Infant/Early Surgery? It Impacts Developing Movement in These Five Ways …
The theme for this week …
Oh, the many ways that medical procedures can get our muscles confused!
This week we look at the impact of surgery on young children. Early medical interventions can affect movement development in ways you may not realize. Read on …
Did your child have surgery at a young age?
Heart repair?
GI/Stomach repair?
Facial reconstruction?
Hip/foot reconstruction?
Arm/hand reconstruction?
Hernia repair?
Cranial fusion repair?
This list represents many of the types of surgeries experienced by children (and adults who had these as a child) whom we’ve met at The Bridging® Institute. In the larger US, annually there are approximately 1.3M surgeries on children in the 0-5 age group.
What’s fascinating is the lack of data about surgeries for children. Even this National Institutes of Health research paper cites a paucity of actual data and how they were able to make projections for the numbers.
Why should we care about early surgeries?
A surgery early in life is often a life-saving measure to help restore function to a blocked organ or malformed structure.
What is overlooked is the impact of the hospitalization and procedure on the motor skill development of the infant.
When a baby should be wiggling around being cute and cuddly with caregivers, they are instead immobilized and monitored in such a way to prevent tiny micromovements from forming.
Also scars, the remnants of the life-saving procedures, create a barrier to muscle function. This disrupter of micromovement function often becomes more pronounced as the child grows.
How is early development affected?
Depending upon the age of the medical intervention, development is impacted in different ways, including:
- Weakness due to missed muscle practice time needed for development while healing or immobilized.
- Tightness due to scar tissue restrictions
- Lack of balance due to asymmetric tightness, strength, and skipped development finesse.
- Poor fine motor skills due to placement and immobilization on wrists for monitoring and IV’s
- Speech due to lack of tummy time to build neck and head control
The gift that keeps giving!
The asymmetries and tightness continue to skew motor skills and posture until growth is finished. Sadly.
The good news is that these all change and catch-up with the Bridging® Technique. We follow the developmental blueprint of motor skills and piece disrupted relationships back together.
Bridging® rebuilds the structural foundation which enables strength, advanced motor skills and flexibility.
Insight of the week from Cara
The Bridging® Institute team and I have had the honor to support many children from their early years into their youth and adulthood. The group I feel most touched by are those who had a life-saving surgery as an infant.
This group included hernia repairs, duodenal stenosis, blocked colon, heart repairs, limb reconstruction, head surgery for a fused skull condition, cleft palette repair, kidney surgery, and hip reconstruction.
They are often misunderstood!
Movement and activity can be a challenge for this group who had early surgeries. They often have odd, subtle coordination challenges, tire easily, and are inflexible in ways that defy logic.
Although they may have had early therapeutic support, we find that the structural connectedness supporting posture and motor skills needs a very specific reset.
What do we find?
When there was a surgery at a young age, we find challenges with muscle function. This can be manifest as one or more of the following:
- Stuck: movement transitions through the area of surgery and monitoring/immobilization are stiff which makes movement hard, as well as fatiguing.
- Clumsiness: Movement through the areas lack finely controlled transitions which results in clumsiness.
- Fast and furious: Movement through the area can be very fast which covers up lack of control. Over time this can result in pain or injury due to improper stress.
- Sensory snafus: When the muscles don’t fire correctly, the sensory organs which provide feedback don’t work well either. This can create either a lack of sensitivity or be oversensitive.
- Posture: Rounded shoulders, uneven hips or back curves can often be from the surgery-related glitches in muscle coordination.