Bedwetting, or nocturnal enuresis, effects all kids sometime, but it’s always embarrassing. It isn’t a big issue if the child has just been potty trained, as conscious bladder control is much easier than bladder control while sleeping. In fact, if both of the parents were bedwetters, the child has an 80% better chance of wetting the bed after being toilet trained. Bedwetting can affect anyone, but it’s more common in boys. Also, if your child has ADHD it is more common for them to have problems.
The factors that define it as an actual problem is if your child still wets the bed after age 5-6, if they wet the bed after a long period of dry nights, and if the experiences painful urination, is unusually thirsty, snoring, or has pink urine.
There are several factors that cause bedwetting, and most of them can be helped greatly with chiropractic. Here is a list of some of the factors that can cause bedwetting, and how chiropractic can help them:
They Don’t Know
This indicates that the nerves that travel from your childs bladder to their brain aren’t fully developed or are blocked by a subluxation. To help, bring your child into the chiropractor so they can set the subluxation straight and help to ensure that your childs nerve flow developes and communicates the right way. It also may be a problem with how deeply your child sleeps. Some messages, such as the ears hearing a loud noise or the eyes sensing a bright light, are supposed to wake us up, so if your child isn’t effected by these external sensations, he or she may have a problem with internal signals as well.
Hormones
Your child is still developing inside and out, but the outside development may be easier to spot. Sometimes, your childs body doesn’t produce enough anti-diuretic hormone (ADH), which slows nighttime urine production. Bring them into a chiropractor, because a hormone imbalance could be a cause of poor nerve signals to the organs that produce ADH.
Stress
Stressful events may cause bedwetting. “What does a child have to be stressed about?” you ask? Well, sometimes becoming a big brother or sister, the first nights away from home, or starting in a new school can be extremely stressful to a young one. Make sure your child is completely comfortable with something before doing it if he or she is wetting the bed. Chiropractic can help reduce physical and emotional stress that the child may be dealing with that he or she doesn’t tell the parents, such as if they fell off of the jungle gym at school and their back hurts a little, but not enough to tell mom and dad.
UTI
Your child may have difficulty controlling urination if they have a UTI. Signs that they may have a UTI can be daytime accidents, frequent urination, and painful urination. Chiropractic helps the immune system work at peak performance, and has no harmful side effects such as a UTI antibiotic. For example, the commonly used antibiotics sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim have side effects such as diarrhea that is watery or bloody, feeling restless or irritable, confusion, hallucinations, seizures, slow heart rate, weak pulse, severe tingling, numbness, and muscle pain or weakness. Do you want to put your child at risk of these side effects for simple bed wetting?
Sleep Apnea
Bed wetting can also be a sign that there is something wrong with your childs sleep patterns. When learning bladder control while awake, they usually have no trouble concentrating on just that, but if they are asleep and having trouble breathing, or have ear or sinus infections, the pain and trouble breathing may be enough to distract them from noticing that they have a full bladder and waking up to go to the bathroom. Chiropractic can help with sleep apnea by clearing the neural pathway from the brain to the lungs. If the child can breathe right then they shouldn’t have any problems recognizing a full bladder. And if the immune system is working well, they shouldn’t have any annoying ear or sinus infection to distract them from noticing they have to go to the bathroom.
Diabetes
If your child has had a long period of dryness, but now seems to be wetting the bed frequently, it can be an early sign of diabetes. If this happens, look for other signs before getting worried. Other signs it can be diabetes is passing large amounts of urine at one time, increased thirst, fatigue, and weight loss despite a healthy diet. If it is diabetes, chiropractic can actually help. There is no solid evidence of how it helps, but there are many instances recorded of where a person suffering from diabetes feels better, has their sugar levels drop, and their quality of life improves.
Constipation
Even though your child may have perfectly functioning nerves between their brain and their bladder, and may be healthy otherwise regarding their urinary tract, chronic constipation can cause bedwetting. If their colon is full, then their bladder doesn’t have as much room. Shifts in sleeping position at night can put too much pressure on the bladder, causing it to empty without them knowing. Chiropractic can help communication between the bowels and brain, relieving your child of constipation and help stop bedwetting at the same time.
Anatomical Defect
This is a very rare cause of bedwetting, but it may apply to your child. An anatomical defect is something that formed wrong in your child’s body. When talking about bedwetting, the anatomical defect would have to occur in the neurological or urinary systems. While chiropractic can’t cure your child of these defects, it can help take advantage of what they do have, and help keep the defects from getting worse by guiding them in the right direction as your child continues to grow and develop.
Chiropractic Can Help
To complement chiropractic care and natural healing, caffeine intake should be stopped completely until the problem has been resolved. It is not the child’s fault for wetting the bed, so they should not be scolded or made to feel bad about what happened. Make sure to let the child know, and make sure they understand, that this is just another problem that will pass, just like potty training or learning to walk.
Going to the bathroom right before bed is always a good idea, but make sure you suggest it so they don’t feel pressure to perform, which may add stress and make the situation worse. Also, stretching the bladder may help by allowing the child to hold more urine. When the child has to go to the bathroom, have him or her hold it for five more minutes every time. Don’t forget to praise your child when they do it, because praise can go a long way in a situation where neither party wants bed wetting to continue.
Find Out More
No matter what the underlying cause is, bedwetting can be helped through chiropractic care. Here at Burtis Chiropractic, we have helped many children and their families move beyond the embarrassment of bedwetting. Chiropractic has no side effects like some medications do and is a cause-fixing, not symptom-suppressing, treatment that gets real results, and leads to total body wellness. Don’t just feel healthy, be healthy!