#180 CASE OF THE WEEK - BREECH

Pretend you are pregnant.  Yes, even you Tim.  Go along with me here.  Pretend you have two children both through natural childbirth.  You are a veteran, an expert even.  Here you are with #3 and #last.  Things are going along fine.  You spend the first trimester vomiting.  The second trimester you are glowing.  The third trimester you are kind of miserable.  Your sciatic nerve flairs up from the baby pressing down on it.  Your feet are swelling.  But you know these are temporary annoyances, so you press on.  8 months and counting.  You go in for a routine visit and the doctor informs you that your baby is butt down, head up, a condition called breech.  The doctor says that if the baby doesn’t turn on its own there are two options.  The first is to manually try to force the baby into the normal head down position, called the vertex position.  This procedure is call external cephalic version (ECV).  The doctor doesn’t tell you that this is done in the hospital with a prepped operating room at the ready in case your uterus ruptures or some other emergency happens.  The second option is caesarian section, surgical birth.  So, do you wait and see?  Do you try the version?  You ask are there any other options?  The doctor says nope, that’s it.
     This is a fair description of the predicament that our patient Lori was in a month or so ago.  She was given a week and a half before they would try ECV, and then C-section if that failed.  But Lori knew about something called Webster’s Maneuver, even if she didn’t remember the name.  And she knew that I had been trained and was experienced in Webster’s Maneuver.  So on a Thursday she reported to my office sharing the above case history, more or less, and that she was hoping I could help.
    In brief, Webster was a chiropractor that postulated that it was pelvic alignment that determined fetal position during the final weeks of pregnancy.  So if the pelvis was misaligned the baby would fit in as best it could.  It might be breech.  It might be sideways (transverse).  Or it could be head down looking toward the belly button (often called sunny side up).  These are all examples of constrained positions.  Over time Webster developed his protocol to determine how to adjust the pelvis, when to adjust the pelvis, and when to stop.  His success rate in over 700 cases was in excess of 95%!
     Now I haven’t had that much experience, only 9 cases.  But in every case except one we were able to align the pelvis in as few as one adjustment and at most 5 before the baby righted itself.  The failed case was apparently due to the cord being wrapped around the baby’s neck, so she had a C-section.  Mom and baby are fine.    
      I saw Lori that Thursday morning and applied the Webster protocol.  It said to adjust the left side of the sacrum.  I tried but nothing moved.  So I saw her again that afternoon.  The protocol recommends twice per day.  Time is of the essence.  The protocol again said the left sacrum.  This time it moved.  Later that day, or was it Friday, Lori felt the baby move.  Monday I checked the baby alignment and it appeared normal.  The ultrasound the following week confirmed that Webster had prevailed once again.  Addison was born through a natural delivery process about 3 weeks later.