Episode 6: The Prenatal Path – Chiropractic Care During Pregnancy

## Episode 6: The Prenatal Path – Chiropractic Care During Pregnancy

If there is one group of people who absolutely cannot afford to sit still all day, it is expecting mothers! 

In Part 6 of our 12-week "Wellness Lifecycle" series, Dr. Brant Hulsebus explores the "Prenatal Path." Chiropractic care offers a safe, natural, and drug-free way to manage the physical stresses of pregnancy, ensuring a happier and more comfortable journey for both mom and baby. 

### In this episode, you’ll learn:
* A Family Legacy: The incredible story of how chiropractic care helped Dr. Hulsebus's grandmother conceive and inspired three generations of chiropractors.
* The Webster Technique: What this specialized certification actually means. (Hint: We don't physically turn the baby; we balance the mother's pelvis so the baby can turn naturally!)
* Preventative Care: Why you shouldn't wait until a baby is breech to start seeking chiropractic care. 
* Managing Changes: How regular adjustments help with common prenatal issues like lower back strain, pelvic shifting, and even "pregnancy carpal tunnel."
* When to Start: Why the best time to see a chiropractor is the moment you find out you are pregnant—or even before!

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### About the Host
Dr. Brant Hulsebus is a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic and serves as the team chiropractor for the Rockford IceHogs. He holds advanced training and certification in the Webster Technique, making him uniquely qualified to support expecting mothers through their prenatal journey.

### Join the Journey
This is Part 6 of our 12-week series. Subscribe to follow along as we build your complete roadmap to spinal health and wellness!

Have a question?
If you are pregnant or planning to become pregnant, ask a chiropractor! Leave a comment or contact our Rockford clinic.

Connect with us:
* Website: https://hulsebuschiropractic.com
* Location: 1877 Daimler Road, Rockford, IL 61112

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Next Week: Once the baby arrives, the chiropractic journey doesn't stop! Join us for Episode 7 as we discuss Pediatric Chiropractic and how we adjust newborn babies.

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www.rockforddc.com

Transcript

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Hello, Dr. Brant Hulsebus here and welcome to another edition of Ask the Chiropractor. Ask The Chiropractor is my little podcast that I do when someone has a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, I try to answer. I'm a chiropractor here in Rockford, Illinois. I'm a proud graduate of Palmer College of Chiropractic, and I'm happy to be the team chiropractor of the Rockford IceHogs. Let's dive into it. hello and welcome to episode six of a 12 episode series that we're working on, and I'm excited to have you. Last time we talked a lot about people who have a desk job or people who sit too much, and I said, there's one population that really can't afford to do that, and that's when someone's pregnant. So if you're pregnant and you're considering going to see a chiropractor or you're considering. Becoming pregnant and why should I go see a chiropractor if this is something I want to do? I gotta tell you, there's a lot of cool stuff we do with pregnant women., I had a lot of advanced education in this, and this is something that's very important to me because if it wasn't for chiropractors helping with fertility and pregnancy, you wouldn't be watching this podcast right now because my grandmother was unable to conceive she couldn't have children. And grandpa went to get her help and he drove her to this crazy school in Davenport, Iowa called Palmer College of Chiropractic. Dr. BJ Palmer himself came out and met my grandma and my grandpa, and he thought he could help my grandma. And after you knew it, grandma became pregnant and the rest was history. Grandpapa signed up for school and here we are, third generation chiropractor. So whenever they talked about pregnancy in school, I got excited, right? because this is like our, my Chiro I don't have a chiropractic story, meaning that I didn't have something awesome in my life. And a chiropractor jumped in and saved me. That made me want to be a chiropractor. I just grew up. But that's a chiropractor all my whole, or chiropractor, you just become a chiropractor. So I became a chiropractor. But those quick talks were interesting to me because that was my family's story. So when you go through chiropractic college, we get classes on taking care of pregnant women. It's definitely part of our curriculum, and you get a little better education if you get to take care of somebody who is pregnant while you're there. And I had that. My sister-in-law was pregnant while I was there, so I got to take care of her while she was pregnant. And then. You get a little bit more education after you graduate. There's some advanced classes and courses you can take in taking care of pregnant women too. And I had a bad incident about five years, maybe 10 years into practice where I tore all the muscles outta my elbow and an injury, and I had to have a plate put in my elbow and had my elbow redone. And during that time, I couldn't work, so my surgeon said, go back to school. You can't work, go make yourself a better chiropractor. And that was some of the best advice I was ever given. So I took courses on what they call the Webster technique, like the Webster Dictionary. So the Webster technique is a chiropractic technique that we do, originally for correcting a breach baby. Now breach baby. That means they're coming feet first, not headfirst. The baby's upside down to mom. And this is a really cool chiropractic technique that I'm trained on and certified in, and it's not what you might think it is if you watch too many TikTok videos. We don't actually move the baby around. Now, the wombs there and the wombs designed to grow a beautiful baby. It had the baby do its thing. The problem is a lot of times, ligaments and tendons and subluxations get in the way. So what we do is we adjust mom's tailbone for a sacrum subluxation. If you don't know the word subluxation, one or two bones in your spine are misaligned, and that's creating stress and that stress is hitting the nerves around that joint causing what you called over back pain. But to us, it's a bigger thing than that because those nerves leave that area and travel to different body parts. And if the womb is under stress, it tightens up and it doesn't relax, and therefore the baby can't flip. So we adjust mom's tailbone, and then there's a muscle on the backside called a piriformis. When you have a pelvic misalignment or subluxation, the pure form muscle can be upset. So we do some work on the piriformis muscle, and that's followed up by ligament work, a trigger point of ligament in the backside. Then we flip mom over and we look at her hip flexor muscles and we try to get those to calm down and we finish with the one more trigger point on the round ligament of the uterus. because that's the only ligament to have muscle in it. So if it has muscle, you can do a trigger point and help it relax. And if you get all that pressure off the womb area, the relax baby will flip. Happy baby. That's what we do now. It was a really popular move when we found out you had a breached baby., I some chiropractors were sitting around, in chiropractic we talk a lot about prevention, prevention, prevention. So the question was, why do we wait until you breach to do this? Why do you have to get bad and then get better? We talk about prevention, so now what we do is we start this Webster technique. The moment you know you're pregnant. The very moment you find out you're pregnant, we start doing it. because why have a breach baby? Why not just take care of it? Now, babies that are naturally in a breach position to a certain time period, then they flip naturally. So if we adjust you the whole time you're pregnant, the babies don't get breached. So before we started doing it for prevention, I was 20 for 21 on adjusting moms can the breach babies A turned. Now since we do it in the moment, we found out you're pregnant. We haven't had a bridge baby in this office since we've been doing that. Now, maybe it's all because of the adjustment. Maybe because of the water in our city that people drink in Rockford. That helps prevent, I don't know. But I'm just really think it's cool that all the moms that come here and get adjusted don't have breeched babies. They're able to have a more natural birthing process, which is better for mom and of course the baby. So that's really cool to me. I like that. I dig it. There is a great reason to come here when you're pregnant. Is chiropractic safe when you're pregnant? I hope you understand that it is. I think that's a silly question. Of course, it's safe to come in and get adjusted when you're pregnant. Matter of fact, you don't want to do a bunch of medications and take a bunch of narcotics when you're pregnant because you're pregnant. So what? Then leave Natural Healthcare, who's been doing natural healthcare since September 18th, 1895. Your chiropractor has, we've been doing it all along. So when you're pregnant, your body undergoes some changes. Some changes. We talk about, some changes people don't talk about. One is your pelvis is gonna change, right? because you're pregnant, you got a big baby in front of. So we can adjust your lower back throughout the pregnancies. That way it stays healthy in alignment the whole time. Then only to give a good nerve supply to your baby, but also just good biomechanics for you. You don't want you to suffer through your pregnancy. We want you to enjoy your pregnancy. Another really common thing to happen when you're pregnant is your rib cage will actually change shape. It's gonna come up and expand out to make room for the baby, and there's a thing called pregnancy carpal tunnel. What happens is all that happens and it jams right where the neck and the thoracic spine come together. I talked a lot about this last week. If you're getting adjusted regularly in that area, we can keep that aerial loose and keep that pregnancy carpal tunnel from affecting you so you don't have to have that arm and numbness going down your arms. It's easy for us to adjust and take care of you for that and keep it happy. Now you can find all kinds of research papers that showed that women have more healthier babies, quicker deliveries and everything when they're under chiropractic care. I'll be honest with you, I don't know how they know that if it's my first ever pregnancy, I got adjusted the whole time. How do you know this was faster enough? I had it. I have no idea. But when you do surveys of women who are pregnant, they enjoy getting adjusted, they going to see the chiropractor. They enjoy having another healthcare provider to ask questions to as they're working with their OB GYN along the way. Now, I know some chiropractors actually became doulas, but they're actually there to help assist the birthing process. I think that's pretty cool. My, my first ever intern I had here, that's what she does. She's actually there helping with the birthing process, with the extra education. I don't do that. I don't have that degree. But it's cool to know that chiropractors are that involved in the natural burling processes. So if you've had some lower back pain, you've had some pregnancy carpal tunnel. Or you had a friend who had all that and you just found out you're pregnant and you don't wanna have all that. I highly recommend coming to see the chiropractor. Now, the tricky part about if you're a new patient in the clinic and you're pregnant, we're not gonna x-ray you. You hear a lot of times we take your x-rays of your spine so we can do a really good job. And that's, I do mean that, I do like doing that, but obviously I'm not gonna radiate the newborn baby before the baby's here. We would never do that, ever unless, it was. Something really weird, but we would still cover the baby with lead before we would do that. The area with lead. But if you're thinking about becoming pregnant and you're not pregnant now, man, that's a great time to come in because I have a pregnant woman on my table. I said, I gotta suspect that. So what your back's doing, I don't have an x-ray of you, so I can't say with. Great certainty, this is what you're doing. But my educated, my thesis is what you're doing with the x-ray. I have a much more things to base my diagnosis and how I'm gonna take care of you off of. So if you're thinking about getting pregnant and you're not pregnant yet, coming in and starting care and getting your x-rays taken is a huge advantage. Throughout your entire pregnancy. Now after the baby's born, we can definitely take your x-rays and think it'll get you then. But yeah, so I'm a huge fan of women coming and getting pregnant. I had a lot of women that have been coming here. My oldest is 20 years old right now, my oldest daughter, and since my wife is pregnant with her, I've always had at least five or six pregnant patients. It's funny, like somebody gives birth to somebody else comes in and tells me they're pregnant. But we've done amazing things with pregnant women, keeping them happy and letting 'em enjoy their pregnancy. That's the biggest thing that should, this should be a time for happiness, not suffering and pain. Don't live with that and don't ask your OB GYN or your midwife or your anybody else if you should see a chiropractor during this time because they're not trained to answer that question. They only, a chiropractor is trained to answer that question. And if you're nervous about seeing somebody about, maybe they take care of any women, maybe they don't. Look in the website, look for that Webster technique. If they got certified in the Webster technique like I am, then you know, they've studied pregnancy. They said how to take care of pregnant women. Again, we all get a sample of that at chiropractic school, but if you want someone did a deeper dive, that's a great way to look. Or just call the chiropractor and ask them, or ask the staff. Just call the staff and say, does a doctor take care of a lot of pregnant women? The staff say what? Pregnant women, they call a different clinic. So you get the one that says, oh, we have lots of pregnant women that come in here. So there you have it. If you're pregnant, you're gonna become pregnant. Go into the chiropractor. Great idea. Second thing, do you know after the baby's born that we go to the hospital sometimes and see the babies did a lot of that more before COVID than we do after COVID, right? Because the world changed the. But a lot of people on their way home will actually stop here on their way home and have us check their babies after they're born. And again, there's classes on that we took here too, to know how to do that. So we take care of them since the moment they're born, all the way up until the moment they're done. So once that baby's born, you want to keep going to that chiropractor. You know what? Why don't you come back next week, episode seven. We'll talk about taking care of pediatrics and newborn babies and little kids and kinda how we deal with the chiropractic adjustment. Very different for a newborn than I do one of my hockey players. Alright, if you're in Rockford and you're pregnant, come on in. I'll be happy to have a conversation with you, talk to you more about it. Otherwise, look for a chiropractor like I described. And if you have a question about chiropractic or chiropractic care, ask a chiropractor. Thanks for tuning in.