Is Pediatric Chiropractic Care Safe?

The Chiro.Org Blog

SOURCE:   Clinical Chiropractic 2011 (Sep); 14 (3): 97–105

Matthew F. Doyle

This new “best evidence” literature review explored reported adverse events and the overall safety of chiropractic pediatric care, as well as other forms of care for the same complaints routinely treated in a chiropractic office.

The results were quite interesting:

  • The chiropractic literature reports incidence between 0.53% and 1% for mild adverse events (AE) associated with chiropractic pediatric manipulative therapy (PMT). Put in terms of individual patients, this means that somewhere between one in 100-200 patients presenting for chiropractic care may experience a mild adverse event; in terms of total patient visits, this means that one mild AE may occur every 1310 to 1812 visits.This incidence rate compares favorably with:
  • the 9% reported incidence rate with Osteopathic pediatric manipulative therapy (PMY), and the
  • 6% reported incidence rate when PMT was provided by a medical practitioner

The authors concluded that: The application of modern chiropractic paediatric care within the outlined framework is safe. A reasonable caution to the parent/guardian is that one child per 100 to 200 attending may have a mild adverse events, with irritability or soreness lasting less than 24 hours, resolving without the need for additional care beyond initial chiropractic recommendations.

You may want to visit our
Chiropractic Pediatrics Page, or the

Kids Need Chiropractic, Too! page
for more on this topic.