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Hello everybody. It’s Dr. Drew Rubin. I am so honored to be here with ChiroSecure. I have had their malpractice insurance since I graduated 1989, and I absolutely appreciate all the great things that they do for our profession. So thank you, ChiroSecure and Dr. Stu Hoffman. Today we’re back with Disruptive Pediatrics for our first of the new year.
I hope 2023 has been great for you. And today I’m gonna talk about Dr. Larry Webster, my mentor, my hero. Let’s go to the slides. And this. Man was really responsible for the creation of the International Chiropractic Pediatric Association. He was, they call him the grandfather of chiropractic pediatrics.
He really began the whole thing, and I was so blessed and honored to have him as a teacher. See, I took his class in 1989 his pediatric class. And now as fortune would have it, I am cla teaching his class at Life University. So I’ve been teaching that class since 2001, the same class that he taught me.
So I am flattered and honored and humbled to be in Dr. Webster’s footsteps. One of the things that Webster was very famous for in saying, He was really probably one of the first chiropractors to start talking about using less force, especially with children. He used to say, minimum force for maximum results to try to get everybody to understand that the concept of an adjustment is, to use that less force is now making greater impact because our bodies, innate intelligence knows what to do with even the most subtle forces.
So I absolutely appreciate him teaching that because it was not something I was exposed to. Before his teaching. Another thing he said all the time was adjusting kids is not like adjusting little adults. You don’t take a Gonstead adjustment and just go like this and make it smaller. That’s not really what pediatric chiropractic is.
It’s a completely different thing. It’s actually. Looking at the pediatric spine and thinking about the different nuances to the spine, their disc, plain lines their joints, lukka, that, that aren’t there when they’re little munchkins. The fact that it, when they’re little babies and newborns, they don’t have secondary curves yet in their cervical and lumbar.
So these are the things that we really need to take into consideration when we’re doing adjustments according to Dr. Web. To make it the best possible adjustment so that it’s not just taking an adult adjustment and making it smaller, and it’s it’s using minimal forces to create maximum results.
So what I’m gonna teach you guys today is some of his famous techniques that he taught us, and the three, there’s three light touch techniques that he taught us back in 1989 that I want to share with you guys. And those three light touch techniques are number one sustained. Which I probably use for 90% of our infant adjusting under age two.
Number two is what he used to call vibratory contact. And number two, three, which is really of cool and something that I’ve been actually experimenting a lot more with lately is what he called the intent adjustment. The intent. Adjustment or intentional adjustment where you’re using a lot less, even a lot less force than your traditional sta sustained content.
We’ll get to that in a second. So here’s just an example of adjusting with minimum force with a newborn. Here I am checking this little newborn. And another thing that he taught us is that, which I think was a very big change from traditional chiropractic approaches, is that you don’t have to adjust a chi, a child on a.
I used to, when I first got into chiropractic, I thought that’s the only way you could do it. You take the baby, you put ’em on the bench, put ’em face down, you put face up, and that’s just how it’s done. But he in 1989 said, no, you adjust a child where they want to get adjusted. So if they want to get adjusted mommy and daddy’s arms, if they want to get adjusted on the bench, They wanna get adjusted on the floor, they wanna get adjusted on the pregnancy pillow, they wanna get adjusted in their car seat, wherever it is that they want to get adjusted, that’s where you’re gonna adjust them.
And that was a brilliant thought process. So here I am like doing some motion palpation of the lower back and looks like I’m working. I believe on this particular picture, I’m working on the SI joints and what I’m doing is I’m motion palpating to see what SI joint is moving and not moving.
And that’s how we’re make deciding which adjustment we’re going to do. Here I’m checking the thoracic. Once again, not face down in this kind of, hugging position, checking the thoracic. And then here I’m doing a cervical adjustment. I’m actually doing a fingertip sustained contact adjustment where in this particular adjustment, you can use either your middle finger or you’re pinky based upon the size of your fingers.
Some people prefer using them, middle, some, they’re pinky. If you have. Hands or some people just like the direction that the pinky does versus the middle finger. But those two fingers actually had the best line of drive for the lateral to medial line of drive that we want to use for, let’s say as an example for an atlas adjustment.
So this is an example of this kind of adjustment and what we’re doing with a sustained contact is we’re using very gentle force. To try to take that atlas from lateral to medial. And so we’re not pushing very hard we’re just trying to put enough pressure in there. Dr. Webbs used to say enough pressure to like if you are holding a, a.
A dime or a coin of some sort. If you guys even know what coins are anymore holding a coin on their atlas and pushing it this way, how much force would you have to not very much force, five newtons, seven newtons, maybe 10 newtons to hold that. So that’s how much force you’re using. So what you’re doing with the sustained contact adjustment is you’re holding for five or 10.
Gentle force. The baby shouldn’t be moving and pushing like this. If they are, he is probably too forceful or maybe not in the exact right spot. And then recheck their legs. So you’re gonna do a leg check. Tap their atlas. That should, let me go back for a second. You’re gonna do their do a a. Leg check, fine.
Let’s say a short left leg, tap their atlas. If that balances the legs, now you’re going to do sustained contact for five or 10 seconds, and then you’re gonna recheck the legs. That was what he was teaching us. Now the vibratory contact is quite interesting because rather than using a sustained contact adjustment, he said for sometimes when sustained contact isn’t working, you gotta do something a.
Different. So what he would say is you would actually take your fingers and go like this, vibrate them like this. So it’s not just holding, it’s a sustain hold with a vibrational kind of component. Almost like if you’re familiar with a authors stem kind of thing, almost like your finger was an author stem, but obviously you can’t vibrate as fast as one of those, tools.
So you gonna vibrate, kinda like this to see if you can get that. Sometimes these areas are of stuck in a baby, especially if they have a tough birth. C-section was stuck in the birth canal for a long time. You might have to do a little bit extra work, and that’s where the vibratory contact comes in.
And then this is the cool new thing that new for me and how much I’m using it. When I, when he first talked about the intent adjustment, I was like, as time has gone on and after 30 something years in practice, I’m realizing this intent adjustment is actually quite effective. Because what you’re doing is in a normal sustained contact adjustment, you’re actually pushing, right?
You’re pushing lateral toe with a force to go from, let’s say you have a right outlist and you wanna get it to into the left, right? So you’re pushing it that way with an intent adjustment. You’re almost doing no force at all. You’re doing enough force to put your fingertips at, say example on Atlas, maybe for one or two Newtons, just enough for you.
Put your finger there and then the force is like this intent. Your intent is to go from lateral to medial. So what Webster was describing way back then was with a sustained contact adjustment, you’re saying to the spine, to the sea atlas, let’s say you’re saying you move here. I’m telling you where to go, you move here.
And with the intent adjustment, it’s like a suggestion like, Hey buddy, would you think about maybe that direction as a good direction for you? He said back then that those adjustments were really good for kids who are having all kinds of challenges, who are. Really just the sympathetically stuck babies who are crying a lot and a lot of colic and reflux, he says sometimes that’s a perfect adjustment for them cuz they just can’t take that much force.
Here’s the interesting thing and what I wanna really share with you guys is in the last several years I’ve actually started using this with my neurodivergent population, with the kids on the spectrum, the kids with a D H D. I’m actually starting their adjustment protocol with what we would call the intent-based adjustment.
So sustain contact with only one or two noms just to introduce ’em. It’s like saying, hello, this is your atlas. You might wanna move it that way if you’re okay with it. Because what we see with these special needs neurodivergent kids is a lot of them, their subluxations. Like they dig themselves in so they don’t respond as well.
So even with a regular sustained contact adjustment, sometimes it might be too much for them. So what we do is we start with the intent adjustment. As they start seeing, we see improvements with re-exams, then we start doing sustained contact, and then after the next re-exam, we’ll now add a more OSUs based adjustment.
I like. Using instrument like activator or you can use inter gonstead, diversified, full spine, et cetera. But this is the level that we’re using these adjustments on, which I now look back when I first learned it I think it was over my head when I first learned it back in 1989 as a almost soon to be graduate.
Now I truly understand what the purpose is in the three levels of these adjustments. The sustained contact for most of the kids, vibratory for some of those kids who are having that the sustained contact just isn’t working enough. And the intent adjustment for those kids who are really having a hard time, very sympathetically stuck.
And for the neurodivergent children that you’ll see in your. All the cool thing about it, and the thing I’ve really enjoyed that Wester told us is all three of them are the same setup. It’s just a different application of a thrust, right? So you have a five or 10 Newton thrust. You have the vibratory thrust, which is like maybe.
6, 7, 8 newton’s, on and off. And then you have the one or two Newton intent adjustments. So it’s really the same exact setup, is just how you’re applying it. Also, the cool thing that Webster said is you can apply this to any bone. I’m ha talking about the atlas today, since it is a fave with kids.
But you can use this with any sacrums, pelvis, thoracics, lumbars, lower cervicals, anything you can apply this. Another thing I like talking about too, that Webster was very fond about is the Webster infant taco headpiece. I love using this, especially with kids who have chronic ear infections.
The little ones who are coming in with chronic ear infections, the ones who are like 10, 11, 12 months old, two years old, et cetera, and they they’ve had ear infection. Their mom’s saying, we need to have tubes. This is what I usually jump to. I often will start with the sustained contact adjustments, but if that does not produce the results I’m looking for, I will jump up to using the infant to hep piece.
I like using it in this manner, holding it in my hands and thrusting. I think that’s my favorite way to do it. I know Webster really love wearing it. A lot of you guys might know or have seen Webster and I showed you a picture of that early on Webster wearing the infant. And then of having either holding the baby in their lap or having the mom or dad hold the baby, and then you just clicking around the baby.
That’s another great tool. We don’t have enough time to go into that today, but I did wanna introduce you. That’s another one of Webster’s amazing tools, especially for the cervical kind of region. Important little caveats for this. We recommend that the drop mechanism should be used when the baby.
Kind of essentially sitting itself up and supporting itself. So closer to a year old. We don’t do this on newborns. We don’t this on do this like little itty bitty munchkins who are have floppy heads. We want to use this on kids who have full head control. So you’re talking closer to a year old when you’re actually using the drop mechanism of the infant head piece.
And this is a fun thing I never forget. Webster said this to us in class. And once again as a, senior intern at Life University back in 1989, I just could not figure out what he was talking about, but I found out that this was true. He called it the Sleeping Baby Adjustment. He said, if you got a baby, you don’t wanna wake them up.
Some kids just are of cranky when they wake up from a nap, just some adults are. So if you got a kid who’s gonna be really cranky when they wake up and mom happens to bring ’em in a car seat, which is not my favorite, but if it happens to happen, which once in a while it does, he would say, don’t wake them up.
Adjust them where they are. And even they’re not a car. Even mom’s holding ’em don’t, you don’t have to wake them up. And this is what he used to say, you have arrived when you can adjust a sleeping baby and they stay asleep. So here’s an example of a sleeping baby adjustment. They came in a car seat.
I checked the cervical, I checked the sacrum. I did some very gentle adjustments. Obviously we’re unbuckling the car. To do this. The kid isn’t still strapped in. But we’re doing these very gentle adjustments like this and the baby stayed asleep. And this was a just one of those e examples of Webster was right.
He said, you’ve arrived when the sleeping baby can stay asleep, and you’ve arrived as a great pediatric chiropractor when your hands are that subtle and your touch is that subtle kind of thing. Just wanted to give you some heads up. I love the ChiroSecure and I love the platform that they’re are giving so many different pediatric chiropractors to talk about Dr.
Berger and Dr. Kalki. It’s just great information that I so appreciate ChiroSecure. But I also love the I C P A. I, CPA A has been my home. Because of Webster founded it. I joined when he officially started in 1993. I am speaking for them. I’ve been speaking now for the last 10 years. I do two different seminars for them.
One live and live virtual called Enhancing Pediatric Neuroplasticity, which is one of the required certificate classes and a few other electives I do as well. So I’d love to see you at that. And there. QR code to click into. I also been working with Dr. Steven Porsche, who wrote the Polyvagal Theory.
I have created something called the Polyvagal Informed Pediatric Chiropractic Seminar with Dr. Porsches, he and I talking together about this. It was filmed last year and now you can get it. The recorded version, if you wanna check this out here. Once again, the QR code, and one of my favorite things I do every single day, including today, I posted my 498th podcast for, it is called Cairo 498.
So there’s the QR code if you want to check it out. It’s all chiropractic all the time. 4 98 episodes of how much I love chiropractic and how, if you want to hear about philosophy or science or the art of chiropractic, I’ve just, every episode is a different take on things. So I’d love to have you listen to that.
We’ve gotta protect our future. That’s why we’re, we’re ChiroSecure and why I’ve been, a member of theirs since I graduated in 89, and we gotta adjust more. Just go out there, just more kids. I hope that showing you today some of Webster’s protocols may inspire you. If you want more information, I’d love to hear about it.
You can always kind of catch me again. You can get me through email or through ChiroSecure. I would love to hear your feedback on this. Thank you guys so much and I’ll see you guys next time.
Today’s pediatric show Look to the Children was brought to you by ChiroSecure.