Heavy baryon chiral perturbation theory (HBChPT) is an effective quantum field theory used to describe the interactions of pions and nucleons/baryons. It is somewhat an extension of chiral perturbation theory (ChPT) which just describes the low-energy interactions of pions. In a richer theory one would also like to describe the interactions of baryons with pions. A fully relativistic Lagrangian of nucleons is non-predictive as the quantum corrections, or loop diagrams can count as O ( 1 ) quantities and therefore do not describe higher-order corrections.