Question
An eight-month-old child often sweats excessively and sleeps restlessly at night, possibly due to heart fire syndrome. What methods can be used to adjust this situation?
Answer
Excessive sweating in children can be categorized into physiological and pathological types. Physiological sweating often has a clear cause, such as wearing too many clothes, intense exercise, or consuming spicy and irritating foods. Once the cause of sweating is eliminated, the sweating usually stops. Moreover, these children generally have good health and no other diseases are detected. Pathological sweating in children has more complex causes and is a symptom of various diseases. Therefore, it is necessary to accurately diagnose the related diseases causing the child’s excessive sweating and find the root cause in order to effectively treat the condition. So, from which aspects can parents observe and distinguish the nature of a child’s excessive sweating? The time of sweating can help differentiate: for example, rickets usually causes sweating during sleep at night, with sweat gradually decreasing after deep sleep; tuberculosis or other chronic Consumable disease lead to all-night sweating, which is what traditional Chinese medicine refers to as ‘stealing sweat’. Excessive sweating when fasting should be considered as a sign of hypoglycemia; when standing up suddenly after squatting, excessive sweating may indicate transient cerebral ischemia caused by positional low blood pressure. Excessive sweating accompanied by symptoms such as alopecia areata (commonly known as ‘child’s hat ring’), broad forehead, and costochondral beading may indicate rickets; accompanied by low fever, decreased appetite, and weight loss, one should suspect tuberculosis and other chronic Consumable disease; accompanied by migratory joint pain and tachycardia, attention should be paid to rheumatism. Excessive sweating in relation to age: for infants and young children, one should pay attention to rickets; for older children, one should pay special attention to tuberculosis.