When you feel you've done everything and nothing has changed

What follows combines several patients' visits into one composite story. It is not about any one child, and anything that could identify someone has been removed.

How do children usually come to us?

Parents come in after getting tests and paying attention to what their child eats, but things haven't gone as hoped. Having already tried many things, they are often exhausted.

When we ask, they say the child often has a stiff neck and shoulders, sometimes complains of headaches, and tosses and turns a lot at night. These things come up even though they came in to talk about height.

Why look at the neck and shoulders?

When a child spends a lot of time with their head bent down, the natural forward curve of the neck disappears. Then the weight of the head rests directly on the neck and shoulder muscles.

When the neck bones straighten into a line, it's called "straight neck" (text neck).

A child's head is not light at all. If the muscles keep holding up that weight, they stay tense all the time, and in that state it's hard to sleep deeply.

The energy the body uses to grow is released during deep sleep. That's why we don't take light, shallow sleep lightly.

What do we look at?

We look at how the child stands from the side. We check whether the head sits in front of the shoulders, whether the back is rounded, and whether the shoulders are at different heights.

We also ask how much time the child spends on screens each day and what their posture is like then. Usually they look at screens for a long time with their head bent far down.

We look at sleep too. We ask what time they lie down, whether they toss and turn, and how they are in the morning.

How do we treat it?

We loosen the stiff area around the neck and work on the position of the neck bones with Chuna (Korean manual therapy). Along with this, we use herbal medicine to deepen sleep and support the body.

We narrow down the changes in daily life to two: raising screens to eye level, and doing a daily movement of gently tucking the chin and opening the chest.

We don't ask for a lot. We set only as much as the child can do every day.

How did things go?

Often the child is the first to say their neck feels better. Sleep comes next, and posture changes more slowly than that.

When sleep gets deeper, mornings change. Parents are often the first to notice this.

What are the limits of this approach?

We don't tell you how much taller your child will grow with this treatment. Posture and sleep are among the conditions for growth, not all of them.

If your child is receiving treatment elsewhere, we ask you to keep it going. We are not a replacement for it.

If your child often has headaches or numbness in the arms, we check that first.

To parents with the same worry

1. Many parents come in to talk about height, and the neck and shoulders come up.
2. When the head is bent down for a long time, its weight rests directly on the muscles.
3. When muscles stay tense, deep sleep is hard.
4. We narrow the changes to two — screen height and a daily movement.
5. Please keep up any other treatment your child is receiving.

We start by checking where your child is right now. We won't rush you; we'll tell you, based on evidence, whether it's fine to wait or not.

If you're not sure whether to wait or to act now, come see us once. We'll check where your child is right now, and we won't rush you.

Every child grows at a different pace, so the same treatment can lead to different courses.