Chiropractic and Pregnancy

Pregnancy can be a wonderful time, but unfortunately aside from offering the opportunity for a child, it also offers a variety of uncomfortable symptoms as well. While most every woman will at some point in her life decide to become pregnant, not all will experience the symptoms the same. Pregnancy is characterized by pains and discomforts from mild to severe that are attributable to the hormonal, physical, and weight bearing physical factors that necessarily occur when a woman grows her child. While most all symptoms related to pregnancy are not treatable, the pregnant woman typically no longer experiences them once she gives birth.
What are the common symptoms associated with pregnancy? There are a variety of factors that will determine how mild or severe a woman may experience some of all of the common symptoms involved with the nine month pregnancy. These can be anything from hereditary disposition to the amount of weight gained, and show a direct correlation to the severity of the pains and discomforts women may feel. This said, symptoms of pregnancy can be emotional, physical, and psychological, and here are the most prevalent ones experienced: hormonal mood swings, depression, sciatica pain, back pain, anger, leg pain, swelling in the hands and feet, and there list goes on.
What is the cause of these pains? While the psychological and emotional symptoms can be attributed to the massive hormonal changes happening in a woman’s body as she prepares for birth; the physical discomforts are due to the necessity to carry a baby to term. The average woman gains between 25-40lbs with child, placenta, increase in fluids, etc included during her pregnancy, and this is likely to create a whole host of pains and strains. The pressure extends itself to the pressure on the feet and hands, the back, and legs-naturally-as the body compensates for the extra weight gained quickly.
Standard medicine typically views pregnancy and its discomforts as just what they are-common and untreatable. They consider that a woman must suffer through nine months of these symptoms as a part of the experience. Moreover, medications can be very limited as doctors do not want the drugs to interfere with the child’s growth; so pain must be managed naturally and ineffectively.
This said, more and more pregnant women have decided not to wait it out and try holistic alternatives to doing nothing at all for their aches and pains and emotional discomfort. They have chosen chiropractic treatment to alleviate their pains and soothe their aches. The reason why so much success has been found in this discipline is that a chiropractic treatment begins with subluxations-incidents in which the spine was thrown out of whack, and appropriate manipulations are applied to realign the spine. As pregnancy necessarily brings a lot of weight to the body, it is only natural that the spine would adjust, and cause pains in the legs, back, and elsewhere. As far as the emotional and psychological discomforts, there has also been success with calming these mood swings with improved attention to diet, exercise, and supplementation.