Adolescent abdominal pain, school refusal, sleep problems, heart palpitations, and anxiety — children who find it hard to go to school even though tests are normal come to us. We also look at growth and bedwetting. A child's body is not simply a scaled-down adult body, so what we look at and the medicines we use are different.
A child's body is not simply a scaled-down adult body. The standards for using medicines are different for the same reason.
Even the reference ranges for how many times a child's heart should beat were, for a long time, based on adults' estimates. When measured directly, they proved different. When I see a child, I see not a smaller adult, but a body under different conditions.
Children are not smaller versions of adults. The systems that process medicines themselves are different. For children, I use medicines with a narrow goal, for a short period, and after stating the boundaries first. And I refer children who need to be referred.
A baby who wakes when put down, a child whose legs hurt at night, a night of wet sheets, an adolescent who cannot get up in the morning — each has a different bodily reason.
Parents joke that their child has a sensor on their back. But an infant's chest differs from an adult's, so breathing can actually become more difficult when lying on the back. Waking up and being unable to fall asleep again appear to have different reasons.
In the evening, their legs hurt; by morning, they are running around. It is often called growing pains, but the evidence that the act of growing taller itself causes pain is weaker than one might think. Some children feel more pain from the same stimulus, and that degree changes with the circumstances of the day.
Bedwetting is not a habit. The pattern differs depending on which of these three is still less mature: the hormone that reduces urine production at night, how much the bladder holds at night, or the ability to wake from sleep when signalled that the bladder is full.
After the later years of elementary school, some children cannot get up in the morning. It is easy to see this as becoming lazy, but at this age the body clock actually shifts later. Laboratory studies have confirmed that this remains so even with enough sleep.
의료진이 직접 전하는 건강 정보입니다.
When frequent urination and increased thirst appear together in a child, do not first assume they are due to habit or stress. If weight loss or severe fatigue is also present, same-day evaluation for childhood diabetes may be needed.
Why does a child go so limp after missing just one meal? A child's body is not a miniature adult's — it stores less, draws it down faster, and its greater surface area means it dries out sooner. This is not malingering; the range the body can tolerate is simply still narrow. And for the same reason, recovery comes just as fast. For a fever (100.4°F/38°C or higher) in an infant under three months old, or when a child is limp and cannot make eye contact, a pediatrician or the emergency room comes first.
Saturday mornings do not hurt, but Monday mornings the stomach hurts, and if the child leaves school early it settles down by lunchtime — is this malingering? A body that does not show up on tests is different from a body that is not hurting. When the same morning repeats itself, the hour the pain begins keeps moving earlier. If a child talks about wanting to die, or shows signs of self-harm, everything else comes second — call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 109 right away.
Kyunghee Meerae Korean Medicine Clinic, Gwangjin is located at Room 201, 46 Jayang-ro, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, South Korea. It is a 7-minute walk from Guui Station Exit 4. · Directions
이 홈페이지의 모든 글과 도해는 경희미르애한의원 광진점 허지영 원장이 직접 작성한 저작물이며, 저작권법의 보호를 받습니다. 출처를 밝힌 정당한 인용을 넘어서는 무단 복제·전재·재배포, 그리고 AI 학습 데이터로의 사용을 허락하지 않습니다. 위반 시 저작권법에 따른 민형사상 책임이 따를 수 있습니다.
All articles and diagrams on this site are original works written by Dr. Heo Ji-young of Kyunghee Meerae Korean Medicine Clinic, Gwangjin, and are protected under Korean copyright law. Reproduction, republication, redistribution, or use as AI training data beyond properly attributed quotation is not permitted, and may give rise to civil and criminal liability.
