The Minister for Health and Aged Care is demanding the Chiropractic Board of Australia explain its decision to lift the ban on chiropractors performing spinal manipulation on infants.

The ban was introduced five years ago following a Facebook video showing a Melbourne chiropractor holding a two-week-old baby upside down during one of his treatment sessions.

A Safer Care Victoria report, commissioned by the State Government in response to the incident, found no evidence supporting either the efficacy or safety of spinal manipulations in infants.

However, it emerged this week that the chiropractic board had sanctioned the practice, in updated paediatric guidelines issued last year, provided the practitioner had the “clinical skills and knowledge to appropriately assess or manage a paediatric patient”.