I’m happy to introduce Kid Row’s second guest blogger: Stephanie Harris, a local chiropractor and mother of young children. Please enjoy Stephanie’s post and contact me via the contact link (upper right-hand corner) if you would be interested in doing a guest blog yourself.

Health and Your Childʼs Symptoms

It can be distressing as a parent to watch your child endure the uncomfortable symptoms of a cold or flu. We donʼt want to see our children suffer unnecessarily. But have you ever considered that the expression of symptoms can be good for your childʼs health?

For example, an elevated body temperature helps the immune system to kill a pathogen. The watery eyes and runny nose that accompany a cold are a way for the childʼs body to flush out that pathogen. When we get sick, the immune systemʼs job is to once again get the body well. And a childʼs body does this by manifesting symptoms.

But hereʼs the tricky thing about all those pesky symptoms: they appear long after the balance of health has been altered. In fact, symptoms are the last thing to show up in the course of a disease or illness. By the time that nose is running and you are chasing your toddler around the house with a tissue, her immune system is already fighting off the offending bug in full force. And, believe it or not, that fever and the head congestion are just what she needs to effectively and efficiently rid her body of the invader, once and for all.

There are natural ways you can support your childʼs healing process during such bouts of symptom expression. Health-restoring treatments such as chiropractic, acupuncture, homeopathic remedies, and herbal supplements can help strengthen the childʼs immune response from the inside-out. Health comes from within. A childʼs body is perfectly designed to regulate itself and to deal with slight imbalances in itʼs homeostasis.

Over-the-counter pharmaceuticals do not actually heal the body; instead they suppress symptoms. Giving your child symptom-suppressing medications can actually stifle the natural course of the healing process. They may indeed alleviate the childʼs discomfort.

Understandably, this makes you, the parent, feel better because your child is not suffering. But in the long run it makes your childʼs body have to work harder to overcome the illness because the natural course of the recovery has been interrupted or stifled. Symptom-suppressing medications operate from the outside-in, whereas the body was designed to heal itself from the inside-out. By the time the symptoms show up, the child is already well on her way to recovery. Getting through the symptom part of the illness can be messy, to say the least, but your childʼs body will be stronger because of it. Those pesky symptoms are a means to an end, and a childʼs body knows just how to heal itself.

Stephanie Harris, D.C., has a family wellness practice in downtown Durango. She can be reached at drstephdc@gmail.com.

A vaccine for swine flu is expected this fall and the CDC is recommending that pregnant women, young people 6 months to 24 years old and people who live with or care for children younger than 6 months old be the first to get it.

This is likely to add heat to the ongoing debate about the safety of vaccines. While most children will have received dozens of vaccine injections by the time they are 18, questions about potential side effects persist. Health officials swear by vaccines’ safety, but the number of parents who decline to have their children vaccinated has doubled in recent decades, according to a 2008 article in the the New York Times.  

Despite my inclination toward natural parenting, I have to admit vaccines are one of the issues I have least scrutinized and so far my children have followed the recommended schedule (although we’ve skipped the flu shots). A recent article in Mothering magazine does a good job of presenting both sides of the debate, concluding in the end that there is reason to believe the medical establishment may have swung toward excessive inoculation, while ignoring the potential negative side effects and questionable effectiveness of some vaccines (a previous swine flu outbreak in 1976 sparked a mass vaccination effort that was later aborted after the shot was linked with rare but serious side effects). Personally, I’m beginning to think in the future I’d like to do some more research before simply following CDC recommendations. Like everything, more information never hurts.

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It’s hard to believe that swine flu entered our lives only about a week ago. Just a week and already, amazingly, I feel inured to reading “death toll,” “school closings,” and “pandemic” all in the same story. Coincidentally, we lived in Mexico City before moving here two years ago. A friend there recently joked that the situation really hit home when his favorite corner taco stand closed (I was dubious enough to avoid those even before all this. But they’re extremely popular, and I always found it curious at lunchtime to see all these business execs in their suits and ties sitting on boxes on the sidewalk balancing plates full of tacos).

But I couldn’t feel more far removed from it now. Given the globe-trotting nature of our society, that’s probably a false sense of security. And being a parent, it’s easy to feel that no precaution is unnecessary (here’s a very thorough swine flu guide for parents on CNN). But are we overreacting? Recent media reports have noted that in a normal year, hundreds of people in this state alone die of the flu. Granted there is the uncertainty of this being a new strain. I suppose there’s no knowing in the moment whether you’re on the right side of history. And there certainly are  ample examples of when we erred in one direction or the other (see this article on the swine flu of ‘76). I guess I’m just content in my belief, naive or not, that it could never happen here.

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Giving a shout out to Rachel Turiel, who in Sunday’s paper wrote about the merry-go-round of illness her family has been on.

http://tinyurl.com/cxrb47

We’ve been on the same ride for a couple of weeks now. Refusing to be vanquished, we soldiered through a trip to Moab this past week as everyone appeared to be on the mend. But even as our 3-year-old was regaining his appetite after three days on a liquid diet, our baby started spiking a fever again. At the pediatrician’s on Friday, we learned about antibiotic-resistant bacteria and are now on another 10-day round with a different drug (which he takes about as willingly as a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay on hunger strike). Then yesterday I was felled by a 24-hour stomach bug. I feel for you, Rachel. Is it just me or is sickness season hitting really late this year? Our pediatrician said she was just now seeing cases of RSV crop up.