Child Alternative Medicine Wheeling WV

Alternatives for Kids

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By Anne Krueger

For most of us, the idea of sticking a child with needles is unnerving. We cringe at vaccinations, avert our gaze during the annual drawing of blood, and spend a great deal of time protecting our little ones from the errant sharp object. Ami Atkinson is no different. Yet there she sat in the spartan office of a practitioner of Chinese medicine, with curtained acupuncture stalls on one side of her and a wall of weird-looking herbs and roots on the other. She looked at her two-year-old son Will and wondered if she could go through with the appointment.

Then Will opened his mouth and coughed—and the flashbacks started rolling: the months of nebulizer and prescription drugs, the emergency room visit, the wheezing and coughing that never really went away. “Was I anxious about letting someone poke tiny needles into my child? A little,” says the Palo Alto, California, mom. “But was I ready to try almost anything to help Will cope with his asthma? You bet.”

Like Atkinson, many parents are nervous about venturing outside the confines of traditional medicine when it comes to their children. My own kids have had chronic earaches and respiratory ailments, but still I’m wary. How do we know if any of this stuff works? What if I waste time giving them an herbal supplement, when the antibiotic the doctor ordered would have worked better? Worse, what if I give my daughters something that actually harms them?

But if you talk to a lot of “last resort” cases, as I did, you’ll be reassured. Parent after parent told me tales of chronic ailments—from earaches to colic—that were finally cured through some sort of alternative therapy. Not one of those children was harmed along the way. And if their testimonials hadn’t convinced me, Michael Cantwell’s would have.

A pediatrician and specialist in infectious diseases, Cantwell is the director of the Health and Healing Clinic at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. He calls himself a “whatever works doc,” and his combination of medical training and open-mindedness dispelled my last worries about the mysteries or risks of alternative medicine for kids.

I especially like the fact that Cantwell looks at the big picture instead of just at the symptoms. “To be effective, you need to approach the child holistically,” Cantwell says. “Consider the mental or emotional overlay to the disease and address that first, since that’s where the disease may originate.” Stress, for example, is one of the things that can put the immune system out of balance, he says, even with kids. So if a child is coming down with cold after cold, it may be worth teaching him or her a relaxation therapy, such as meditation or guided imagery.

Cantwell is also reassuring about the risks of alternative medicine. It’s true that there hasn’t been a lot of scientific study of most alternative therapies, especially in the treatment of children. But using them, he says, presents few risks. “Nobody is going to die f...

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