Stuart H. Ditchek M.D. - Healthy Child, Whole Child: Integrating the Best of Conventional and Alternative Medicine to Keep Your Kids Healthy

T his book is designed to give information on various medical conditions, treatments, and procedures for your personal knowledge and to help you be a more informed consumer of medical and health services. It is not intended to be complete or exhaustive, nor is it a substitute for the advice of your childs physician. You should seek medical care promptly for any specific medical condition or problem your child may have. We strongly recommend that you talk to your childs doctor about any measures you use with your child.

All efforts have been made to insure the accuracy of the information contained in this book as of the date published. The authors and the publisher expressly disclaim responsibility for any adverse effects arising from the use or application of the information contained herein.

W riting forewords to books is not a high form of the literary art. When I do it, it is usually out of a sense of obligation to author friends or publishers. That is not the case at present. I am genuinely enthusiastic about Healthy Child, Whole Child , because it embodies the spirit of the new medicine I have been trying to develop. It is a pleasure to introduce it to readers and to help it find a place in the homes of parents who want to create healthy lifestyles for their children.

I know all three authors of this book, have taught them all, and worked with them. I am proud of their contributions to the growing field of integrative medicine (IM) and delighted that they have taken on the tremendous task of applying it to the realm of childrens health.

These are the basic principles of IM:

• A partnership must exist between patient and practitioner in the healing process.
• Good treatment should include appropriate use of all available methods to facilitate the bodys innate healing response.
• Physicians must consider all factors that influence health, wellness, and disease, including mind, spirit, and community as well as body.
• Doctors should neither reject conventional medicine nor accept alternative medicine uncritically.
• Good medicine should be based on good science and open to new paradigms.
• Doctors should use more natural, less invasive interventions whenever possible.
• Medicine must address the broader concepts of health promotion and disease prevention as well as the treatment of illness.
• Practitioners themselves must be models of health and healing, committed to the process of self-exploration and self-development.

Doctors Russell Greenfield and Stuart Ditchek and Lynn Murray Willeford observe all of these principles in Healthy Child, Whole Child. I can vouch, especially, for their adherence to the last one, because I know them all to be personally committed in their own lifestyles to health and healing and, as parents, to modeling healthy behavior for their children.

The field of pediatrics is ripe for IM. Pediatricians are open to it. They may lack knowledge and experience of other modalities of treatment because their training failed to provide them, but they have no intellectual barriers in the way of learning. Most parents today want to make use of more natural methods of prevention and treatment for their kids. They are especially wary of using pharmaceutical drugs for all problems. And the healing potential of young people is greater than that of grown-ups. Give their bodies a chance and some support, and they will usually come back to the balance of health quickly, often dramatically.

I have helped produce a textbook for clinicians on Integrative Pediatrics that will be published by Oxford University Press in 2009. The Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine that I direct has trained a number of pediatricians, and we are currently developing a comprehensive IM curriculum (in distributed learning format) that we hope will become a required, accredited component of all pediatric residency programs.

As codirector of the first NIH-funded center for research in alternative medicine in pediatrics, I helped organize studies on the efficacy of cranial osteopathy and echinacea in managing recurrent ear infections and the usefulness of chamomile tea and hypnosis in improving recurrent abdominal pain. Both conditions are very common childhood ailments. A great deal more of this kind of research needs to be done.

But we do not have to wait for the results of studies to come in to apply the basic principles of integrative medicine to raising healthy kids in the twenty-first century. That can be done right away, and Dr. Russ, Dr. D, and Lynn Willeford have done it. I think you will find, as I did, that they have produced a very readable, user-friendly guide that is rooted in common sense and a balanced approach to health and medicine. Raising healthy kids is one of the most important contributions we can make to the future. This book gives you the information and the tools you need to do it.

Tucson, Arizona
April 2008

A re you looking for ways to prevent the umpteen ear infections that kept your daughter on prescription antibiotics most of last year, or at least a better way to treat them? Are you sleep deprived and looking for a cure for your babys colic? Are you searching for safe, effective therapies to reduce your asthmatic sons reliance on steroid drugs? If youre not concerned about specific illnesses, maybe you have other questions about your childs health. How can I build up his immunity? What will help my child most when shes sicka drug, an herbal extract, a homeopathic remedy, a chiropractic adjustment, a change in diet, a magnet in her shoe? Can I combine some of these therapies, and how? Which therapies are safe and effective for children and which are uselessor worse, dangerous?

So much has changed so fast in health care that we dont blame parents for feeling out of their depth. Where once there was just one kind of medicine, now there appear to be many, and few parents have the time or the knowledge to sift through and evaluate all the new information on therapies and remedies. More and more drugs are now marketed directly to consumers. The latest medical theories are trumpeted in all the media. Parents are trying to make responsible health care decisions for their children while facing a bewildering array of options and an astounding lack of credible guidance.