September 12, 2017 – The Foundation for Chiropractic Progress (F4CP), a leading voice of the chiropractic profession and sponsor of September Drug-Free Pain Management Awareness Month, emphasizes the safety and effectiveness of non-pharmacologic chiropractic care for children and infants. Lonnie Zeltzer, MD, director of the California-based Pediatric Pain and Palliative Care Program, advises that drugs are not the only way to address chronic pain. 
“The prevention and treatment of pain can be addressed through many different modalities, with chiropractic care being one,” says Zeltzer, who is a professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. “We now know that body manipulation such as chiropractic care with a licensed, experienced chiropractor can have many physical, emotional and biologic benefits to reduce pain.”
According to the National Health Interview Survey, 3.3 percent of children were cared for by a doctor of chiropractic in 2012 – a total of almost 2 million children that received chiropractic and osteopathic manipulation care. For infants, a 2009 study found 78 percent of infants under chiropractic care were able to exclusively breastfeed after 2-5 sessions of chiropractic care within a two-week period. In another study, infants with colic that excessively cried were five times less likely to cry significantly, if they were provided chiropractic care. In this particular study, infants showed approximately a 50 percent reduction in crying time compared with infants provided only the usual medical management.
“Chiropractic care has become a mainstream first-line option for children,” says Sherry McAllister, DC, executive vice president, F4CP. “According to a two-month study with 81 children with asthma who received chiropractic care, results revealed that those under care saw a 45 percent decrease in the number of “attacks” and that 31 percent of the subjects voluntarily chose to decrease their medication.”
Doctors of chiropractic (DCs) receive a minimum of seven years of higher education and are specifically trained to diagnose, evaluate and provide non-pharmaceutical care and rehabilitation to individuals of all ages suffering from acute and chronic back, low back and neck pain, headaches, neuro-musculoskeletal conditions and other related syndromes.
