Emma Howard: So, welcome back to Baby Talk with me Emma Howard. A little later on, we will be delving into the mail bag once more to answer your questions by Midwest Su McDonald but before that here is a look at how Steven Mathews got home when she visited the Osteopathic Centre for Children.
Female Speaker: This complementary therapy is increasingly popular as a way of treating a whole range of baby and toddler problems. Teething, windy or irritable babies can all be helped. As many new parents sway by osteopathy as a way of health in common ailments, so how does it work?
Karen Carroll: If you think about all of osteopathy, pediatric osteopathy is just a osteopathy we are doing it on small people who are slightly different to big people but it’s the same principle. So osteopathy is really looking at structure and function and movement. So what we were interested in is how a structure effects of function, how the function affects a structure and how everything moves in relation to everything else and so what we are doing is looking at those complex relationships whether its with the bones of the head which is sometimes that something we will focus on with babies or whether its if you got baby who doesn’t crawl properly whether its through the bones of the pelvis somehow the lower extremities the legs are actually moving and hormones effecting the balance through the pelvis so how is that muscles affecting that balance.
And if baby comes out for example that’s been quite compressed or quite tight and quite tightly packed then certain areas may be compressed and that can effect movement and balance if they had one leg very tightly tucked up that can effect the hip balance so we will looking all of those things, assessing all of those things and then very gently encouraging the body to correct because everything has a blueprint from health and what’s lucky for us is that baby is a very much closer to that blueprint than as we are as adults we haven’t handled those, of palsy and knocks pastro bad habits. So, with the baby being that close, some of the child being that close, it’s a lot easier to reestablish that help and patterns for movement whether that baby already has.
Female Speaker: Karen Carroll is a consultant pediatric osteopathic at the Osteopathic Centre for Children based in North London and Manchester. It was set off as a charity 15 years ago to make the pediatric osteopathy available to all the children regardless of the family’s financial circumstances.
Karen Carroll: Well, we don’t turn any patients away because they can’t pay. Patients are asked to pay what they can afford and some patients pay a few pounds or nothing and some patients pay more than that. I don’t know what an average donation is but patients are just encouraged to pay what they can pay at the time.
Female Speaker: All osteopaths undergo four years of medical training under that OCC. They also complete a two year diploma in pediatric osteopathy. The minute you walk in to the center, you know you have come somewhere to put children first.
Tessa Adie: Nothing is too much trouble, come here everything is done at the child’s speed, it’s very unstressable, very non-invasive unlike physiotherapy with a pulled and push where they don’t want to go.
Female Speaker 2: It’s just so much more relaxed and least crying at time, he doesn’t and he is trying to use the arms more and he just left to be inherent.
Female Speaker 3: Its like a magic work, I don’t know what they do, I don’t know how it happens but that’s the results.
Female Speaker: Taking an alternative route to when your child has a health problem can be a bit daunting and its often hard to find guidelines outside of seeing your GP. Osteopathy however is now so regularly used and so often recommended by doctors but it’s virtually mainstream what isn’t so well known is just how beneficial osteopathy can be for babies and children.
The variety of problems that pediatric osteopaths can treat is extraordinary as well as the more common childhood elements here at the Osteopathic Centre for Children their work has also proved to be effective with more serious conditions like autism, epilepsy and cerebral palsy. The treatment for these children aims to support their recovery by elevating their symptoms and making them easier to manage.
Karen Carroll: Here we certainly have a number of severe conditions. We see children with epilepsy, quite chronic severe epilepsy and also the mild forms we see children with cerebral palsy, children who have down syndrome and other genetic conditions where they don’t even have a name and treatment is not going to cure the condition but what we do hope to do is to help that child function as best they possibly can within the problems that they have.
Female Speaker: This is eight month old Kai, who has been diagnosed with cerebral palsy. His mother Amy brought him to the OCC to see if they could help him with the loss of movement in his right arm. He was also very distressed and having problem sleeping. Amy has already noticed an enormous difference in Kai’s condition since he has been to the center.
Amy Surrey: When he was baby he never used to move his arm, his right arm until today and now he is just, he start to use it and hold things, trying to hold his bottle, he is really trying to make it, when he held it at back, he is right on it and he is trying to use a lot more since its being coming here that is and its being kicking his legs a lot more.
Karen Carroll: When you see a child with cerebral palsy, the cerebral palsy may be affecting different areas so it may be as mild just as one tight arm or it may leave them very un-chronically affecting those daily affected and again there we are just looking to give them the best quality of life that they can have and to get their function as good as it can be for them and how this good it can be for them.
Female Speaker: Pediatric osteopathy is a very gentle manual technique that works to make sure the body’s framework is in alignment allowing a good blood and nerve supply to internal organs and relieving any tension in the muscle and bones that could be restricting movement. This is particularly important where there is a physical disability such as Kai’s cerebral palsy.
Four year old Joe also has this condition as well as severe epilepsy sometimes suffering from over a 100 fits a day. Since being treated at the OCC, Joe sgyes have been dramatically reduced.
Tessa Adie: And he is just generally a happier much more contented child he is beginning to learn more as well. There is nothing you can read with finger-arm, it’s just everything is come together.
Karen Carroll: With epilepsy, most of our children that we see will be on medication and that affects the brain as it suppose to but it can also affect how the brain develops on a certain level, so again what we are trying to do with those children is to really encourage their assistance to work within the medication and sometimes having effect can be quite shocked to the system. We talk about things in terms of feelings and qualities so bit like a wine master might talk about different tastes of wine. They might say wine is chocolaty or peppery while we talk about tissues being dense so hard or shocked or irritable and some people who recently had an epileptic fit which is tissues that the coverings of the brain I mean they just cant feel very, very irritable.
Female Speaker: Lucas is three and half years old. He was born at just 30 weeks and has mild cerebral palsy as a result of a brain hemorrhage at birth. He also has to live with a cyst on the left side of his brain and needs help to keep his movements coordinated.
Hind Estefanos: The cyst is affecting his right side of the body and mostly relaxed also it affects his balance mainly and we do physiotherapy with him but I found this treatment to be the best treatment out of all after the lot test.
Female Speaker: In an ideal world, every newly delivered mother and baby would benefit from a postnatal checkup from the pediatric osteopath to ensure that the effect of labor and delivery and birth don’t go unresolved. Lawrence Stevens decided to bring six day old Lola to the Osteopathic Centre for Children so that both she and her baby could be treated.
Karen Carroll: Yeah, I mean a lot of which is just really helping her body adapt to the changes of having given birth because it is actually one of the hardest things that most of us will ever do and next for some women it can be almost like running marathon is to do is to help the pelvis to settle back down into its pre-pregnancy position to help the internal concept pattern to the position things gradually change and like anyway and put this body well designed to do that but if you had a very long difficult labor or difficult labor, the body doesn’t always will have quite as easily so that’s one of the things that we can do.
Female Speaker: It isn’t uncommon for women to experience problems after birth from lower back pain to headaches, stress in contents to pain during its course all of which can be addressed that much more easily shortly after the birth. Lawrence baby needed an assisted delivery using ventouse and that’s left her head slightly tender and misshapen.
Karen Carroll: Sometime what we are looking at is the skull is almost like a membranous bag at this point in time that its got bony stiffness in it but it is not sort of a less poieric variety of skull that we associate with what a skull looks like so its actually much more fluid and much more membranous so when you are applying ventouse, the ventouse obviously compresses and you put a lot of pressure onto them to hold out and that can compress some of the structure that we put to tentorium and underneath the tentorium and around the tentorium there are basket of sinuses so they can actually get a bit of headache from back compression and that’s congestion as well as obviously having a bruise something from the ventouse.
Female Speaker: Kate Hammer was helped through a difficult pregnancy by the OCC, when she suffered from pre-eclampsia, a condition affecting one in ten pregnant women where they develop high blood pressure together with protein in the urine. The anti and postnatal care offered by the centre for her and baby Audrey has helped them throughout.
Kate Hammer: I have pre-eclampsia, so from the -- and I really relied on the treatments that I was getting and just the support and the care I was getting here, and the day before Audrey decided to come four weeks early I was treated and that child, have said this baby is ready to come out, which is very reassuring when I found myself at the hospital the next day morning and is all happening.
Female Speaker: Audrey, who is now 13 months was born four weeks early and stayed in hospital for a month. She is now back on track, further need some treatment for mobility.
Karen Carroll: Its internally or externally rotate so we have been looking that with Audrey and tell him that almost tensed to turn into released back out and then we also have been working on the spine, on the muscles of locomotion and then sort of higher doing spine which is where you did you working from --
Female Speaker: Pregnancy is the time when many women became more aware of their bodies and for many pregnancy means having to cope with the whole range of symptoms from low back pain to morning sickness. Osteopathic treatment during pregnancy can help the body adjust to these changes. Carol Smart, who is 30 weeks pregnant, she gave birth to her first child prematurely and is hoping the osteopathic centre can help her cope with this time around.
Karen Carroll: Well, if we talk about pregnancy as a whole, basically we pregnant women you have got a lot of changes to adapt to and lot of hormonal changes as well as physical changes so we can help the body as it learns to adapt to those things. As your baby grows not on your but often your breast increase in size and that can put a lot of strain through the upper back as well. Carol was actually experiencing some low back pain and again often the sacroiliacs can be a source of discomfort for a lot of ladies as ligaments soften, the ligaments particularly through the pelvis will soften but she was starting to experience some pubic synthesis pain as well. So, one of the things that we are going to be doing for the next couple of months through her pregnancy is hopefully to monitor that to help to reduce the stress of the developing growing baby on the low back and so synthesis of pubis.
Female Speaker: Because baby Chiana was born three months early, the OCC are keen to keep her closely monitored she is now 11 months old and doing very well and although just here for check up, Carol is concerned about some dry patches appearing on China’s but also about her general development.
Karen Carroll: Where the child decide like that that we need to look her bad neurological systems so we need to see whether or not they are covering all their milestones because sometime your baby’s can be little bit delayed in those and she was doing very, very well but the thing that we really noticed today was that when she was writing herself she has a reaction that we all had, she was writing herself quite as well when she was turned over to that right side so she was loosing her balance more easily and then we asked mom she said yes, that is what happens. So, and what we actually found was that an area that’s quite tight typically in premature babies at the back of the head was actually was still quite compressed on her own, very, very slightly rotated so we were trying to release that which will help the area that affects the balance.
Female Speaker: Charlotte Renolds had osteopathic treatment while she was pregnant and has returned to the centre to have her 11 month old baby treated for his eczema. Charlotte believes that this complimentary therapy has improved to see the skin condition along side the conventional treatment done by her GP.
Karen Carroll: And at your . is trying to help him to get off the medication but that’s done over a period of time with the patients either the parents are the slowly withdrawing medications, concentration with their specialists as they can.
Male Speaker: So I mean how is been?
Charlotte Renolds: Really, up and down the defects mark, sometimes its been fantastic and we will be of to the start in from parents how pareenrs, how they with week and other time and he has been reacting against the food I have been eating.
Female Speaker: Breastfeeding several is beginning to cause a problem as it’s hard to isolate to his allergies while he is still relying on Charlotte’s milk. David Seba’s osteopath is looking at the ways to isolate his allergies and before he begins the treatment his consultation is thorough. Often pediatric osteopaths can diagnose problems that may have been missed by health visitors or regular GPs.
The OCC believes that by treating relatively minor problems in infancy future health is less vulnerable. Leaving a minor problem without treatment means that even while a child’s body adapts to it and even if it clears off eventually, there still remains a long-term negative effect. So, although the clinic doesn’t offer miracle cures sometimes the health of sick children can improve enormously.
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