I‘ll never forget the moment, sitting there in a post-graduate seminar in Chicago, when I realized that as a chiropractor I had been really, really messing something up. I wasn’t a newbie by any means- I’d been in family practices for 7 years by this point, served my profession at the state and national level, and won a major award for my alternative health news podcast. But here I was at the Doubletree being shown the most basic concept about changing an infant’s diaper, and I was dumbfounded.
Most of us do the double-leg lift. Okay, let me write that another way: Almost all of us do the sniff check, undo the diaper, lift the baby up by the legs to get the dirty out, wipe the creases and insert the clean one in. A couple swipes of the tape, Velcro or snaps and it’s all done. It’s the way we’ve seen it done in the movies, on TV, and in our own living rooms for generations. It’s even rational- once new babies discover their feet, it’s almost impossible to keep them out of their mouths! But I'll tell you this- the way most of us have intuitively changed a diaper is not sound spinal biomechanics, and it very well may be the cause of your baby’s colic.
