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Chiropractic helps delayed speech in 7 year-old

A case study presented in the October, 1998 issue of the International Chiropractic Association Review reports that a case of acquired verbal aphasia (delayed speech) in a 7 year-old girl was reversed soon after beginning Chiropractic Care. The study was conducted by Dr. Peter Fysh, Professor of Pediatrics at the Palmer College of Chiropractic West in San Jose, California. Dr. Fysh reports that the child's language skills developed normally, using small strings of words, until about 18 months of age. At that point, her vocabulary suddenly decreased to only one or two words. Speech therapy at 3 1/2 years of age was unsuccessful and by the age of 6, she could only say "mom" and "dad." Evaluation by a pediatrician, audiologist, psychologist and a speechlanguage pathologist revealed no causes for her condition. By the time she turned 7, on-going speech therapy had only increased her vocabulary to 4 words. At this time, she was taken to a chiropractor. Aside from the delayed speech, it was noted that she also tended to hold her arms rigid at her side and was unable to perform normal 7 year-old physical tasks such as skipping. During the examination and case history, it was discovered that "at sixteen and-a-half months of age, on a single visit to her pediatrician, she had received vaccines for diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, measles, mumps and rubella. Upon further questioning her mother revealed that the child had stopped talking within a few weeks following the date of these vaccinations." The association of the loss of speech with the vaccinations is important in this case because the pertussis vaccine has been associated with brain inflammation in infants which could very well result in speech disorders such as this one. According to Fysh, "perhaps the link was there, overlooked initially [by the specialists] and almost impossible to prove in retrospect. " After three weeks of chiropractic care, the mother reported that her daughter was using new words every day. After five weeks she was able to skip rope for the first time and at seven weeks, she was arguing with her father over which TV programs to watch with a vocabulary of more than sixty words. After 3 months she showed wellcoordinated physical movements and no arm rigidity . Fysh concludes that this case highlights several problems in the traditional medical approach to this situation. "First, because of the perceived importance of vaccinations as being a necessary part of a child's health care program, their effect upon development may have been disregarded. Finally, the traditional reluctance of the medical profession to include chiropractors using spinal evaluation...perhaps leads to patients enduring continuing problems, when a solution may indeed be available but untried because it is outside the focus of traditional medical thought."

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