How evolutionary bodywork helps repair breastfeeding problems

The function of baby's connective tissue, muscles, and joints is context dependent

An appreciation of the significance of fascial connective tissues and their interconnection throughout the whole of the body has become more mainstreamed in recent years. Like many advances in health, this important understanding has come out of Complementary and Alternative Medicines, from what I call the traditional bodywork therapies (chiropractic, osteopathy, craniosacral therapy, myofunctional therapy).

You can find out the difference between traditional bodywork and evolutionary bodywork here.

A more constrained version of breastfeeding-related bodywork used to be called suck training. Now, traditional bodywork in breastfed babies is viewed as a whole-body intervention and referred to as integrative or holistic lactation support.

However, from the perspective of evolutionary bodywork, traditional bodywork does not go far enough. It does not to offer whole-of-ecosystem support. Evolutionary bodywork treats the breastfeeding mother and her baby as a single biological system.

You can find out why it's best to think of a breastfeeding woman and her baby as a single biological system here.

The desire to suckle drives your baby's oral seeking reflexes, jaw drop, vacuum creation, and milk extraction (a fixed action pattern)

The desire to suckle (which is almost as much about sensory motor need for the maternal body as it is about your baby's need for milk) triggers fixed action patterns - the baby's oral seeking behaviours and the primordial vacuum creation with her jaw drop. However, the way the baby is fitting into the mother's body determines the surrounding neuromuscular movement patterns and shape of the baby's tongue during breastfeeding.

The human infant has less fixed action patterns than any other living creature. The mammalian reflexes help the little one find the breast, in close interaction with the mother. Breastfeeding is the maternal and infant body in action as an entire unified ecosystem. The drive to suck results in the jaw drop. The shape of the tongue, the depth of the jaw drop, the symmetry of movement patterns, will depend on the context. The shape the tongue takes on and the oral meuromuscular movement patterns will be very different if they are being looked at away from the context of breastfeeding.

I have been fascinated by the work of pioneering neurodevelopmental researchers who propose that motor development is foundational for all facets the human infant's development. In a child, movement is primarily driven by the power of desire, or biological need, or emotion.

This means that exercises acted upon the baby a number of times a day, no matter how interactive parents try to be, are not occurring within the movement ecosystem of that baby, and can't possibly create more functional movement patterns and neuronal pathways.

But changing the movement patterns by changing the context e.g. by applying the gestalt method of fit and hold, will support habitual symmetric musculoskeletal and nervous system patterns of movement.

Otherwise neurologically normal babies, without a diagnosed neurological condition, do not develop 'faulty sucking patterns'. The biomechanics of infant suck depends on context. The shape and movement of the tongue, the configuration of the soft palate, the posture of the lips and shape of the cheeks will be different with a bottle, on an adult's finger, on a dummy, and on the breast, all depending on the nature of the object or tissue that is being drawn into the baby's mouth with the sucking reflex.

Fit and hold determines baby's neuromuscular movement patterns and shape of the tongue during breastfeeding

The bodywork that our breastfeeding babies need occurs in the context of breastfeeds, which are repeated many times of the day and night. This is evolutionary bodywork. It is applied through the gestalt method of fit and hold, which optimises spinal alignment, so that the baby sucks with symmetrical positioning. It allows the nipple and breast tissue to be drawn up deeply in response to the baby's application of vacuum. It ensures that baby's cervical spine is not unduly flexed or extended, but has a slight and comforable extension.

Evolutionary bodywork also protects the mother's joint and spinal alignment, so that she is protected from musculoskeletal pain as a result of breastfeeding her baby.

Evolutionary bodywork understands how sympathetic nervous system hyperarousal affects patterns of movement including oromotor movements

A baby will alter the way she holds her lips, opens or moves her mouth and jaw, and moves her tongue depending on her sentient responses to the environment and people around her. She may not wish to have a finger in her mouth, which alters the movements of the tongue and tissues in her mouth - even if she allows the finger in.

A baby with a conditioned dialling up may fuss and fret at the breast. This too will affect the movements and shape of the tongue and tissues in her mouth.

The role of sympathetic nervous system arousal and hyperarousal, conditioned or otherwise, has not been properly considered when a baby's suck and swallow is being assessed in breastfeeding.

Bodywork understands that a dialed up baby is a baby whose nervous system is on high later, and that this interferes with integration of movement and neural pathways for musculoskeletal alignment.

The little body is pristine tissue. A dialed-up body is certainly on a path to restrictions if this were to continue for many months or years, but the baby's body is as unknotted, unwritten, awaiting its little life with lovely elastic undamaged tissues and fascia. If the birth was traumatic the little one has profound capacity to heal.

Sucking problems aren't usually caused by birth trauma

Access to technological, medical, or surgical birth interventions are a human right. Birth interventions protect life and health, and when they are not available to women and their babies, for example, in developing economies, a woman's human rights and her baby's human rights are breached.

However, birthing women and their babies have the right to demand of our health systems that they experience technological or surgical birth interventions only when necessary to protect life and health. In the West, many women are subject to unnecessarily high rates of intervention, and are disempowered and negatively impacted by this. Many women also describe experiences of unnecessary obstetric birth trauma, sometimes from unnecessary use of interventions, sometimes by failure to have appropriate interventions offered in a timely manner, and this is a serious concern.

However, it's inaccurate to attribute baby breastfeeding problems to subtle fascial or cranial nerve restrictions due to birth trauma. The kinds of birth-related injury which might impact upon breastfeeding are:

• Bruising or haemorrhage from forceps or vacuum delivery - caputs

• Drowsiness due to medications

• Prematurity, with weak suck

• Jaundice due to caput or haemorrhage, with bilirubin effects upon alertness

Other than in these conditions, babies who aren't born prematurely, and who don't have neurological medical conditions will suck reflexly. The capacity to find the nipple and suck is one of the relatively small number of 'fixed action patterns' that we find in the human newborn. The dropping of the jaw, with the tongue following along, is a two-million-year-old, hardwired mammalian reflex.

Lack of vigour in sucking relates to a range of factors, but is not due to subluxed cranial nerves or to neurological damage from the birth.

It is not possible or sensible, and possibly harmful, to try to stretch infant connective tissue manually. Baby connective tissue is pristine - fresh, subtle and stretchy, regardless of the difficulty of the birth process.

It helps to remember that prior to the advent of birth technologies, there were very high death rates and injury rates for both women and their babies associated with giving birth. Yet in these earlier times of high maternal and infant mortality rates, most women across all cultures on the planet including in the West breastfed their babies. Birth trauma was not causing fascial or connective tissue restrictions, which impaired breastfeeding.