Childhood Bedwetting

Childhood bedwetting is a common and distressing situation for both kids and their parents. This condition is also known as nocturnal enuresis which means nighttime urination.

If the child is fairly young, a diagnostic evaluation is done, including seeing medical specialists when needed. If there are physical problems or inherited disorders of the urinary tract then these should be treated right away.

In most cases, however, a child with bedwetting has no physical problems and often parents are told to just wait it out.

While this approach is understandable, I believe it does not give us the whole picture.

By using the very valuable information readily obtained through evaluating your child with a Chinese medicine or energy medicine perspective, we can find those contributing factors that may not be obvious and the treatment or focusing measures that will help accelerate the resolution of the bedwetting.

In many cases it is true that if you wait long enough, the child will “outgrow” bedwetting. However, I have yet to find a child or a parent who is willing to accept that approach without trying anything and everything to alleviate this persistent problem.

In my experience, some of the most common precursors to bedwetting are a history of having had immune system challenges like serious infections or severe allergies. These conditions require energy from your child’s kidney and bladder energy circuits, both when they are actively occurring and in some cases for years afterwards.

Other situations that can take up more of a child’s kidney and bladder energy are fearful or traumatic events like suffering from a bike or car accident, head injury, or even just having elective surgery for things like ear tubes and having tonsils taken out.

It is not that these events are causative in and of themselves, but it is the redistribution of the energy that is required by the child’s system to deal with them in the moment and in the aftermath that can lead to an imbalance in the kidney and bladder energy circuit.

This is such a common situation in kids that I have incorporated asking these specific questions with every new patient I see in my practice. In this way, we are able to get a more holistic picture of what’s going on with the child from the very beginning.

The usefulness of this information and the fact that it can be correlated and given back to the child and family as part of a coherent energy explanation for bedwetting, makes this a key component of my strategy with kids and parents.

The energy medicine way of looking at your child’s kidney and bladder energy evaluates the historical experiences that may be related to current symptoms, and recognizes that the body as a system is called upon to make energy distribution decisions based on priority and the need to maintain vital functions.

In addition, the ability to prevent or anticipate the possibility of new symptoms appearing in the future is something I want all parents to know is possible using this type of energy medicine approach.

You can read more about the energy medicine and Chinese medicine approaches that I use in my practice on my website, where I delve into more discussions on this and many other topics and concepts.

In addition, if you are the type of parent that likes all the details, you may be interested in my book called Energy Medicine Principles for Parents which is available in softcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thanks for coming back to visit my blog. If you like the content I have here, let all your friends know and make sure you send me your questions and comments.

Heart Coherence

I had the opportunity recently to talk with Dr Rollin McCraty who is the Director of Research at the HeartMath Institute in California. They have been investigating the concept of heart rate variability and coherence for many years now. You may have seen Dr McCraty’s appearance in the movie I profiled in a previous post called The Living Matrix Movie. It is a wonderful exploration of energetics in healing, and I think well worth your time to watch it. You can check to see if there is a screening in your area by checking the Living Matrix website.

Our hearts beat with a pattern that most of us don’t recognize and really don’t think much about. Most of the time the pattern is somewhat chaotic and goes up and down in a random fashion. However, there is a pattern called physiologic coherence where the heart rate actually increases and decreases in an orderly, smooth way. On a computer screen it shows up as undulating waves going up and down, which is very different than most people’s baseline heart wave pattern. How is this important to you and your child?

It turns out that this state of coherence is strongly correlated with improvements in health status and one’s ability to deal with stress. It has been found that most people are not in coherence except in very specific circumstances or only after having been trained in certain techniques. The HeartMath Institute did a study several years ago which documented improvement in school age kids’ ability to handle anxiety prior to and during test taking in school. This is a remarkable finding which showed that kids could be taught a few simple self calming techniques and this actually translated into improved subjective feelings on the part of the students, as well as improved objective findings pertaining to their test scores compared to a control group. The full reference to this study called TENDS, which stands for Test Edge National Demonstration Study, is available on the HeartMath website.

I am very interested in exploring this concept of heart rate variability and coherence as a way to document what’s going on with kids in particular when we are using techniques like BodyTalk and other non-invasive, natural approaches to pediatric problems. The heart itself is much more than a muscular organ that pumps blood circulation throughout the body. It has amazing energetic qualities as well, in keeping with the multidimensional aspects of all of our body’s organs and systems. For example, in the Chinese medicine system, the heart energy is in charge of such things as sleep cycles, creativity, dreaming and speech patterns. I believe we must expand our understanding of what it means to have this remarkable body and system operating on different levels of experience and awareness.

Stay tuned for more information coming about the HeartMath Institute and their dedicated researchers. Their work is truly exciting and it is on the cutting edge of natural medicine and healing modalities available to us now and coming in the near future.