Preventing Infant Head Deformity to Achieve Optimal Infant Neurologic Function with Dr. Martin Rosen

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1442 W. Belmont Ave., 1E Chicago, IL 60657

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TRANSCRIPT:

Anne Nicholson Weber: 00:00 Welcome. This is episode 2. I'm so glad you're here. My guest today is chiropractor, Dr. Stephanie Maj, who explains how chiropractic care during pregnancy can help prepare your body for a more effective labor and an easier childbirth. [music] This is the BirthGuide podcast -- conversations about building your circle of support in the childbearing year. We connect you with experts in our community who can help you conceive, stay healthy in pregnancy, have a safe and satisfying birth and embrace the joys and challenges of becoming a new family. I'm your host, Anne Nicholson Weber, the founder of BirthGuideChicago.com, where every month thousands of Chicago area families find relationship-centered care, from preconception through the postpartum period. [music] Welcome to a new episode of the BirthGuide podcast. Today we're talking about the benefits of chiropractic care in pregnancy. Joining me to talk about this is Dr. Stephanie Maj with Community Chiropractic. She has been practicing for 26 years and has specific expertise in the area of perinatal care, including Webster certification. So Dr. Maj, maybe you could talk first off about what kinds of issues can arise in childbirth that having had chiropractic in pregnancy could have helped to prevent. Dr. Stephanie Maj: 01:42 Yeah. Well, first off, thank you so much for having me on your show and for what you do in the Chicagoland community. It's such a resource and it's so helpful. Anne Nicholson Weber: 01:54 Well, thank you. Dr. Stephanie Maj: 01:55 I love talking about this. I love talking to new families that want to have a more proactive, a more intentional birth. And I really feel like my job is to help prepare them, where most everyone that I know has either an OB or a midwife or somebody assisting them and their job is more of monitoring -- it's watching, it's testing, it's looking for trouble, you know. And what my job is really to do is to prepare your body for delivery. And, you know, if we look at what the troubles are, we would back up to the first, just the anatomy. The baby -- the uterus and the baby -- are sitting on your pelvis. That bony pelvis is what that baby has to get through there. And so a lot of our focus is the alignment of that pelvis. So when you have a balanced pelvis, the hole that the baby comes out of is wide and open and uniform. Dr. Stephanie Maj: 03:02 So when the baby's coming down the birth canal, there are bony landmarks that the baby has to hit and things happen when the baby hits them: the shoulders move, the baby twists. And this is how this dance of getting out of the uterus and getting born, this is the dance of that. There's twists, there's turns, it all relies on this pelvis being in the right alignment. So if your pelvis is twisted, it can interfere. It can actually make that hole distorted and interfere with the baby's ability to get through your pelvis, the actual boniness of your pelvis. But it also can interfere with the baby, you know, when it's supposed to hit this certain bone and trigger a reflex, and then the shoulders, you know, tilt and the head turns or whatever, if that bone isn't there, then that doesn't happen. And so that's where the babies can get stuck in a certain portion of the birthing process. Dr. Stephanie Maj: 04:01 You know, most everybody that comes to me is looking to have a vaginal delivery. Basic. The people that come to me tend to have more of that intentional idea of like, not being medicated, not having interventions. You know, I wanna make sure that I help their bodies make that happen. Instead of thinking of it like what problems there are, it's like, how do we avoid them before they happen, you know? So, I mean, the easy thing is if somebody is having hip pain, back pain, you know, that is your body's sign that there's something going on. You know, a lot of people think those indicators are just like stress. “Oh, that's just stress. Oh, that's just stress.” Or “I'm pregnant. Of course I have back pain. I'm pregnant. Everybody that is pregnant has back pain.” Not true, not true at all. Dr. Stephanie Maj: 04:53 And I have a lot of people that don't have any issues, you know, have no pain yet. Their pelvis is twisted. And I see them later in their pregnancy and they're wanting to have this vaginal delivery and the baby isn't cooperating. You know, the baby is not in a great position. And so a patient that comes to me, she's pregnant right now. I have two patients, her and the baby. So I have th...