Hip Pain During Pregnancy: Can Chiropractic Care Help?
If you’re carrying a child, you may be experiencing a variety of painful conditions. One such issue that affects many women is hip pain.
But why does hip pain occur during pregnancy? And, more importantly, what can be done to get rid of pregnancy-related hip pain?
In this post, we’ll address these questions and more. This way, you can gain a better understanding of how the pregnancy is affecting your body and what you can do to make the process more comfortable.
Why Does Hip Pain Affect So Many Pregnant Women?
When a woman becomes pregnant, her body goes through a variety of changes to accommodate the growing baby. For example, hormone levels change dramatically. These hormones promote the growth of tissues and perform other tasks that enable the women’s body to accommodate the fetus.
Because of these hormones (and other factors), the joints of the body become more lax, especially in the hips and pelvis. This is because the pelvis needs to stretch significantly to allow the baby to pass through during labor.
As a result, the hips often become very painful due to this relatively rapid change during the gestational period. Specifically, the normally stiff and rigid bones of the hip suddenly become flexible. This would cause anyone significant pain!
How to Treat Hip Pain During Pregnancy
As you might imagine, pregnancy is a scary time for many families. Despite our advancements in technology and medicine, many women still miscarry, have stillbirths, and experience other serious pregnancy complications every year.
Unfortunately, it can be very hard to design good studies that examine exactly why these negative outcomes occur. Case in point, it would be extremely unethical to subject a woman to a potentially dangerous stimulus in order to see how it affects the pregnancy.
For this reason, we tend to be overly cautious when it comes to prescribing treatments for pregnancy-related ailments. Many medications, treatments, and even dietary changes have been associated with negative outcomes, and that is the last thing a pregnant mother would want. These correlations have led to what are known as “contraindications”.
Contraindications during pregnancy are those treatments and substances that should be avoided. Excessive caffeine intake and alcohol are two common examples of substances which should be limited during this time. Similarly, aggressive massages to the abdominal area, saunas, and other commonly used treatment methods for orthopedic pain are also contraindicated during pregnancy.
Luckily, chiropractic care has been shown to be safe and effective for pregnant women. In the next section, we’ll take a closer look at this treatment option for pregnancy-related hip pain.
Chiropractic Care and Hip Pain During Pregnancy
If you’ve never been to a chiropractor before, you may have an image of chiropractic treatments being “rough” or “aggressive”. But this is far from the truth. In fact, chiropractic treatments are tailored to the individual patient’s needs. For instance, a small child would not receive the same amount of force during treatment that an NFL linebacker would.
Similarly, an appropriate amount of force would be used on a pregnant woman during her treatment. Specifically, the chiropractor will only apply as much force as is needed to achieve the desired outcome, which, in this case, is pain relief.
Are you experiencing hip pain during your pregnancy? If so, you may be unsure what the safest and most effective course of action will be. Our dedicated team at Anchor Health Chiropractic, the go-to Noblesville chiropractor, is here to help. We can help you alleviate all of your symptoms before, during, and after your pregnancy. Book your appointment now!
