Small Intestine Energy and Your Child

The digestive system is the link between the small intestine and your child, but there are many other reasons why this organ and channel is important from an energy perspective.

While it is common for digestive symptoms to occur in young kids like nausea, vomiting and diarrhea, many parents don't realize the other energy functions of the small intestine.

In the Chinese medicine system, the small intestine is an equal partner on the kidney, bladder and heart circuits. As you will see, this relationship is critical to know when trying to help a child with symptoms related to the small intestine energy circuit.

This figure shows the interdependence of your child's small intestine energy system with the other three contributing circuits,the heart,the kidney and the bladder. The surrounding topics on the puzzle pieces depict examples of what the collective functions of these four organ and energy circuits are according to the Chinese medicine system.

Remember that from an energy perspective, these organs and energy channels are interchangeable and dynamic, meaning your child's underlying system will seek to balance all of them in real time.

For this section, we will focus in on the small intestine energy, but keep in mind there is not a distinct boundary between the small intestine, heart, kidney and bladder meridians. They are all part of one continuous energy loop within the system.

In the Chinese medicine system, the following functions are mostly the responsibility of your child's small intestine energy circuit:

Some small intestine related symptom patterns that I have seen in my practice over the years are abdominal pains, nausea and vomiting, food intolerances, gas and bloating, and difficulty focusing and mental over-analyzing. Other associated symptoms are depicted in the graphic below.

When kids have digestive system related complaints it is often difficult to pinpoint what's causing it. I have found that using the energy medicine approach gives us more options to choose from when trying to delineate how and why those symptoms are occurring.

Let's look at the common example of a child with chronic abdominal pain. While it is important to get the details of the history and associated factors that go along with the pain, it is those features that are outside of the digestive system but still within the energy system that can be most helpful.

Let's say a school aged child has intermittent crampy abdominal pains unrelated to eating or drinking, it can happen during school or on the weekends, and tests run at the pediatrician's office have come back with all normal results. What do we do now?

From the child's energy system's perspective, there will be an explanation that describes why these pains are happening and maybe even the timing of them.

If we explore the energy dynamics as they relate to the kidney-bladder-heart-small intestine circuit, there will likely be energy shifts and imbalances to explain these symptoms.

It is also very likely that the distribution and order of priority will dictate the reasons for the abdominal pains.

If the child has extraordinary energy requirements on the other 3 subcircuits, such as a heart energy problem like poor sleep, and a kidney and bladder circuit problem like immune system challenges or bladder control problems, these will all contribute to a decrease or lack of energy in the small intestine.

Even an over-reaction in another category like the immune system can have an effect in the small intestine by contributing to the development of food allergies.

In the energy medicine view of your child, we must take into account these relationships and influences if we are ever going to get to the bottom of why these symptoms are present.

I want to state unequivocally that if a child has abnormal test results like blood work, X Rays or ultrasounds, contrast studies, or urine or stool cultures, then of course these should be identified and treated.

In the vast majority of cases, all studies come back normal and then we are left with a dilemma. What I have found is that this is the perfect scenario to use the wisdom of the Chinese medicine system and the energy medicine approach because it will give us valuable and useful information.

One other aspect I want to call your attention to is the set of symptoms shown in the list of small intestine related energy patterns above which are NOT in the digestive system.

Things like restlessness, over-analyzing and poor discernment can be directly related to the small intestine energy circuit, even in the absence of any digestive system complaints or symptoms.

This points out once again the concept of needing to explore multiple systems, and multiple levels of experience (physical, mental, emotional, and psychological) in order to uncover the real underlying causes and to shoot for the most complete and long lasting results.