Host: 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 swear by osteopathy as a way of health in common elements. So how does it work?
Karen Carroll: If you think about all of osteopathy, pediatric osteopathy is just osteopathy. We’re doing it on small people, who are slightly different to big people, but it’s the same principle, so osteopathies is really looking at structure and function and movement. So, what we’re interested in is how the structure affects a function, how the function affects the structure, and how everything moves in relation to everything else. So what we’re doing is, looking at those complex relationships whether it’s with the bones of the head, which is sometimes that something that we’ll focus on with babies or whether it’s if you got a baby who doesn’t crawl properly, whether it’s through the bones of the pelvis and how the lower extremities, the legs are actually moving and how that’s affecting the balance through the pelvis or how certain muscles are affecting that balance.
If the baby comes out for example, there has been quite compressed or quite tight and quite tightly packed, then certain areas maybe compressed and that can affect movement and balance, if they’ve had one leg very tightly tucked that can affect the hip balance. So, we’ll be looking at all of those things, assessing all of those things, and then very gently encouraging the body to correct. Because everything has a blue print for health and what’s lucky for us is that babies are very much closer to that blue print than we are as adults, we haven’t had all those years of foes and knocks and cluster of bad habits. So, with the baby the being that close and with the child being that close, it’s a lot easier to reestablish that health and the patterns for movement that, that baby already has.
Host: Karen Carroll is a consultant pediatric osteopath at the osteopathic center for children based in North London and Manchester. It was set up as a charity 15 years ago to make pediatric osteopathy available to all 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 our average donation is, but patients are just encouraged to pay what they can pay at the time.
Host: All osteopaths undergo four years of medical training under the OCC, they also complete a two year Diploma in Pediatric Osteopathy. The minute you walk into the center, you know you’ve come somewhere that puts children first.
Unknown Speaker 1: Nothing is too much trouble. Come here, everything is done at the child’s spade. It’s very unstressable, very non-invasive unlike physiotherapy with they are pulled and pushed, where they don’t want to go.
Unknown Speaker 2: He is just so much more relaxed and he used to cry all the time and he does it and time changes arms more, he just loves being here.
Unknown Speaker 3: It’s like a magical work. I don’t know what they do, I don’t know how it happens, but watch the results.
Host: Thinking an alternative route when your child has a health problem, it can’t be a bit daunting and it’s often hard to find guidelines outside of seeing your GP. Osteopathy however is now so regularly used and so often recommended by doctors that it’s got to the mainstream. What isn’t so well known is just how beneficial osteopathy can be for babies and children.
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