The Webster Technique for Breech Babies | Prenatal Chiropractor in Arlington Heights, IL
Hi, I’m Dr. Katie Sleigh with Sleigh Family Chiropractic and today we’re going to be talking about the chiropractic technique that we use for pregnant patients.
The Webster Technique
So the technique is called the Webster technique. And patients oftentimes will find us and find that technique as a way to help with baby positioning. So they often find us if their baby is in the breech, or the transverse position. So what that technique does and what what it for Is It helps to ensure balance and alignment in the pelvis and the surrounding muscles and ligaments. What that technique is not is it does not put any pressure on baby, it’s not actually forcefully, making baby move into a different position. So what we know is that during pregnancy, you have an increase of a hormone called relaxin. So that hormone allows for all of your connective tissue to relax or stretch in preparation for your growing baby. What that hormone also affects is the joints of the spine. And especially we focus on the joints in the pelvis during during pregnancy. And so what can happen is those joints of the pelvis become more flexible than they otherwise would be. And things can miss a line. There are also several ligaments that attach on to the pelvis, including the ones that attaches through here, those are your round ligaments that you may feel stretching throughout your pregnancy. And those ligaments support the uterus. And so if the pelvis is twisted, it’s going to put some torsion, it’s going to pull tighter one of those ligaments more so than the other one. And that can create torsion and tilting in the in the uterus. And it can affect the size and the shape of the uterus, where you’re growing baby is when that size and shape of the uterus changes that can make it more difficult for baby to do what baby is supposed to do, which is get into that ideal head down position. So what we do with the Webster technique is we restore alignment in the pelvis and balance in through the ligaments so that it relieves all the tension on the arrest. So baby can do what baby’s supposed to do, which is to get into that head down position.
Performing the Webster Technique on Pregnant Moms
All right, so this is what a Webster technique adjustment looks like. So first of all, when we are adjusting pregnant women, in order to make it comfortable for them to lie on the table, we use these pillows here, they are a high density foam and they have holes in the middle. So belly is going to go in there. So we will invite our patient to lie on the table here. So she kind of puts the belly in the middle so that it doesn’t put any pressure on baby. First part of the Webster technique is the checks. So we’re going to bring the feet up toward the rear and feel for which side there’s more restriction in. And then based on that, we’re going to adjust the pelvis. And so for pregnant women, we generally will use one of two styles of adjusting. So we might use the drop table which looks kind of like this. And the reason we use that drop table mechanism is because the dropping motion of the table augments what we do with our hands so we don’t have to put a lot of pressure on to the mom. The other style of adjusting that we may use is this tool. It’s called an activator. What this does is it just taps T bone back into the proper alignment and is usually a bit more more gentle. And then the second part we’re going to have my foot over on to her back. And so once we have mom on her back, we’re going to work to release the according round ligament based on what we adjusted in the pelvis. It’s a very gentle pressure. Usually Mom’s not really going to feel much of anything at all. We just hold that until the ligament releases.
So I hope this gives you a better idea of what we do as far as taking care of pregnant women in our office specifically as it relates to baby positioning. If you have any questions, please drop them below. I’ll see you on the next video.
