In our generation, by which I mean, roughly college aged, we hear a lot of people claim to have ADHD. Half the guys I’ve dated and 90% of my friends tell me “oh, I have ADHD” as they bounce off the walls during a moment in class.
ADHD isn’t the joke that my friends make it out to be. It’s actually really dangerous to the thousands of children taking the medications for it. Adderall and Ritalin are not healthy. Those are the medications children are put on. Some quick facts:
• Adderall was a weight loss pill before it was used for ADHD.
• Both medications warn not to give it to children.
• Both say they stunt growth.
• Both say not to give to anyone for long periods of time.
• The FDA warns that they both can cause heart attack, stroke and sudden death.
Yet, these are the pills that are given to children specifically for long periods of time sometimes at a very young age.
Don’t take my word alone for the proof. There are tons of Doctors out there who speak out against ADHD and the medicines.
• First, there is Dr. Bose Ravenel. He feels he is “a rebel with a cause” (Bose). He’s a 70 year old pediatrician. He also wrote a book focusing on how ADHD is a disease that no one can give definition to. Ravenel says that he at one point was a supporter of ADHD medications. This all changed when he realized ADHD DIDN’T EXIST A FEW YEARS AGO.
• Another Dr. Mary Ann Block says that she has found out that children with allergies exhibit the same symptoms as a child with ADHD. No child she saw was ever given a physical to find out if they had anything wrong with them.
Doctors are backing up the parents that don’t want to give drugs to their children. Yet, some doctors are pushing the drugs. A lot of them will compare ADHD to diabetes, saying that if your child had diabetes you would give them insulin right? Well diabetes is an insulin deficiency that can be measured. Insulin, the drug used to treat diabetes, is a hormone that is needed for life. ADHD can’t be measured and the drugs used to treat it are not necessary to live.
Teachers and doctors are also using the threat of reporting parents to the Child protective services if they don’t give the children the medication. The child protective services has gone as far as to remove a child from his home after a teacher told authorities that he was not being given his medication. The funny thing about this is that the mother had given her son his medication before he left the house but instead of making things better it made him way worse. The mother had been threatened before that if she didn’t give her son the medicine the school would be forced to turn it over to child protective services. That very morning she gave his ADHD medication to him. When he got to class his ADHD symptoms were so much worse. The mother tried to tell the school she had given him the medication but they wouldn’t listen.
There is a story about a woman named Alice in one of the articles. She has a seven year old son named Nathan. After going too many different doctors and getting many different diagnoses from the time he was little, he ended up at Dr. John Breeding’s office. Alice was upset that the school her son had gone to as a child was now rejecting him because of his behavior. Like many parents, Alice had begun to feel it was her fault as a parent for not raising Nathan better. She was one of the many parents who refused to give her son the medications that all the doctors tried to force on her using the “if your son had diabetes you would give him insulin” arguments. She says that she did give him Ritalin in the end because she wanted to slow him down. It had worked and she was now calm enough to consider some sort of different treatment.
There are tons of different paths to go in order to avoid giving a child a drug.
• One way is called the four-step program:
1. Change the child’s image of themselves and make it so they see themselves in a positive light.
2. Get rid of electronic media because children get addicted to them.
3. Changing their diet to something with a lot of fish oil.
4. Don’t put so much stock in the education system. In our society, things a child use to know in second grade are now being taught in kindergarten. It sets your child up for failure.
• Another alternate is to get them checked for any allergies that may be present. As in the previous paragraphs, it has been known to cause the same effects as ADHD.
Nutrition itself is a huge problem. Food additives, like food colorings, can cause huge problems. The old saying “you are what you eat” comes into this. What we eat determines what our blood is made of, and what our blood is made of determines how our body functions.
Food additives aren’t the only problem. Another problem is refined carbohydrates. This is foods like white bread and anything made with white flour. It is already know that people who eat large amounts of these are known to have mental diseases. Refined carbohydrates make your brain fuzzy and it can’t seem to focus on anything.
Soft drinks are another problem. They contain refined sugars. Refined sugars are bad because they take away the nutrients that your body really needs. These include B vitamins and several minerals including Zinc.
Dr. Breeding says we can fix this problem with a few simple steps. The first is to focus on public schools. It isn’t good that children have pop and junk food so close at hand. Vending machines have got to go. Along with this, we need to educate parents on how to feed their children things that will teach them to eat right on their own.
The last big concern is that advertising companies shouldn’t be allowed to target children. It should be illegal to put sugary cereals on TV between the times that children are likely to be seeing it. This causes children to become obese and has been proven to be a rising health concern in America.
Many different opinions and many different facts have led me to two conclusions. The first is that ADHD does not exist and it is just used to make children be seen and not heard. It is used as a cover up for all our parenting problems. And the second is that there are better ways to deal with these problems such as watching what we feed our children and making sure they don’t have any alternate problems such as allergies to stand in their ways. With so many people claiming to have ADHD, maybe it’s high time someone actually look into it.
