Pediatric Chiropractic

Children benefit enormously from chiropractic care. Using extremely gentle techniques appropriate for their age and size, we help kids grow, develop, and thrive without the use of drugs or invasive procedures.

A children's adjustment doesn't look much like an adult one. With a newborn, the pressure we use is roughly what you'd use to check whether a tomato is ripe: a light, sustained contact with a fingertip, held for a moment, no twisting and usually no sound at all. As kids get bigger the technique scales up with them, but it always stays sized to the child in front of us. A three-week-old and a fifteen-year-old soccer player get two completely different visits, and neither one gets the dramatic back-cracking most people picture when they hear the word chiropractor. Parents are often surprised by how little there is to watch. With the youngest patients the whole thing is over before most people realize it has started.

The reasons families come in are pretty ordinary. A toddler who went off the porch step and has been favoring one side since. A nine-year-old whose neck is sore after a weekend tournament. A middle schooler carrying a backpack that weighs more than it should, hunched over homework and a screen most evenings, saying their upper back aches by dinnertime. Teenagers in year-round club sports who train one side of the body far harder than the other and start to feel it. Babies who seem to turn their head more easily one way than the other. Kids who've started saying that one shoulder sits higher than the other. What ties all of that together is comfort and movement: how a growing body is holding itself, where it has gotten stiff or sore, and whether anything is worth a closer look.

Our office is on Wells Branch Parkway in North Austin, and the Chicoine family has been caring for families in this part of town since 1989. That's long enough that we now adjust the children of patients we first saw when they were children. Dr. Shelly Hogan, D.C. did postgraduate study in pediatrics and prenatal care after graduating from Parker College in 2005, and Dr. Nicole Edwards, D.C. has been practicing in Austin since 2001. Both are daughters of Dr. Jon K. Chicoine, who founded the practice and has since retired. There's a play area in the waiting room, and parking right at the door. If you arrive with three kids and a diaper bag, that's a normal Tuesday around here.

You stay in the room for the whole visit, every time. Before anyone touches your child we sit down with you, ask what you've noticed and when it started, ask about the falls and bumps even the ones that seemed small, and then look at how your child actually moves. We explain what we found in plain language, to you and to your child, in words that fit their age. If a kid isn't up for it that day, we don't push. You can come back another time and nobody will make a fuss. What we do here is care aimed at comfort, movement, and the everyday aches of growing up, and it sits alongside your child's regular checkups rather than in place of them. If you're not sure whether something is worth an appointment, call (512) 255-1777 and describe it. We'd rather talk it through on the phone than have you sit on it.