands, right. So all of these things are so important for parents to consider. But I think the take home, really is that there are people like you out there who really have invested a lot in being able to provide this kind of quality care to families. And, it’s just a matter of getting connected with those resources when you do need them. Because there are options, right? Sometimes parents hear I’ve had patients even say it, right? They’re like, Okay, so my baby’s got a tongue tie, and it’s causing these problems. And so like that said, I can’t nurse and I’m like, Whoa, no, no, hold on. We’re only like halfway through the discussion. There’s absolutely, this is treatable, it is fixable. And I think more families need to hear that it’s an important message.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [57:48]

It’s pervasive through health care, sometimes people come especially chiropractors, though it’s not as prevalent now. But when I started practicing, probably the first 20 years at least, chiropractors with the last hope, like people would always come in after everything else they just, and I always hated hearing that, oh I went to my doctor, he said, I’m just gonna have to live with it, or I went and they said, well, that’s just the way it’s gonna be. And it’s like, no, the difference is, is that some practitioners can deal with certain things in some character tissues can deal with other things. And just because your practitioner or your child or someone has told you Oh, that’s way it has to be.

 

That doesn’t mean that’s the case, it literally means that they don’t have the skill set, while the knowledge base to deal with it. And that if you’re a parent, and you think something’s wrong, and  that, intuitively, trust your intuition, and don’t stop. So you find somebody who at least can talk to you on the same level and deal with whatever issue you’re dealing with. Because my experience is parents really, really do know, best mothers, especially they have a gut feeling when they know something’s wrong and something’s off. And I think that they should basically put that at the top of the heap when they’re deciding what they want to do, or deciding if something should be done. If they have that gut feeling. I’m pretty sure my experiences that gut feeling is right. Yeah,

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [59:08]

I would, I would 100% agree with that. And I think you kind of spoke to a little bit of this last sort of point or question I wanted to bring up which is that I’ve seen and heard from parents as well, especially doing a lot of telehealth and working with people in different locations that there’s been some not so great chiropractors out there that have especially emerged during the pandemic that have maybe grown a platform and maybe over I don’t want to say even maybe like they definitely over promise what they can achieve as chiropractors and it’s obviously a sales ploy and whatnot.

 

And unfortunately, it’s really done a lot of harm to the profession of chiropractic because there’s people like you who are well trained who are professionals, and , I’ve even seen it I’ve posted about just even bodywork, which I don’t need even love that word, but it’s kind of accessible to parents. And then immediately there’s like this backlash comments of chiropractors or quacks. And I’m like, Well, yes, some are. Yeah, absolutely. Some are, just like any profession, right? And so what’s your response to that? Because I just want people to know, like, you’re not all the same, and there is benefit, but you got to go to the right one.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [1:00:23]

Well it’s really simple. Have you ever heard of a bad lawyer?

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [1:00:27]

I saw one on a major court case recently in the past month.

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [1:00:32]

Have you ever heard anybody say they had a horrible dentist? No, I mean, it’s exactly. We have people and infection. And I would say most healthcare professionals that that go into the health care business don’t go into to do harm. Right? Right. They go into the best they can do. And yes, some people get burned out. I mean, there’s all different kinds of aspects. So what I tell people is simply that one of the first questions I ask my patients, especially if they come in with a very challenge kid, like I’ve had, I get a lot of kids who have genetic issues. And that was the first thing I asked the parent is, what is your expectation? Like? What do you expect to get a chiropractic care. And if you don’t, let’s say I have a kid who can’t walk can’t talk, as genetic disease.

 

That is basically means you’re never going to be able to walk and talk again, experiences while I expect you to next few months Johnny to be walking and talking, I’m gonna, I’m gonna make sure that they understand that’s not a valid expectation. So you should be clear with the practitioner, what your expectation is, the practitioner village, I always tell people walk your talk, if you promise something, then you need to have the skill set to deliver it. So if you see a patient, or kid that is having a specific issue, then and you promise to correct that issue, then you need to no one have the skill set to do that. And you should have the experience that that happens, or often happens a lot.

 

So I try and tell my people I teach is to basically, what I kind of said to you is help you help the parent create a baseline with the child, a neurological baseline that you’re both looking at, and then say, look every couple of weeks, which is what I do in my office, we’re going to reevaluate and see if that baseline shifts, I said and I understand your expectation is that Johnny’s going to sleep,  better, I never had a mom she came in, the mom and dad came in and they look just so beat up. And the baby did not sleep for more than an hour and a half, I think the child was two months old when we saw him did not see for an hour and a half, whether it be day or night in a row. Right and, and I adjusted the child, I just I just showed you, on the second visit the first physical exam, like just to the child on the first visit, and the mom came in, and she said Tuesday she goes she slept 12 hours. And I said, That’s awesome. But I want you to understand don’t expect that to happen from

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [1:02:50]

like, catch up sleep, right?

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [1:02:53]

child’s that you’re not gonna put your child down at seven at night. And it’s gonna wake up at seven in the morning. But bottom line is it changed. So right, you really have to monitor the expectations, whether it be I take care of a lot of kids with reflux and parents who I want to get them off the drugs I don’t like I do too. But we have to go to , step by step. So you have to keep realistic expectations. And you have to have baselines, I even patients if you come into my opposite, so you came into my office after a car accident, and you have severe neck pain and pain radiating down your arm, I would say to you look, we’re going to take a six week protocol here. And after six weeks, I’m gonna do re evaluation, I want to see if what’s happening to you is changing in a positive way. If it is, then we can stay the course if it’s not, then what I’m doing is not going to help you.

 

So what we do with parents or babies is I check them depending on what their particular issue is, in the first couple of months, every two to three weeks, we do what we call progress evaluations to see number one because I may be seeing objective changes that are not translating subjectively the patient we want and basically both of us want to be on the same page. So if you brought your child in, because they had colic, and I’m seeing all kinds of changes, and the colic is not going away, then we can either reevaluate our relationship or maybe think about doing something else. So if you if you go to a practitioner, you should have your expectations, let the practitioner know that and if they say great, then they need to have not only the skill set, but parameters to follow that baseline so that you can see if there are changes happening so that you both can have conversations periodically to see if those changes are occurring.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [1:04:32]

Ah oh my gosh, that is the most just so beneficial to hear you say that great advice for parents because this is the case with any kind of practitioner, not just a chiropractor and, it’s funny because a lot of people will say well, can you get all this done in one appointment and I’m like, no, because how do I even know if let’s say it’s a minor issue right and I can I can give you the direction to correct it in that first appointment. Oh, how are we assessing whether or not that works? Because if not nursing is this thing that happens multiple times a day, every day, we’ve got to make sure and also maintenance, right? Like, you experience a shift like the 12 hour baby sleeping, and like, that would be a great testimonial. If you just put that out there and said, I get babies to sleep 12 hours.

 

Unknown Speaker  1:05:22

People do that. And you’re right. And that’s where the internet becomes deadly.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  1:05:25

Yeah, it’s this loud vocal minority that takes advantage with stuff like that. Yep.

 

Unknown Speaker  1:05:29

So we, we all have miracle cases, I can tell you a miracle cases that happen in my office. And if I put them on the internet, that would be great. And, the problem with the internet is it’s often quantity, quantity, not quality. I remember talking to a young practitioner, and he was getting 100 new patients a month from the, from his marketing. And I’m like, I don’t even know how you deal with 100 new patients a month, how do you have the chat, and but, three quarters of them never came back, or they were blown out the door. And so it’s really about the quality. And you really need to be careful, right? When you see stuff on the edge, there are miracles that happen. I’ve had kids that literally couldn’t walk and talk that walk and talk. I’ve had kids who had seizures, that the seizures don’t occur anymore.

 

I’ve had dozens and dozens of kids who have had reflux because they’re no longer on their medication. And it gives you pleasure simply that their head is resolved and normalized without , helmets. I mean, I can go on and on and on for 40 years. But I don’t realize that because that’s not really what we’re about. It’s not , you it’s not about the miracles, it’s about the day to day grind. It’s like, if you have I mean, there are kids, we have Mozart’s and we have painter Monet’s and people who are just brilliant, brilliant. But that doesn’t happen every day. Yeah, doesn’t happen every day. So the idea behind this is that you need to really have rational expectations and goals and ways to monitor if those are occurring. And so I’ve had patients whose maybe their symptom didn’t go away.

 

But they stayed under care, because they saw other changes in the behavior. Let’s say, I had a kid who had, let’s say, ear infections. And though that’s very common with chiropractors, and almost always helps, and occasionally sometimes is an abnormal Eustachian tube or something, and they keep still gets ear infection. But what the parent has noticed as well, Johnny’s behavior is much better, he sleeps much better, better, he’s much calmer, he’s much happier. So I’m going to stay into care, even though my initial reason for coming to you was because he had an ear infection. So we, the conversation has to stay open. And the parameters have to be objective on your end, even though they’re going to be subjective on the parents end, which they shouldn’t be, because that’s what they’re there about.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [1:07:41]

Yeah. Oh, gosh, no, that’s, that’s such an excellent explanation. And I couldn’t agree more with everything you’ve said. And I just think the work that you’re doing is wonderful. And I love that you’re out there educating other practitioners on how to do these things that you’ve spent so much time refining and perfecting and whatnot. And so where, where can people find you if they’re interested in seeing you and they happen to live where you do and then also, , postdoc directory of your previous students as well. And then another thing too, if you’re doing training, I do have a fair amount of professionals that listen to the podcast. So how can they access you for training?

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [1:08:25]

Sure. So number one, if you’re a layperson, and want to find out more about us, or maybe even get a referral from us, someone in your area, my office website is Wellesley, w-e-l-l-e-s-l-e-y, chiro ch iro.com. That’s basically my office website. If you’re a professional, there’s two places you can get in contact with me if you’re interested in learning from us or buying some of our books. Then you can go to peak potential program.com.Or, if you’re a doctor want to find out about our courses or practitioner, you can also go to Dr. Martin rosen.com. And that’s Dr. Martin rosen.com. So those are three main websites. They also have our book, if you’re interested in the book as a layperson, or for your office to explain what we just talked about on this podcast you can go to it’s all in their head book.com and get our book there. And the last thing if you want to just email us, it’s Dr. Martin Rozina gmail.com And the doctors Dr. Martin mending RTI, n rosen@gmail.com.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [1:09:38]

Awesome, thank you so much. And thank you so much for, putting yourself out there and being accessible for the people that need you. And just having this conversation today. It’s so important and I can just tell that you have this incredible passion for giving families and babies the best start in life. So it’s been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. DeRozan

 

Dr. Martin Rosen  [1:10:00]

Oh, thank you so much. It was great talking with you. I think your passion matches mine, maybe with a little more energy because you have a few years to catch up to me with. But no, I think it’s awesome that you’re doing what you’re doing and how expansive you are in your in your vision. It’s really great to see.

 

Jacqueline Kincer  [1:10:18]

Oh, well, I appreciate that. Thank you.