2016年8月26日

在我从事五行针灸治疗的早期，曾经对治疗幼龄儿童非常抵触。他们自己无法与我讨论问题所在，由于无法交谈，我便不知如何下手去诊断他们的五行。因此，我只能通过父母的讲述来了解他们。（为图简便，下文中我以母亲来代表父母，而实际上父亲的作用也是同等重要的。）因此，在见到孩子之前，需要安排一个专门的时间，在孩子不在场的情况下，向母亲单独了解情况。能当面交流是最为理想的，电话次之，但不宜通过电子邮件。私下的会面亦能暴露母子关系这一重要信息，这里我们还需用到诊断技巧，方能发现母子关系的真实情况。

一般而言，孩子（及长大以后）的问题大多源自家庭。而难点在于，大多数的父母都意识不到他们在这一点上所起的作用，正如我们之中的大多数人在面临困境时，都不愿承认己责。有问题的孩子的父母，通常在如何为人父母方面存在不足，而这一点，通常是导致孩子失常的首要原因。这样的案例在我的治疗中屡见不鲜，让我更加坚信，只要母亲得到治疗，孩子或许可以不治而愈。有此信念在心，再加上我对孩子的帮助常以失败告终，让我这些年来更加不愿为年幼的孩子做治疗。

我曾有幸将最初到我这里求治的两个孩子带到华思礼教授的面前。那时我刚刚开始操持五行针灸，不知该如何为他们治疗。第一个孩子是一个3岁的小男孩，据母亲说他完全失控了。他只允许母亲碰他，抗拒其他任何人，医生暂时将其诊断为自闭症。我和他母亲费劲力气，才把又哭又闹的他从车上架到诊室里来。华思礼教授快速一看，便吩咐我马上做AE（祛邪），而他极力抵抗，我和他母亲不得不牢牢把他按在我腿上。我记得当时没有AE，尽管之后我经常在很多年龄非常小的孩子身上发现大量AE。

华思礼将孩子的五行诊断为木，告诉我做完AE之后仅以左侧的原穴结束。让我惊讶的是，治疗完后不久，孩子便突然安静下来，转过头看着我，我走开时目光也一直跟随，这是之前从未有过的。我将此理解为对木的治疗起了作用，极度的愤怒得以平息。从那以后，他连续几次每两周来做一次治疗，我会为他做一些华思礼教授推荐的木的主管穴，他每次都会开心地向我跑来，仿佛治疗已然成为一种享受。在大家看来，他已恢复成了正常的小男孩。

可惜的是，在那之后我只给他又做了少数几次治疗。华思礼教授告诉我，他的母亲需要驱除附体，幸运的是，她也是我的病人，但我之前却并没有发现附体。而不久之后，她却突然停止了自己和孩 子的治疗。孩子的父亲非常乐意孩子继续接受治疗，他向我解释妻子之所以停止治疗，是因为她对于我认为孩子的问题是她造成的深感不安，对于这一点，她是绝不承认的。他虽然明白妻子对孩子的占有欲过强，却无力劝服她让孩子继续在我这里治疗。

我与其他两位母亲也有过类似的经历，她们表面上都非常想帮助自己的孩子，却拒不承认是她们对待孩子的态度不妥导致了孩子的问题，尽管治疗对孩子确有帮助，她们都很早便停止了对孩子的治疗。

当然，其他治疗师治疗儿童的经历也许比我愉快，他们所遇到的母子关系或许也没有我所遇到的那般复杂。我也相信，只需要采集任何可以采集到的信息，尽力诊断五行，祛除邪气并继续其他五行针灸的基本治疗，五行针灸便能帮助孩子解决身心的各种问题。

让人高兴的是，我可以以一个非常有趣的故事来作为结束，这是一个治疗儿童的成功案例，尽管我从未见过这个孩子，也没有施以一针。一位病人的女儿年仅18个月，最近却突发哮喘。她问我能否帮忙。有着那么多不愉快的经历在先，开始时我并不情愿，不过既然自诩为五行针灸师，我便问自己：“为什么这么小的孩子会得哮喘？为何她的金会处于如此重压之下？”由于金与父亲有关，我问最近家里、尤其是孩子的父亲是否发生了什么变化。她说最近孩子的父亲参加了一个高尔夫俱乐部，这个周末大部分时间不在家中，而以前都是全家在一起其乐融融地度过周末的。我与父母一起详细地解释了金的需要，建议父亲尽可能地多陪伴孩子，为了孩子牺牲一些打高尔夫的时间。这对我来说是一次大胆的尝试，且对能否有效并不寄予太大希望。

值得称赞的是，父亲居然做到了，母亲告诉我时我都有点难以置信——父亲增加对孩子的关注后的几周，孩子的哮喘便有所好转，最后竟痊愈了。整个过程未须施一针一药！她的父母都对家庭关系有着足够的洞见，并虚心接受他人的建议，而不幸的是，这样的情况，正如我们所知，非常罕见。

Friday, August 26, 2016

The challenge of treating very young children

In the early days of my practice I was very reluctant to treat young children. I knew that they could not themselves tell me what was wrong, and without talking to them I was not sure how I was going to diagnose their element. Everything I learnt about them would therefore have to be filtered through what their parent told me. (For simplicity’s sake I will call the mother the parent, although the same holds true for the father.) Before seeing the child, therefore, we need to arrange to talk to the mother quietly on her own, and not in the child’s hearing. Ideally this should be done face to face, rather than on the phone, and certainly not by email. A private talk will also yield crucial information about the mother’s relationship to the child, and here we have to use our diagnostic skills to discover what exactly is going on between mother and child.

Most, if not all, problems in young children (and in later life!) originate in family life. The difficulty for us here is that most parents are often unaware of the part they play in this, for, like most of us when faced with unpleasant facts, we arereluctant to admit to our own responsibility. A parent of a distressed child often has unresolved issues around being a parent which may well be, and usually is, the prime reason for disturbance in the child. I have some very good examples of this from my own practice which have reinforced my conviction that if only I could treat the mother, the young child would probably not need treatment. This conviction, and often my experiences of failing to help the child, have reinforced my increasing reluctance over the years to treat young children.

I was fortunate that I was able to take the first two children I was asked to treat to see JR Worsley. This was at a very early stage in my practice, when I did not know how I should approach treating them. The first child was a young boy of about 3, who was said by his mother to be completely out of control. He would only let his mother touch him, refused to relate to anybody else and had been given a provisional diagnosis of autism.His mother and I had to drag him kicking and screaming from the car to the practice room, where JR, after looking at him quickly, told me to carry out the AE drain, despite his loud protests, with his mother and me holding him firmly on my lap. As I recall there was no AE, although I have since often found a surprising amount of AE in even the youngest child. JR diagnosed the element as Wood, and told me to follow the AE drain with the source points on Wood on the left side only. To my surprise, shortly after the treatment, the young boy suddenly fell quiet, turned his head to look at me and kept eye contact as I walked away, something he had not done with any of us before. I interpreted this as the Wood element diffusing his terrible sense of anger. From then on, for the few treatments he continued to come to me once a fortnight for the simple five element command point treatment JR had recommended, he would run happily to greet me as though he enjoyed his treatments. Nobody would then have diagnosed him as other than a normal little boy. Sadly, however, I was only allowed to treat him a few more times. JR had pointed out that I should do possession treatment on the mother, luckily a patient of mine, something I had not yet noted, but very shortly afterwards, the mother abruptly stopped treatment for both herself and her child. The child’s father, who was very happy with my continuing to treat his son, explained his wife’s decision to stop treatment by the fact that she was very disturbed to think that I might think that she was the cause of the child’s problems, something she denied totally. He himself could see that she was much too possessive of the child, but could do little to persuade her to allow me to continue treating their child. I had similar experiences with two other mothers, both of whom, though ostensibly wanting help for their young children, refused to acknowledge that there was anything in their own attitudes to their children which might be contributing to the problem, and both quickly discontinued the child’s treatment very early on despite quite clear evidence that it was helping.

Of course, other practitioners may have had happier experiences of treating children than I have had, and their experiences may well be with less complex mother-child relationships than mine have been. I’m sure, too, that much can be done to help young children deal with whatever problems, psychological or physical, they come to you with simply by trying hard to diagnose the element by means of any information you can glean, then doing an AE drain and basic five element treatment.

I am happy, though, that I can finish this blog with a rather lovely story of the successful treatment of a young child, though I never saw the child or inserted a single needle. A patient of mine had an 18 month-old daughter who had suddenly started to suffer from asthma. Could I do something to help, she asked me. With some of the unhappy experiences I had had in mind, I was at first reluctant to do so, but then I put on my five element hat, and asked myself. “Why would a little baby develop asthma? Why would its Metal element be in such distress?” Metal, being the element of our relationship to our father, I asked whether anything had recently changed at home, particularly in relation to the child’s father. She told me that he had joined a golf club, and was now away from home for much of the weekend. Before this, the whole family had had happy weekends doing things together. I talked through the needs of the Metal element with both father and mother, and suggested that the father should make every effort to be with the child as much as he could, perhaps sacrificing some golf for his child’s sake. This was rather a long shot on my behalf, and I wasn’t very optimistic that this would help.

To the father’s credit he did this, and even I was surprised when the mother told me that, after a few weeks of increased attention from the father, the child’s asthma started to improve, and eventually disappeared altogether. And this without the need for any medication, or any needles. Here both parents had enough insight into family relationships and were open to listening to advice, something which is unfortunately rather rare, as we know.