Few things are more powerful than hearing a child put words to their own progress. Twelve weeks into chiropractic care, a two-year-old boy who had presented with delayed speech turned to the adults in his life and said, “I’m so happy I can talk now.”
That very human outcome moment crowns the clinical findings in a new case report published in the Asia-Pacific Chiropractic Journal[1]. It documents the presentation, care and outcomes of a two-year-old male who came to a paediatric chiropractic clinic with delayed speech, low postural tone, persistent primitive reflexes, emotional dysregulation and general fussiness.
What makes this case particularly interesting is how the little boy arrived at the chiropractor’s door. His family had been working with a speech pathologist, completing five to six sessions with some gradual progress. But during that time, the speech pathologist noticed something beyond her own scope: postural and movement patterns suggesting retained primitive reflexes might be contributing to his developmental difficulties. She referred the family on for a comprehensive neurodevelopmental chiropractic assessment.
It’s a small but significant example of interdisciplinary collaboration, with a speech pathologist and a chiropractor each bringing their own lens to a child’s development.
Why primitive reflexes matter
Primitive reflexes are the involuntary movement responses we’re all born with. They’re essential survival mechanisms in early infancy, governing feeding, breathing and orienting responses. Under typical conditions, they integrate within roughly the first twelve months of life as higher brain centres mature and take over [2].
When that integration doesn’t proceed as expected, the retained reflexes have been associated with a wide spectrum of difficulties: poor postural tone, coordination challenges, sensory hypersensitivity, emotional dysregulation and attention difficulties. The theory is that unintegrated reflexes create ongoing neurological “noise,” leaving fewer resources for higher-order tasks like language acquisition, social learning and self-regulation [3].
This matters more than ever. Speech delay in preschool children was estimated at around 9% prior to Covid-19, with more recent data suggesting prevalence has risen to approximately 16.9% [4]. And longitudinal research links early speech delay to later difficulties in literacy, academic achievement, social competence and mental health [5].
The new case report
The little boy in this report was born at 40 weeks and six days, following an induced labour and a rapid delivery. Milestones were largely on track, but his mother described him as always “whingey” and wanting to be held, suggesting a baseline of heightened regulatory demand from early infancy.
Chiropractic assessment identified vertebral subluxations, cranial restrictions, reduced postural tone, diminished reflexes, and a striking list of retained primitive reflexes, including the rooting reflex, palmar grasp, tonic labyrinthine reflex, asymmetrical tonic neck reflex, Perez reflex, Galant reflex, plantar grasp and symmetrical tonic neck reflex.
Care was delivered across an eighteen-week plan, moving from twice-weekly to fortnightly visits, using age-appropriate diversified, drop-piece and activator-assisted adjustments, cranial releasing techniques and soft tissue work. A home exercise programme rounded out the approach, targeting left-body stimulation, proprioceptive activities and gross motor play.
Over the course of care, the clinic’s health index score rose from 58/100 to 82/100, exceeding the target threshold of 80. All primitive reflexes integrated with the exception of the asymmetrical tonic neck reflex. Postural strength and reflexes normalised, and muscle testing returned to within appropriate limits.
But the numbers only tell part of the story. The boy’s speech went from one to two new words per day to up to twenty new words per day, a change his mother described as an “explosion.” Alongside this came new peer friendships at daycare, meaningful imaginative play, independent balance bike riding, and a markedly improved capacity to identify and communicate his emotions. His mother described being “blown away” by the changes.
As the authors note, care for a child is also care for the whole household. A child who can communicate is a child with fewer daily frustrations and emotional outbursts, and that ripples out to everyone around him.
As always, we need to be clear about what a case report can and cannot tell us. This is a single patient. Natural developmental maturation and carry-over benefit from prior speech therapy cannot be entirely excluded, though the authors note that chiropractic care was the only change introduced to his management at the time the improvements were observed.
What this case does offer is another data point in a growing body of literature suggesting chiropractic care may play a meaningful role in supporting neurodevelopmental outcomes in children with persistent primitive reflexes and associated developmental concerns. The authors’ call is one we echo: prospective cohort studies and randomised controlled designs are needed to investigate this further.
Until then, cases like this one, and the little voice at the centre of it, remind us why that research matters.
References
[1] Godfrey J, Postlethwaite R, McIvor C. Improvement in Speech, Primitive Reflex Integration and Neurodevelopmental Dysregulation in a two-year-old male under Chiropractic care: A Chiropractic paediatric case report. Asia-Pac Chiropr J. 2026;7.1. https://www.apcj.site/GodfreySpeech.pdf
[2] Modrell AK, Tadi P. Primitive Reflexes. StatPearls [Internet]. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK554606/
[3] Martello J. (2023). Persistent Primitive Reflex and Developmental Delay in the School-Aged Child. The Journal for Nurse Practitioners. Vol. 19, Iss. 10. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nurpra.2023.104767
[4] Bartelt K, Gracianette M, Deckert J, et al. Childhood Speech Development Delays Increasing Since the Start of the Pandemic. Epic Research. https://epicresearch.org/articles/childhood-speech-development-delays-increasing-since-the-start-of-the-pandemic
[5] Johnson CJ, Beitchman JH, Brownlie EB. (2010). Twenty-year follow-up of children with and without speech-language impairments. American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology, 19(1), 51‚65. https://doi.org/10.1044/1058-0360(2009/08-0083)
