Does Your Baby Need Their Back Cracked?

Every once in a while, my algorithm will feed me a video of someone getting their body parts cracked at a chiropractor’s office. I’ve never been on the receiving end of a spinal adjustment, but the dramatic pops and snaps from these clips make me feel a mixture of disgust and relief, the same reaction I have after watching Dr. Pimple Popper’s videos. But recently, the average age of patients I’ve seen getting cracked on the bench has gone down — significantly.

My “For You” page has been infiltrated by videos of babies receiving chiropractic care. Given concerns about the harm chiropractic adjustments can have for adults, this booming genre of viral video surprised me, and I couldn’t stop scrolling. The babies, it seemed, were suffering from ailments including congestion, constipation, and the dreaded colic. After trying seemingly everything to soothe them, their parents needed a Hail Mary: baby chiros.

That was the case for Courtney Armstrong, a 24-year-old from North Carolina who brought her daughter, RaeLynn, to the chiropractor for an adjustment. In a video from last spring, RaeLynn lies on her back while the chiropractor feels around for tense areas, claiming that “most babies have stress at the top of their neck.” Then he tenderly picks her up and appears to apply pressure to the spots he has deemed too tight, almost as if he’s about to crack her back. After a few squeezes, he puts RaeLynn back down and starts adjusting her neck. It’s a strange and silly thing to behold, like Julia Child making a chicken dance, but starring a tiny, adorable baby. No wonder the video has racked up 3.4 million views.

RaeLynn was around 1 month old when Armstrong first brought her to see a chiropractor. She was favoring one side (also known as torticollis), colicky, and constipated. “I would constantly take her to the doctor and all they would do was switch her formula, and that only seemed to make things worse,” Armstrong says. She did some Googling — and watched a few baby chiropractor videos on TikTok — before scheduling an appointment. After their first visit, Armstrong wanted to jump for joy. RaeLynn was cured: She stopped crying, was no longer colicky, and could pass gas very easily, according to Armstrong. “He massaged this certain spot of her spine, and literally 10 minutes after I left the office, she had a full-on blowout,” she says.

When Armstrong left the chiropractor, her credit card hadn’t yet been charged for the visit. After she posted RaeLynn’s visit on TikTok, the doctor saw the video had gone viral and gave her a discount: only $200 for the session. He asked her to bring her child in twice a week for six weeks, but after four sessions, Armstrong didn’t think RaeLynn needed to continue receiving adjustments. It’s not that she regretted those sessions, but she did initially regret posting the video: “I got a lot of hate comments [saying] I’m a horrible mother — ‘Why would you take your tiny baby to a chiropractor? She’s going to be damaged for the rest of life. You don’t deserve kids,’” she tells me. Some of the comments led Armstrong to question if she had made a mistake. “But then I had to step back and say, Hey, look, my daughter made improvements just in those four sessions. I did the right thing because now my daughter is not fussy, she’s not uncomfortable, she’s pooping, she’s passing gas, she’s happier. My baby is healthy, and she’s happy.”

Once you watch one baby chiro video, the algorithm serves you more and more. Many of the videos that have landed on my feed come from Momma’s Chiro in Huntington Beach, California. The practice often posts clips of its infant sessions, sometimes looking like the chiropractors are doing nothing at all and other times whipping out a Hypervolt to use on a child’s back. Momma’s Chiro has claimed that its work on babies can help with colic, sleep problems, bowel movements, mobility, and more, but many health-care professionals are skeptical.

“There is no role for a chiropractor in the treatment of a child, and definitely not an infant,” says Sean Tabiae, MD, an orthopedic surgeon based in Columbus, Ohio. “When you see a chiropractor manipulating the spine or the hips because they claim that it might help the child stop being colicky or might help their function of their bowels, it’s very concerning because there’s no basis to that.” Dr. Tabiae also says attempting a manipulation on a baby is “even more dangerous than an adult” because their bones aren’t fully developed.

There are other health professionals who are anti-baby-chiro — and even some docs who perform adjustments on adults aren’t so sure of the practice. “There just hasn’t been any clinical trials done or enough research done to actually support [adjustments on babies],” says James Lehman, a chiropractic orthopedist and director of the Health Sciences Postgraduate Education Department at the University of Bridgeport in Bridgeport, Connecticut. If there are any positive outcomes from taking your infant to the chiropractor, he says, they’re likely a coincidence.

Lehman recommends checking in with a physician before bringing your baby in for any kind of adjustment. “It’s always safer with a baby if the pediatrician has seen the patient and feels comfortable with the chiropractor,” he says. While Armstrong did not tell her daughter’s pediatrician she was taking her to see a chiropractor, Molly F., 35, from Bend, Oregon, did.

“I had a lot of conflicting feelings about chiropractors,” says Molly. Her 1.5-month-old was favoring one side, and she feared it was torticollis. “My dad is a radiologist, and he’s pretty anti-chiropractor because he sees a lot of injuries from them.” But Molly herself had been seeing a chiropractor who specializes in prenatal, postpartum, and infant care throughout her entire pregnancy and she trusted the practitioner. Her son’s pediatrician blessed the visit, as did her cousin, who is a pediatrician as well.

She took her son for three visits, and all of them were covered by insurance, so it only cost the family a $25 co-pay each session. Molly says she thinks it worked, although she’s not totally sure if the positive outcomes were real or coincidental. “I mean, he stopped favoring one side, he started moving his head more in his sleep, and whether it was just because he was getting older or because she helped loosen some of those muscles, we will never really know,” she says. If nothing else, seeing trending TikTok videos of baby adjustments like the ones from Armstrong gave me and thousands of other scrollers a distraction from something even more urgent: our own back pain.

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