The Child’s Cry
It is not uncommon for an infant to cry with no apparent localized cause. This crying may continue for hours with no other symptoms. There will be no indication of colic or other symptoms to denote the seat of the pain. The crying is constant and, while in some cases may be quite violent, yet there are no paroxysmal attacks; this indicates that the pain is constant. It is easily distinguished from a hunger cry in that the child usually refuses to nurse. If the crying persists for hours there will be more or less exhaustion. Such cases are very pitiful and draw heavily upon the sympathies of the chiropractor as well as upon other attendants. In such cases the first thing to do is to strip the infant of all clothing and look for open safety pins, rough places in the clothing, such as folds or wrinkles; foreign objects, as small buttons, for example. Usually, however, this will be done before the chiropractor is called. It may be an advantage for the chiropractor to observe the infant very carefully for a few minutes after the clothing has been removed, in an effort to locate the seat of the pain. However, this is not so very important because first, in most of these cases it is practically impossible to determine the location of pain, and second, because a very careful palpation of the child will always reveal the causative subluxation. In making the analysis the chiropractor should give himself plenty of time to make a thorough palpation. He should not be in too great a hurry to adjust the child merely because of his anxiety to relieve the crying. He must not allow the incessant crying of the child to work upon his nerve and destroy his efficiency in caring for the patient. In these cases the subluxation may be located in any part of the spine, although it is less often found in the cervical region. If there is a subluxation in the cervical region, great enough to produce this constant crying, there is very likely to be cerebral symptoms. In these cases the subluxations are usually quite exaggerated and very often the hot box becomes the determining factor.
In a case recently an infant three weeks old had been crying constantly for several hours. The clothing had been removed and the child very carefully bathed and powdered; then instead of the clothing being replaced the child was wrapped in a blanket. Still the crying persisted. A very careful observation of the patient gave no information whatsoever as to the possible location of the cause for the crying. There was nothing that would quiet the child. He finally grew so exhausted that the cry became little more than a whimper, beads of perspiration standing out over the entire body. There were no signs of colic or tympanites. A careful palpation revealed the sixth dorsal very badly subluxated and a slight subluxation of the first lumbar. These were adjusted and the child stopped crying almost instantly and in less than ten minutes was sleeping normally. There was no return of the abnormal crying and the child had no further adjustments.
We have many such cases on record, but the citation of this one is sufficient to illustrate the results that are obtained in such cases.