At my daughter’s 1 year old hip check up with Dr. Mulpuri, the X-Ray showed that her hips were still slightly dysplastic and a few degrees off from the normal developed hips at her age. Therefore, we were given the choice to try to put her in a rhino brace a few hours a day and at night when she slept. The advice was that it doesn’t hurt for her to wear the brace and it has a chance to help her hips develop normally, however it isn’t proven that it would actually fix it. There could still be a chance that her hips would still not develop normally.
On the other hand, even if she didn’t wear the brace, there is still a chance that her hips could begin to develop normally without any intervention.
My husband and I were put in a position to make a decision whether we wanted our little girl to wear such a bulky, hard brace for the chance that it may help her hips.
At that time, she was just learning how to walk and still wobbly and one of our biggest concerns was that it would affect her walking, cause her to walk funny, or be less active and we were worried about how it would affect her confidence. Furthermore, as she had her sleeping habits, we were concerned about how the brace would affect her sleeping and restrict her movements at night. As new parents, having a baby sleep through the night is so important that we were worried for anything to affect that.
We were going back and forth with so many questions - Was wearing the brace and putting our baby through the discomforts worth it if it didn’t even provide a sure fix? What if she ultimately still needed surgical intervention after wearing the brace anyways? But what if this was all she needed for her hips to develop normally?
Finally, we decided to leave things to chance and elected not to put the brace on her. On her following visit, the x-ray showed that her hips did not get worse although it is still in a similar condition as the previous visit and we will have to continue monitoring her hips’ development for the next few years.
Have any other parents been faced with this decision? What did you decide to do? And if your child wore the brace, did it help their development and show improvement in the next visit? Would love to hear what others’ experience with the brace was like and if perhaps we should reconsider giving her the brace…
