The Effect of Herbal Medicine Treatment on the Growth of Children

한약투여가 소아의 성장에 미치는 영향

Objective : We used herbal medicine to treat various disease and also to keep good general condition of children. We aimed to evaluate the effect of herbal medicine on the growth of children treated with herbal medicine. Method: We studied 187 children who visited the department of Pediatrics, KyungHee Oriental Medical Hospital from March 2004 to August 2004. They meet condition as follows; they were treated for more than 6 months and they visited our clinic more than 3 times. Whenever patients visited our hospital, we measured their height, body weight and obesity degree using DS-102(dszenix, Seoul). We measured height percentile of first time visit, and that of last time visit. And we compared them using the Growth Statistics Curve made by the Korean Association of Pediatrics, 1998. Results : The mean growth of total children showed 4.04 percentile upwardly; the growth- up percentile of boys was 4.52 and that of girls was 3.26. Analysis according to disease resulted as follows; children with respiratory disease showed 10.29 percentile growth-up, digestive disease 4.21percentile, urinary disease 4 percentile, allergic disease 2.65 percentile, weak children 2.52 percentile and other disease 3.19 percentile. Conclusion : Herbal medical treatment helped growth not only in children who took medicine for growth retardation problem but children with various disease. Moreover herbal medical treatment applied to keep good general condition of children also gave positive effect on the growth of children.