acupuncture for kids

(This child recently made an appearance on youtube, just sooo excited at seeing a train. Bless!)

I love giving acupuncture to kids.

For one thing, they’re a lot easier to work with than adults, largely because they haven’t been on the planet long enough to accrue all this stuff that we older folk gather: beliefs, injuries, beliefs about our injuries, stress, you know.

An acupuncture treatment for a child, therefore, usually only takes about half an hour.  Which is good, because it’s hard for them to hang out longer than that.  Once they start coming to balance, that energy just comes bursting out.

They don’t mind needles, for the most part, though I will work without needles if I need to use a point that I know will grab a bit.  Working with my hands as the needle has the added benefit of really engaging with the child’s energy, and they will just lock on to the whole experience.

My first child patient was my 3 year old grandson.  Since I wasn’t sure about the needle thing, we used a toothbrush – to astonishing result.  Now, 3 years on, he asks for treatment when he needs it, and we use needles at his request.  He gets to put a needle in me first, and then I’ll line up the needles on him and he taps them in.  Then he gets this blissed out look on his face, and relaxes until he feels finished.

I decided to blog on this after coming across an article this week from the Cleveland Clinic, a nationally known and respected western medical center, titled ‘Acupuncture for Kids: a surprisingly effective choice’.

The first two things they say about acupuncture advantages?   ‘No side effects… fewer doctor visits’.  They go on to list uses, which is pretty much the list you can find on the Greenfield Community Acupuncture website (my other incarnation is as owner/lead practitioner of GCA).  I’ve found it just so useful to help kids who are experiencing anxiety.  And of course there’s the time that the parents caught the onset of an ear infection in their toddler, and we headed that off in 15 minutes.

Maddy loves the Earth, acupuncture and peace – fantastic!

So you may want to think of including acupuncture in your child’s health care, especially as a preventative.  My secret dream is that people – including and maybe especially children – will come for an acupuncture tune-up when the seasons change, so they can walk into a new life phase fully ready to go.

ps  here’s the link to the GCA website page that tells you what acupuncture can treat:

http://trygca.com/what-we-treat.html

and here’s the link to the Cleveland Clinic article:

http://health.clevelandclinic.org/2013/02/acupuncture-for-kids/

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