Alternative children’s health care more mainstream

By Kathleen Bishop Newman

After recurring bouts of ear infections with her 18-month-old daughter, Samara Pernice was at her wit’s end. That’s when she turned to a chiropractor for help.

“I was at desperate measures with my daughter,” said Pernice. “She was very, very sick. I sat in my doctor’s office and cried, and the doctor cried, too.”

A week after tubes were put in her daughter’s ears to help with drainage, Pernice said her child got an ear infection in one ear and four days later in the other ear.

“She was on eight medicines a day, a nose spray and ear drops,” said Pernice. “We were totally traumatized.”

Although Pernice had never heard of a child going to a chiropractor, a client where she cuts hair in Liberty recommended she give it a try. After several visits that involved gentle manipulations near the child’s ears and some vitamin therapy, the girl’s ears were clear and she hasn’t had an ear infection since.

Brian Kelling, a Kearney chiropractor for 22 years, said that most medicine treats symptoms and not the cause of illnesses.

With chronic ear infections, sometimes there can be a misalignment of the top two vertebrae that sit right below the ear, and this can cause a change in pressure within the Eustachian tube, making it harder to drain. Low force chiropractic manipulation can release that pressure.

“There is a misconception that people think kids don’t have back and neck problems, but they can get musculoskeletal problems just like adults,” said Kelling.

He’s seen kids with back and neck problems from falling out of trees, wrestling with siblings and sports injuries. But, because of how fast they heal, relatively serious problems can clear up quickly in children if identified.

Kelling said chiropractics have changed dramatically over the last 20 years and the field is now a more mainstream area of health care with most major insurance companies carrying chiropractor benefits.

Acupuncture, which has been used for hundreds of years in eastern parts of the world, is also widely accepted as a treatment for a variety of conditions. In that process, low-level electric stimulation is applied to a point on the body related to the area of pain.

Kelling said that one fairly new therapy is the use of low-level cold laser (CLL) to accelerate the body’s healing.

“All living things respond to light and energy. At certain frequencies the inflammatory response has been found to accelerate, allowing for faster healing results,” Kelling said.

Laser therapy has been used by professional sports teams on the West Coast for 10 to 15 years to reduce swelling and speed healing of muscle strains and broken bones.

Kelling, who has one of the stronger lasers in Kansas City, has used CLL on young athletes such as runners and baseball players.

He said that laser treatment reduced swelling quicker than ice and could be used for pretty much everyone.

“It’s unbelievable how much faster the results are,” he said.

Correspondent Kathleen Bishop Newman can be reached

at 628-6030.