Chinese Medicine Notes

The Art of Observation by Julian Scott

Posted on February 2, 2009 by Yael

When my boy suffered his 2nd asthma attack, I had a fall out with Chinese Medicine.
As a result I didn’t even want to look at Julian Scott’s book about children. Nothing against the book or Julian, but I needed a break.
My faith in Chinese Medicine is now restored, and I am able to go on with reading Julian’s book.

A small addition about excess and deficiency
Last time we talked about excess and deficiency and I would like to add, that Julian addresses an important factor in children’s health- LPF.
As we are in the era of antibiotics, this is an issue that is worth reading and looking into, as it can cause a situation of LPF in children.

Observing children
Julian dedicates 21 pages to talk about how to diagnose a child, and keeps mentioning looking at a child’s as the most important while diagnosing.
We all know about the big difference in our ability to diagnose an adult and diagnose a child. With children, we usually get most of our information from the adult- mom or dad.
When I think about it now, it can be very confusing- when do we know that the parent says the things as they are and not describes things from his/her point of view? For example- are the colic really that bad, or is just because the parent has been losing so much sleep over it that it seems bad to him/her?

Observing the child and asking the parents are our main sources of information.
Observation is very important:
First of all- this is how we will be able to decide whether the child is excess type or deficiency type.
Second- looking at the child will allow us to see changes from one treatment to another. Of course, updates from the parent are very important, but there are some things that we will be able to see that will be quite obvious to us- the child’s spirit, level of vitality, color of face and so on.

The art of observing a child
Observation starts the moment the child enters the clinic.
Julian warns us that children might be sensitive and won’t like us looking at them, so we must be subtle with our gazes.
From this point on, Julian talks about the finger vein- how to find it, what can it tell us etc.
Then we have a number of tables, that can help us with observing children.

Believe what you see
Julian offers this one advice- believe what you see.
In an era of pulse and tongue diagnosis, and some people even use computer software to have a quick diagnosis, observation is on the verge of extinction.
But we already know Julian, and we know that everything he presents to us is simple. All we need to do is reconnect with our intuition, be focused while diagnosing and things will be simple- especially with children.

Over to you
What do you think? How do you treat children in your clinic?
I would love to read your thoughts and comments.