What Is Infant Colic?
An Essay on the Crying Baby and What the Body Is Trying to Say
Author’s Note
This essay uses the word “colic” because that is the label parents will hear from their pediatrician, see on packets of soothing drops, and read about at three in the morning when their newborn has been screaming for four hours and they are searching for an answer. The label is what brings readers to the question. It is also a bucket diagnosis that describes what the parents are experiencing — a baby who cries inconsolably, doesn’t sleep, won’t be put down — without describing anything about what the baby is experiencing. Mainstream pediatric medicine acknowledges that the cause is unknown.¹ The treatments offered work for nobody, or work for a fortnight, or work in the sense that the baby eventually grows out of the period during which the body’s distress signals are this loud.
This essay is built around the work of Dr. Amandha Dawn Vollmer, a Canadian naturopath who has spent nearly two decades helping families with colicky babies and who recently published a piece consolidating what she observed across hundreds of cases.² Her four-cause framework — vaccination, formula feeding, improper latch and maternal diet, birth trauma to the spine — is the spine of what follows. The supporting case is built from the broader terrain literature: Williams, Shelton, Tilden, Lester and Parker, Cowan, Engelbrecht and colleagues. Where this essay uses establishment language (”infant,” “vaccine,” “formula”), it does so to name what the establishment is doing; where it describes what is actually happening to the baby, it shifts to the terrain register. Both registers are necessary and the reader should always know which one is operating.
Full credit, throughout, to Dr. Vollmer for the original investigation that prompted this essay. Where this work goes further than her piece, it is because her piece pointed the way.
Vollmer’s Story
Vollmer was a colicky baby herself. Two full years of it. Her father drove her in the car at night and put her on top of the rocking dryer because nothing else worked. Years later, with the benefit of her own training and her own investigation, she put the pieces together: her first vaccinations had damaged her gut and nervous system, and she was given formula instead of breastmilk. Her first experience earthside, as she puts it, was gut-wrenching pain.²
When her own daughter was born in 2011 — at home, in water, with no interventions, exclusively breastfed — colic appeared anyway. Vollmer traced it to her own diet: she had been eating large quantities of purple cabbage soup for birth recovery. She cut the cruciferous vegetables, the garlic, and the onions. The colic resolved within days. Leg-pumping exercises, valerian tea, and homeopathic remedies did the rest.²
When she opened her clinic in 2012, the same pattern repeated across families. Her clinical observation, distilled across years of work with hundreds of mothers, identified four causes. One or more of these accounted for every case of colic she encountered: vaccination, formula feeding, improper latch when breastfeeding, and traumatic births affecting the spine.²
The crying is not a malfunction. The crying is the only signal an infant has, and the infant deploys it when something in the terrain is wrong. Once the something is identified and removed — the dairy in the mother’s diet, the cabbage, the formula, the cervical strain from a forceps delivery, the most recent shot — the crying resolves.
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What the Establishment Says, and What It Cannot Answer
The establishment definition of colic is a tautology dressed up as a diagnosis. The standard frame is the “rule of threes” — crying for more than three hours a day, more than three days a week, for more than three weeks, in an otherwise healthy baby. This defines colic by what the baby is doing (crying) rather than by why the baby is doing it. It then asserts that the baby is healthy. If the baby were healthy, the baby would not be screaming for hours every day. The definition forecloses the question it ought to answer.
Pharmaceutical responses include simethicone (sold as Infacol, Mylicon, Dimethicone) for “trapped wind”; ranitidine (Zantac) for presumed acid reflux; and proton pump inhibitors for the same. None of these treats a known cause because no cause is acknowledged. They suppress symptoms in the hope that the baby will outgrow whatever is happening before the parents lose their minds. The 2020 BMJ Open overview of reviews and guidelines concluded that proton pump inhibitor evidence was unfavourable and that simethicone evidence was weak.³
Probiotics — specifically Lactobacillus reuteri DSM 17938 — are the current popular alternative. Earlier unblinded trials reported benefit in breastfed infants. The largest properly blinded trial, conducted by Sung and colleagues and published in the BMJ in 2014, did not replicate this. The probiotic group cried 49 minutes more per day than the placebo group at one month follow-up. In formula-fed infants on probiotics, the figure was 78 minutes more.⁴ The most popular CAM alternative, like the most popular pharmaceutical alternative, fails on rigorous testing.
The establishment position on colic, in essence: nobody knows; give it three months; here is something to numb the gut while you wait.
What Colic Actually Is
Colic is a cluster of symptoms — extended crying, abdominal distress, sleep disruption, feeding difficulty, gas — appearing in babies whose terrain has been violated within weeks or months of birth. The body of an infant is small, the toxic burden it can manage is limited, and its capacity to communicate distress is restricted to crying.
The four insults Vollmer identified from her clinical work map onto the terrain framework, with one extension. The standard four domains of insult are toxic exposure, nutritional deficiency, electromagnetic radiation, and psychological/emotional strain. Vollmer’s clinical work identifies a fifth that the framework needs to name explicitly when discussing infants: structural and mechanical strain, particularly cervical and suboccipital strain produced by birth trauma. Tilden recognized postural and tension-related disease in adults — the spine-manipulators, he wrote, had earned their standing because so many neurotic patients were carrying muscle-fatigue diseases that yielded to manipulation.⁵ For infants, whose entire spinal column has just been subjected to compression, traction, or instrumental delivery, the structural domain is one of the primary insult categories.
The four causes of colic, then:
Vaccination — the toxic insult, delivered by injection, bypassing every gut and skin barrier the infant has, depositing aluminium and other neurotoxins directly into bloodstream and lymph.
Formula feeding — the nutritional insult, replacing the only food a human infant is designed to digest with industrial product whose protein structure, fat profile, and contaminant load the infant’s gut cannot manage.
Improper latch and maternal diet — the indirect nutritional insult, where what the mother eats reaches the baby through her milk, or where mechanical issues with the latch produce overactive letdown, lactose timing problems, or insufficient fat delivery.
Birth trauma — the structural insult, where cervical, suboccipital, or fascial strain compromises the autonomic nervous system that regulates the infant’s digestion, sleep, and capacity to settle.
These causes are not mutually exclusive. Most colicky babies present with one or more, often interacting. A formula-fed baby is also typically a vaccinated baby. A vaccinated baby with cervical strain has both a toxic burden and a compromised vagal tone with which to manage it. The four insults compound.
The First Insult: Vaccination
Vollmer placed vaccination first. So does the strongest evidence.
A 15-day-old male infant was brought to a chiropractor’s office in 1999, presented in a paper by W. E. Sheader published in the Journal of Clinical Chiropractic Pediatrics.⁶ The infant was emaciated, unable to breastfeed, screaming continuously since birth, vomiting after feeds. The mother reported that her son had been given a Hepatitis B vaccination within hours of birth. On examination, the baby was crying with high-pitched screams and full-body shaking, with a distended abdomen and excessive bowel gas.
After the first chiropractic adjustment to C1, the screaming and shaking reduced significantly. By the second visit, vomiting had ceased and the mother had successfully resumed breastfeeding. No further adjustment was needed.
The baby was symptom-free for five days.
He then received a second Hepatitis B vaccination.
All symptoms returned to a severe degree, plus a low-grade fever. Adjustment was given but produced no reduction. He was adjusted three more times over the following week with minimal improvement. Eight days after the vaccination, he began to show marked improvement; by the nineteenth visit, no symptoms were noted and no adjustment was needed.
Then, seven days after another vaccination, every symptom returned. By the thirteenth subsequent visit, symptoms resolved.
This is a single case report. It cannot establish causation on its own. What it does establish is a clinical pattern: the same baby, the same chiropractor, the same intervention, the same outcome twice in succession. Vaccinate, watch the colic and screaming and gut distress return; remove the toxic exposure, watch the body slowly clear it, watch the symptoms resolve. The commenting physician on the case noted that the high-pitched screaming the baby exhibited is what is known as a cri-encephalique — a neurologic cry indicating irritation of the central nervous system.⁶ Children who present with this cry, the commentary added, should not be vaccinated again.
A single case report is the kind of evidence that gets dismissed in mainstream review. It is also the kind of pattern that would warrant systematic study if institutional medicine were interested — temporal association, dose-response (the symptoms returned with each subsequent shot), and a clear reversal trajectory once the exposure stopped. The studies that would adjudicate the question have not been conducted because the institutions that would conduct them have no incentive to find the answer.
The pattern the Sheader case captures is documented across the broader literature.
Cowan describes the aluminium content of the modern infant vaccination schedule: every diphtheria, tetanus, and pertussis vaccine, every Hib vaccine, both hepatitis vaccines, the meningococcal and pneumococcal vaccines, the HPV vaccines.⁷ Aluminium is added as an adjuvant — the substance whose purpose is to provoke an inflammatory response so that the laboratory markers the establishment calls antibodies will appear and the vaccination can be declared successful.
The body has some tolerance for ingested aluminium. Beneficial gut flora prevent much of its absorption. The body has no tolerance for injected aluminium. Yehuda Schoenfeld and colleagues, working from a mainstream immunological position, proposed in 2011 the term ASIA — autoimmune/inflammatory syndrome induced by adjuvants — to describe the cluster of symptoms that follow injection of aluminium-containing vaccines.⁷ Their key finding, as Cowan summarizes it: a person would have to ingest a million-fold higher dose of aluminium to deliver to the immune cells the same level that a single injected adjuvant delivers.⁷ The amount of aluminium injected into infants on the standard vaccination schedule, Cowan writes, exceeds anything that can be considered safe.⁷
A colicky baby’s clinical presentation following vaccination — neurological distress (the cri-encephalique), gut inflammation, sleep disruption — is the body’s response to that injected toxic load.
Vaccination’s role in infant mortality more broadly was investigated by Neil Z. Miller and Gary S. Goldman in 2011, comparing vaccination schedules and infant mortality rates across thirty-four countries. The countries administering the fewest vaccines in the first year of life had the lowest infant mortality rates. The United States, administering the most, had the highest.⁸ The same insult that kills some infants — those whose terrain cannot manage the toxic load — produces colic in others, whose terrain can manage it but only at the cost of inflammatory distress, gut chaos, and unrelenting crying.
A post-vaccination fever, Shelton wrote, “is the consequence of accumulated impurities in the system.”⁹ A post-vaccination cluster of vomiting, distention, sleep disruption, and screaming is the same body, doing the same work, expelling the same kind of insult — except the insult was injected, which is to say it bypassed every barrier the body uses to keep itself clean.
The mainstream position is that vaccines have nothing to do with colic. The Sheader case answers that. So do the millions of mothers who have noticed, against the advice of their pediatricians, that their babies’ worst nights follow shots.
The Second Insult: Formula
Robert Mendelsohn called bottle-feeding with cow’s milk “the granddaddy of all junk food.” The bottle-fed human baby, he wrote, is substantially more likely to suffer “a whole nightmare of illnesses.”¹⁰
Modern infant formula is not cow’s milk. It is an industrial reconstitution of cow’s milk components — denatured proteins, refined vegetable oils, corn syrup solids or lactose, synthetic vitamins, mineral salts — designed to approximate something the human infant is not designed to digest in the first place. Cow’s milk is engineered by a cow’s body to grow a calf to several hundred pounds within a year. Human milk is engineered by a human mother’s body to grow a brain. The two are not interchangeable.
Cowan documents what happens when the engineering is further degraded by industrial processing. Pasteurisation reduces the B vitamins, especially B2, B6, and B12, even when the milk is merely heated to 170°F. Ultra-pasteurisation, which flash-heats milk to 230°F, likely destroys close to 100% of vitamin content. The minerals remain but the enzymes needed to assimilate them are destroyed. Pasteurisation also destroys beta-lactoglobulin, which the gut needs to take up vitamins A and D, and renders milk proteins allergenic.⁷
For infant formula specifically, Cowan documents one further insult: aluminium levels are especially high in infant formula, particularly soy formula.⁷ The infant gut, already attempting to manage proteins it cannot digest and fats it cannot break down without the enzymes that pasteurisation killed, is now also processing aluminium and the chemical residues of every step of the manufacturing process.
Williams, writing in Terrain Therapy on infant feeding nearly a century ago, gave the rule with characteristic bluntness: “Inability to feed an infant on the breast must shortly become a burning disgrace.”¹¹ He understood — as did every culture before the formula industry — that breastfeeding is the only food a human infant is designed to receive, and that when the natural supply genuinely cannot be provided, what comes next is raw, unprocessed milk from a healthy animal: “Never cook infant’s milk. With a pure supply, which could be easily assured, such folly amounts to a crime; while pasteurisation is a fitting monument to the false god of modern medicine.”¹¹
Williams’s instructions for the rare cases requiring substitute feeding involved fresh raw milk from a known animal, given uncooked, modified by dilution with water and supplementation with milk sugar to bring the protein concentration down toward what a human infant can digest. There is no chapter of his book devoted to choosing among brands of industrially manufactured formula because such a thing did not exist when the book was written.
The contemporary terrain practitioner advising a mother who genuinely cannot breastfeed — there are such cases, though they are rarer than the formula industry would have one believe — points toward the homemade formulas developed by the Weston A. Price Foundation, built on raw milk from grass-fed animals, with the cofactors and structure of real food rather than the reconstituted approximation of food.¹² Vollmer’s piece directs readers explicitly to this resource.²
A formula-fed colicky baby is a baby whose digestive system is being asked to do something it cannot do.
The Third Insult: The Latch and the Maternal Diet
Most colicky babies are not formula-fed. Many are exclusively breastfed and still cry for hours every day. Vollmer’s daughter was one of these — homebirthed in water, no interventions, exclusively breastfed, and still suffering until Vollmer cut the cabbage and the cruciferous vegetables and the alliums from her own diet.²
What the mother eats, the baby eats. This is not metaphor. Foods consumed by the mother are broken down, absorbed, and the constituent compounds — proteins, fats, micronutrients, also pesticide residues, food additives, pharmaceutical metabolites, and incompletely digested protein fragments — circulate in her bloodstream and are present in her milk. Some of these the baby’s gut can handle. Some it cannot.
Dr. Jack Newman, a Canadian pediatrician and one of the most experienced clinical breastfeeding consultants in the world, identifies three patterns that produce what gets labelled colic in the breastfed baby. These are clinical observations that do not depend on any particular paradigm to validate; they are about what reaches the baby’s gut and what the baby reports back through crying.
Foreign proteins in the mother’s milk. The most common is cow’s milk protein. Newman’s clinical protocol is for the mother to eliminate all dairy products for seven to ten days. If the baby improves, dairy proteins were reaching the baby and the baby’s gut could not manage them. Other proteins can do the same — beef, soy, eggs, wheat, peanuts — but dairy is the most frequent culprit. The mother who eliminates dairy and watches her baby settle has identified the insult by terrain logic: remove the cause, observe the resolution.¹³
Overactive letdown and feeding both breasts at each feed. Human milk changes during a feed. Fat content increases as the baby drains the breast. If the mother switches sides too early — driven by clock-based feeding rules or worry about supply — the baby gets a high volume of low-fat foremilk, takes in more lactose than the gut’s lactase can manage at one time, and presents with the signs of lactose mismanagement: green watery explosive stools, gas, distention, crying. These babies are not lactose intolerant. Their guts are being hit with more lactose at one time than their own enzymes can keep pace with. The fix is mechanical: feed one side until the baby comes off himself, use breast compression to keep him drinking longer, allow the fat content to rise.¹³
Overactive letdown reflex. Some mothers’ milk lets down so forcefully that the baby chokes, struggles, comes off the breast, and the milk sprays. The baby gets high-volume low-fat fluid, can’t manage the flow, becomes fussy and irritable at the breast. The fix: feed when the baby is calm, lie back to use gravity against the flow, feed one breast per feed (or more) to allow the letdown to settle.¹³
These are mechanical observations about what reaches the baby and how it reaches the baby. The mother adjusts what she eats, when she feeds, how she feeds. The reports change. This is feedback in the most basic sense.
Williams went further. He held that the mother’s emotional and psychological state poisoned her milk as surely as poor diet did. “Bear in mind, also, the deleterious effect of poisons, emotional or physical, in the mother’s blood. Many an infant’s mysterious sickness, and even death, is caused in this way.”¹¹ He wrote of how “the destructive effect of Negative Thoughts… poisons the mother’s blood; it poisons her milk; but, worse still, it poisons the child’s subconscious mind. The children of worrying, peevish, irritable parents are never well; and far too commonly it is the parents of sick children who need treatment, and not their unfortunate progeny.”¹¹
The terrain framework includes psychological and emotional strain as one of its insult categories, and a nursing mother whose daily life is dominated by stress, fear, exhaustion, conflict, or grief is supplying her infant with milk shaped by that internal environment.
The Fourth Insult: Birth Trauma to the Spine
The fourth cause Vollmer identified, and the one most distinctive to her clinical contribution, is structural strain to the cervical spine produced during birth.
The cervical spine of a newborn is unprotected by the muscular development that protects the adult spine. The bones are mostly cartilage. The ligaments are loose. During a vaginal delivery — and especially during a delivery involving forceps, vacuum extraction, induced labour with synthetic oxytocin (which produces unnaturally forceful contractions), or significant traction on the head — the upper cervical vertebrae can be displaced, and the suboccipital region (the junction between the skull and the first cervical vertebra, C1) can be left strained.
The clinical evidence on manual treatment for colic requires honest calibration.
What the Trial Literature Shows
The most rigorous summary of the trial literature is the 2012 Cochrane review by Dobson and colleagues, which pooled six randomized controlled trials covering 325 infants. Five of the six trials measured crying time. The pooled result favoured manipulative therapy, with a mean reduction of approximately one hour and twelve minutes per day. No serious adverse events were reported in any of the included trials.¹⁴ This is a real signal.
Cochrane’s qualifying conclusion deserves direct quotation: “Most studies had a high risk of performance bias due to the fact that the assessors (parents) were not blind to who had received the intervention. When combining only those trials with a low risk of such performance bias, the results did not reach statistical significance.”¹⁴
The trials sort by methodology. Trials in which parents were aware their baby was being treated — Wiberg, Nordsteen and Nilsson 1999 (the Copenhagen trial comparing manipulation to dimethicone), Hayden and Mullinger 2006, Browning and Miller 2008 — showed large effects, in the range of 2.4 to 3.1 hours of crying reduction per day.¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ Trials with parental blinding showed smaller or null effects. Olafsdottir and colleagues 2001, comparing chiropractic adjustment to a nurse simply holding the infant for the same time, found no significant difference between the two.¹⁸ The largest trial to date — Holm and colleagues 2021, with 200 infants across four Danish chiropractic clinics — found a significant unadjusted difference of 0.6 hours per day favouring treatment, but the difference lost significance once the analysis was adjusted for baseline crying, age, and clinic.¹⁹ Miller, Newell and Bolton 2012, the only trial specifically designed to estimate parental reporting bias, found that the treatment effect persisted but was smaller in the blinded condition than in the unblinded condition.²⁰
A real but moderate signal, partly mediated by parental expectation and the calming effect of a low-stimulus clinic environment with attentive hands-on care. The remaining effect — what is left after expectation is subtracted — is smaller than the unblinded trials suggest, but it is not zero, and it is consistent across enough independent studies in enough countries to be more than chance.
For comparison: the largest blinded trial of Lactobacillus reuteri (Sung 2014, BMJ) found that probiotic-treated infants cried more than placebo controls.⁴ The largest blinded trial of manual therapy (Holm 2021) found an unadjusted reduction that did not survive adjustment, though it was directionally consistent with the broader literature.¹⁹ Manual therapy is not magic, but the most rigorous test of its most popular alternative produces worse outcomes than placebo, while the most rigorous test of manual therapy at least produces a direction.
The KISS Framework
The mechanistic framework for understanding why a structural intervention to the upper neck would resolve a digestive presentation is KISS syndrome — Kinematic Imbalances due to Suboccipital Strain — first described systematically by Heiner Biedermann, a German surgeon working at the University of Witten-Herdecke. Biedermann’s foundational 1992 paper drew on his clinical experience with more than 600 children under two years of age.²¹ The presenting cluster he identified: torticollis, unilateral facial asymmetry, C-shaped scoliosis, motor asymmetries, retarded hip-joint maturation, opisthotonos, restless sleep, feeding difficulty, and colic. The risk factors he identified: intrauterine misalignment, instrumental delivery, prolonged labour, multiple gestation.²¹
Biedermann’s clinical method was specific. Manual diagnosis (palpation for upper-cervical hypersensitivity and range-of-motion restriction) plus, in 85% of cases, an upper-cervical radiograph to determine the direction of the manipulation. The manipulation itself was a single short thrust with the proximal phalanx of the second finger applied to the suboccipital region — a low-force technique, not a high-velocity adult-style adjustment. He reported two cases of post-treatment vomiting in approximately 600 infants and no serious complications.²¹
The framework has been extended in subsequent German manual-medicine literature. The Spreewald II multicentre RCT, published in 2024, randomized 171 infants aged 14–24 weeks to one-time manual treatment versus exercise-only control. The treatment group’s symmetry score improved 5.9 points; the control group’s, 3.6 points. The difference of 2.3 points was statistically significant at P less than 0.001.²² This is not a colic outcome — it is a postural symmetry outcome — but it is direct evidence that the underlying structural dysfunction Biedermann described is real, measurable, and responsive to manual treatment.
The neurophysiology that makes the framework biologically plausible was documented by Koch and colleagues in two papers from the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University of Göttingen. In a study of 199 infants, mild mechanical stimulation of the upper cervical region produced vegetative reactions in 52.8% — flushing, apnoea, hyperextension, sweating.²³ A larger 2002 study of 695 infants aged one to twelve months found notable heart rate change in 47.2%, with bradycardia (heart rate decreased 15–83% from baseline) in 40.1% of those.²⁴ Infants in their first three months of life were most likely to develop severe bradycardia. The authors’ framing was forensic — they were investigating mechanical cervical irritation as a potential factor in sudden infant death — but the finding for the colic question is this: the suboccipital region is a potent autonomic modulatory zone in young infants. Mechanical input to that region produces measurable nervous system responses, including responses that shift parasympathetic and sympathetic balance.
This is the mechanism that links cervical strain to colic. The vagus nerve runs from the brainstem down through the cervical region into the thorax and abdomen, where it innervates the heart, the lungs, and the entire digestive tract. The vagus is the primary nerve of the parasympathetic — the “rest and digest” — branch of the autonomic nervous system.²⁵ When the upper cervical region is strained, the autonomic balance can shift toward sympathetic dominance and the parasympathetic recedes. The infant cannot enter the rest-and-digest state. Heart rate elevates, gut motility falters, sleep fragments, crying becomes chronic. The Koch studies do not prove this for colicky infants specifically. They establish that the input-output relationship between the suboccipital region and the autonomic nervous system is real and substantial in this age group.
High-Velocity Versus Low-Force Technique
A distinction the published trial literature does not always make clearly, but which matters greatly for any parent considering this option, is the distinction between high-velocity low-amplitude (HVLA) cervical thrust technique and low-force technique (sustained pressure, occipito-sacral decompression, gentle mobilisation, cranial osteopathy).
HVLA cervical manipulation in infants is not justified by the available evidence and is the subject of safety concerns. The low-force techniques are what the contemporary published RCTs actually test. Biedermann’s technique, despite the term “thrust,” was a low-force application of the kind a trained practitioner can deliver to an infant without producing the autonomic responses Koch documented from more vigorous mechanical input. A parent seeking structural care for a colicky infant should be specifically asking about technique, training, and infant experience. Not all manual therapy is the same, and the gentle end of the spectrum has the better evidence and the better safety record.
The Safety Question
Manual treatment of infants is not without risk, and the published literature on adverse events deserves direct engagement.
Miller and Benfield’s 2008 retrospective review of three years of paediatric chiropractic care at the Anglo-European College of Chiropractic teaching clinic covered 781 children under three years of age and 5,242 treatments. Seven mild adverse reactions were reported — approximately one per 749 treatments. No serious complications occurred.²⁶ This is a low rate by any clinical standard.
The broader literature does, however, document serious adverse events, including infant deaths. Todd and colleagues in 2015 reviewed published serious adverse events in infants and children across chiropractic, osteopathic, physiotherapy, and manual medical treatment, identifying 15 serious events including three deaths.²⁷ Underlying preexisting pathology was identified in most cases. High-velocity, extension, and rotational manipulation techniques were used in most. The Brand 2005 Dutch systematic review noted at least one published infant death following craniosacral therapy.²⁸ The 2024 international physiotherapy taskforce position statement (Gross and colleagues, Journal of Manual & Manipulative Therapy) recommends against spinal manipulation and mobilisation in infants entirely.²⁹ This position has been contested by Sacher and colleagues in Manuelle Medizin in 2025, arguing that the taskforce overgeneralised across techniques.³⁰
Serious harm is rare but documented. It is concentrated in HVLA technique and in cases where underlying pathology was missed. Low-force technique applied by a trained paediatric practitioner has a documented adverse event rate of approximately one mild reaction per 749 treatments and no serious events in over 5,000 treatments. The technique-and-training distinction is the safety distinction. Parents seeking this care should select for it explicitly.
The Birth Trauma Connection
The link between birth events and infant colic is suggested both by the KISS literature and by recent obstetric research. A 2025 prospective study of 390 instrumental deliveries at Al Wakra Hospital in Qatar found that combined use of vacuum and forceps was an independent risk factor for both birth injury (adjusted odds ratio 4.1) and abnormal neurodevelopmental outcomes (adjusted odds ratio 3.87).³¹ Wiberg and Nilsson’s 2000 case series suggested colicky infants had had a faster second stage of labour than non-colicky controls — that is, more rapid expulsion through the birth canal, with greater mechanical stress on the cervical spine.³² Wiberg and Wiberg’s 2010 retrospective of 276 colicky infants found that response to chiropractic treatment could not be explained by natural decline in crying with age.³³
The Klougart, Nilsson and Jacobsen prospective study from 1989 followed 316 infants treated by 73 chiropractors across 50 Danish clinics; 94% reported satisfactory response within 14 days, usually within three visits, and a quarter showed marked improvement after the first adjustment. Half of the infants had previously undergone unsuccessful drug treatment.³⁴ This is uncontrolled observational data and should not be cited as efficacy evidence — but it is consistent with the trial literature when the trial literature is read honestly, and it represents 73 independent clinicians arriving at the same clinical conclusion.
The Practical Bottom Line
Low-force manual therapy by a trained paediatric practitioner is a reasonable option to try, particularly when the birth involved any of the established risk factors for cervical strain (instrumental delivery, prolonged or rapid labour, induction with synthetic oxytocin). The trial literature supports a real but moderate effect, smaller than the unblinded case series suggest but larger than zero. The mechanistic framework is biologically coherent. Safety data are reassuring for low-force technique with trained practitioners. HVLA cervical thrust technique should be avoided.
This is not a definitive treatment. It is one of four interventions parents may need to consider, and it is the one most likely to be relevant when the birth was difficult.
How Acute Becomes Chronic
Shelton described the mechanism by which an acute condition becomes a chronic one with mechanical clarity: “A child frequently develops colds. It develops sore throat, tonsillitis, bronchitis, pneumonia, all of which are cured, and soon followed by another cold, another tonsillitis, another bronchitis, and this process continues until chronic disease of the lungs evolves.”⁹
The colicky baby on simethicone, on Zantac, on proton pump inhibitors, on prescribed formula switches without identifying the underlying cause, is in the early stage of this cycle. The drug suppresses the symptom. The cause continues. New symptoms emerge. New drugs are added. The infant’s gut, already disrupted, must now also process pharmaceutical residues. The infant’s nervous system, already strained, must function under further chemical interference.
The acute condition — colic, presenting in the first months of life — is the body attempting to expel insults. When the cause is removed, the body completes the work and the symptoms resolve. When the cause continues and the symptoms are suppressed, the work is interrupted. The toxic burden remains. The infant grows into a child whose gut is already compromised, whose nervous system has been further perturbed by every pharmaceutical intervention, whose vaccination schedule continues, and whose presentation gradually shifts from “colic” to “reflux” to “food sensitivities” to “ADHD” to “anxiety” to whatever label is current at the age of twelve.
Tilden saw the same architecture: “All so-called attacks of disease of whatever kind are crises of Toxemia, which means vicarious elimination of Toxin that has accumulated above the saturation (toleration) point.”³⁵ The crying is the elimination crisis manifesting at the only level the infant can produce. The treatment, in Tilden’s frame, is the same for any acute presentation: identify and remove the cause.³⁵
For colic, this means: stop the vaccination schedule, replace formula with breastmilk where possible (or with raw-milk-based homemade formula where not), examine the maternal diet for foods reaching the baby through the milk that the baby cannot manage, and address any structural strain in the infant’s spine. It means doing less, not more. It means undoing rather than adding.
This is the opposite of how the establishment treats colic, which is precisely why establishment treatment of colic does not work.
Practical Guidance
What follows synthesises Vollmer’s clinical framework with what Newman, Williams, Cowan, Shelton, Tilden, and Mendelsohn establish about the terrain of an infant.
On vaccination. The strongest case for the etiology of colic, and the strongest available evidence for action, is the vaccination schedule. The decision to vaccinate or not is one parents must make for themselves, but it is a decision that should be made with full knowledge of what is in the syringe, what the published evidence on aluminium adjuvants establishes, and what hundreds of thousands of mothers have observed in the days following a shot. Vollmer’s piece is one place to begin. The published research collated by Lester and Parker, Cowan, Engelbrecht and colleagues, Sam and Mark Bailey, and many others is another.
On feeding. Breastfeed if at all possible. If breastfeeding is not possible, the homemade formulas based on raw milk from grass-fed animals (with the recipes available through the Weston A. Price Foundation) are the closest available substitute. Industrial formula is the last resort, not the default; the colicky baby on formula is a baby whose gut is reporting that the formula is not food.
On the latch and maternal diet. Feed one breast until the baby comes off himself; use breast compression to keep him drinking; allow the fat content to rise across the feed. If the baby is colicky on exclusive breastmilk, eliminate dairy products from the maternal diet for seven to ten days as the first intervention. If improvement, the cause was dairy proteins reaching the baby. If no improvement, work through other common culprits — soy, eggs, wheat, beef, peanuts, and cruciferous vegetables (especially in the early weeks). This is slow work, requiring patience and a notebook, but it identifies the actual cause rather than suppressing the symptom.
On structural strain. A cranial-sacral therapist, paediatric osteopath, or chiropractor with specific paediatric training and experience is worth seeking out, particularly when the birth involved any of the following: forceps, vacuum extraction (especially combined with forceps), induced labour with synthetic oxytocin, prolonged or unusually rapid labour, or any situation in which traction was applied to the head. Ask explicitly about technique — low-force, gentle mobilisation, occipito-sacral decompression, or cranial work, not high-velocity adult-style cervical thrusts. Ask explicitly about training and how many infants the practitioner sees in a typical week. The published case literature suggests three sessions on average; a baby may need only one. The risk profile of skilled, low-force work on infants is low; the potential benefit, when structural strain is present, is meaningful.
On the body’s intelligence. The baby is not broken. The crying is the only language an infant has, and it is deployed when something in the terrain is wrong. Williams’s words on this are worth carrying around in the early months: “DON’T BE AFRAID! There is every reason for confidence. Those who think, eat, and act right have little to fear from disease. Remember the significance of Acute Illnesses. They are house-cleanings; and most of baby’s untoward symptoms are explained in this way.”¹¹
The parents’ job is to identify the violation and remove it. The healthcare system’s job, when it is doing its job, is to assist this process. When it is suppressing symptoms with drugs whose only purpose is to keep the parents from noticing what the baby is reporting, it is not doing its job.
Returning to Vollmer
Vollmer was a colicky baby for two years. Her father drove her in the car at night. Her mother put her on the rocking dryer. Nobody knew what was wrong. Nobody named the vaccinations or the formula or the gut damage they produced together. She suffered through two years of pain that nobody understood as pain.
Her daughter, a generation later, was colicky for a few weeks until Vollmer cut the cabbage. That is the difference that knowledge makes. That is the difference between a baby whose body is being heard and a baby whose body is being silenced with drugs.
Across nearly two decades of clinical work, Vollmer found that the same four causes accounted for nearly every case of colic she encountered. The cases resolved when the causes were addressed. They did not resolve when the symptoms were suppressed. This is the pattern she lived through twice and watched repeat across hundreds of families.
Mainstream pediatric medicine says the cause of colic is unknown. This is a statement about what the establishment is willing to investigate, not a statement about what is happening to the baby. The cause is knowable. Vollmer has done the investigation, and what follows from her investigation is a framework that any parent of a colicky baby can apply, starting tonight, with their own notebook and their own observation of their own child.
Full credit to Dr. Amandha Dawn Vollmer for the work that made this essay possible.
Explain It To A 6 Year Old
When a baby cries a lot and won’t stop, the doctors call it colic and say nobody knows why. But babies don’t cry for no reason. Babies cry because something is hurting them or making them feel sick.
There are usually four things that make a baby cry too much.
The first is shots. The shots that doctors give babies have things in them that babies’ bodies don’t like. The body tries to get rid of those things, and while it’s trying, the baby feels bad and cries a lot.
The second is the wrong milk. Mommy’s milk is the right food for a baby. The milk in cans (formula) isn’t real food for a baby — it’s made in factories, and a baby’s tummy doesn’t know what to do with it. So the tummy hurts and the baby cries.
The third is what mommy eats. When mommy eats some foods, tiny bits of those foods go into her milk. Sometimes the baby’s tummy doesn’t like those bits. If mommy eats different food, the baby feels better.
The fourth is a bumped neck from being born. Being born is hard work. Sometimes babies’ necks get a little bit twisted on the way out. There’s a special doctor (a chiropractor or osteopath) who can gently help the neck feel better, and then the baby can rest properly.
When grown-ups figure out which one of these four things is making the baby cry and they fix it, the baby stops crying. The baby was never broken. The baby was just trying to tell us what was wrong.
References
Mainstream pediatric resources including Mayo Clinic, NHS, and American Academy of Pediatrics describe infant colic as a condition of unknown cause.
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Great write up … No jabs , cranial/ sacral works wonders and have the mom give you a diary of what she eats for 48 hrs . Happy belated Mother’s Day to all the moms out there . 💞
Nice work, Unbekoming. Lots of factors with Colic, but loved the fact that you emphasized the mechanical aspect and its solution, via specific adjustments (usually C1 and mid-upper T-spine). Have been doing that for over 35 years, and all I can say is that it works far more often than not. The unfortunate reality, however, as your essay shows, is that vaccinations are a wild-card. Nuff said on that topic for now, otherwise I may start ranting and rambling a bit.