“For an infant in pain, it is not unusual for an hour or two to be the maximum sleep period between crying spells. This can go on for months, and in some cases a year or more. Yet in many cases, these infants find immediately restful sleep periods of up to 20 hours following one chiropractic adjustment.”
I remember it like it was yesterday. It was 1972, and I was a night-shift student-clinician at the free clinic in New York City. It was midnight, and we were about to get off duty when a couple brought in an infant girl that was literally screaming. She had been this way for months. The crying stopped only for an hour or two while taking milk or sleeping fitfully. She had been through every imaginable medical test, nothing was found wrong, and her parents were told she had colic. They were at their wits end and had to come to see the clinic director who had a reputation throughout the city for helping infants with “colic.”
He examined her carefully, with extreme attention to her upper neck where it joins her skull. He told the parents that their baby was suffering from a subluxation of the atlas vertebra (the first vertebra at the top of the neck). A subluxation is a slight misalignment of the vertebra, perhaps knocked out of position during a tough forceps delivery. He said it needed to be adjusted, it would not hurt, and it would definitely help. They agreed to the treatment.
