Symptoms and Your Child

This section will be devoted to the exploration of symptoms and your child from a systemic perspective.

This means that your child's symptoms must be taken into account in the context of their whole system.

This is how their own body is making decisions minute to minute in order to take care of the millions of processes happening in real time.

I have found the Chinese medicine system to be one of the best at helping us interpret your child's symptoms in the most complete and all-encompassing way.

I will give you some basic background as to how the Chinese medicine system is set up, and also how I personally use this system in the evaluation and treatment of kids in my practice.

I have learned through the Chinese medicine system, that when I see a child with lung problems like asthma, bronchitis, and frequent lower respiratory infections, the first thing to do is to get the child's history.

This is something we all learned in medical school, but what was not emphasized was how broad that history taking has to be to truly provide a holistic view of the situation.

We cannot be complete by just focusing on the respiratory system, nor for that matter on the physical body alone.

We must be much more diligent about finding the causative factors having an impact on your child.

One way to do so, is through the Chinese medicine system. I want to show you a series of graphics I made to indicate visually how the Chinese medicine system categorizes some of the functions and symptoms of the organs and meridians existing in your child right now.

In the middle of these puzzle piece graphics you will see four organs which are grouped together.

These four organs and their corresponding meridians, channels, or energy pathways, make up what can be called subcircuits of your child's energy system.

These figures show only a small sample of the corresponding functions and symptoms which go along with each organ and meridian, and therefore they should not be interpreted as a complete listing.

Even though these organs and meridians and acupuncture points have proper names, and descriptions in Chinese, I will just use plain language to describe these attributes.

If you are curious to know the actual Chinese medicine words and phrases, I encourage you to explore the many well done websites on Traditional Chinese Medicine on the web.

For our purposes, I will keep things simple and practical so you get to the main points which are going to be relevant to your child right now.

This is also a way for me to describe to you how I think about your child's situation when I am seeing patients in my office. Needless to say, the way I practice today is very different from the way I used to practice as a general pediatrician.

I believe this style of practice using many different modalities and approaches is better than using one way alone.

Now, let's look at these subcircuits which come from the Chinese medicine system.

First we have the Lung and Large Intestine organs and meridians which are paired with the Spleen and Stomach organs and meridians. As you can see, the surrounding functions and symptoms depicted are quite varied and unique.

The point of showing this picture is to elucidate how broad the functions and symptoms of this one subcircuit are.

If I am seeing a child with a lung problem, I immediately think of and ask questions pertaining to these corresponding and related functions, simply because the energy required to maintain all of these activities comes from the same reservoir alotted to these four organs and meridians.

In this way we can begin the process of digging deeper into the historical and energy related reasons behind the onset and continuation of any symptoms and your child.

Next comes the Kidney and Bladder(urinary) organs and meridians which are paired with the Heart and Small Intestine organs and meridians. Here again, you can see the diverse collection of activities and jobs that this subcircuit is responsible for.

If I am called upon to see a child with bladder symptoms like bed wetting or frequent bladder infections, I immediately think of these corresponding categories and begin the process of piecing together the most likely causative factors that may have predisposed to the bladder symptom.

I want to point out that we are not limited to only physical symptoms. Although it is not shown here, fear as an emotion is included in this Kidney-Bladder subcircuit.

It is no surprise that in the Chinese medicine system, fear-provoking events and memories can directly contribute to bladder problems because the energy required to deal with fear must come from the same source as is required for bladder function.

This allows us to glimpse the underlying priority list that a child might be using to distribute the energy they have available for this subcircuit.

When more energy is devoted to dealing with the symptom of fear than with bladder function and holding capacity, it is not surprising that certain children will have bladder symptoms observable externally, while the real energy imbalance may be hidden internally and related to fear.

Next we have the Liver and Gall Bladder organs and meridians which are paired with the Triple Heater and Pericardium. This is another subcircuit which has many important functions in the growing child.

We can see from this grouping of functions that symptoms that may be included in this category are also correlated with a multitude of varied activities.

I have found that the Liver energy subcircuit is really important as the energy reservoir that helps us deal with stress, in any shape or form, be it physical, emotional, mental, relationship, and even environmental.

How sensitive a child is to their surroundings comes under this heading as well.

If for example, I am seeing a child who has anxiety as a symptom for no apparent reason, I will look to this subcircuit for clues as to what may be the underlying cause.

What I have found is that when speaking about your child's energy system and the "settings" they are using, the concept of time often gets thrown out the window.

What I mean is, it does not seem to matter how much time has gone by since a stressful event has occurred.

It may still have an effect on your child from an energy perspective, and this alone can cause imbalances which might result in something like unexplained anxiety and nervousness.

I hope these subcircuit graphics make it easier to understand the broad spectrum of possible contributing factors when it comes to symptoms and your child. This now sets the stage for further exploration and detail as we continue to dig deeper into the specific symptoms and conditions your child may be experiencing.