ADHD Treatment: The Myths
The Myths of Treating ADHD
- If you are concerned or worried about treating your ADHD child with drugs, you are not alone.
- If you decided to treat with drugs and your child is can’t fall asleep at night, you are not alone.
- If you decided to treat with drugs and your child is losing weight, you are not alone.
- If you decided to treat with drugs and it upsets your child’s stomach, you are not alone.
- If you decided to treat with drugs and your child has terrible side effects, you are not alone.
If you decided to treat with drugs and your child is doing great, you are not alone, also. But you are pretty lucky and there is no guarantee that it will last.
Even if you are happy with your child’s progress while he is on medication there are a number of mistakes and misconceptions that parents have and you should know.
Myth 1: Medication treats ADHD
Don’t get me wrong. I am not against medication for children with ADHD. I have used it with my own children and I have recommended its use in other children. I just want you to realize what everyone in the medical profession knows and what your doctor may or may not have shared with you when you discussed the possibility of giving medication to your child.
Medication does not solve the problem. No one with ADHD was ever cured by taking medication. What drugs do is to make it easier for your child to make it through his day. It helps to settle him so that he can sit in school quietly and concentrate on learning material.
Myth 2: Your child will grow out of ADHD
It could be your child will grow out of ADHD. Some children do. It used to be that it was thought that 50% of children out grow ADHD. That is because as your child gets older and matures the symptoms change. As our understanding of what ADHD looks like in an adult becomes more refined, it appears that less and less children outgrow the problem.
The actual percentage of children who outgrow ADHD is still unclear. A lot depends upon how you define adult ADHD, and we have no universally accepted criteria for this. However, everyone agrees that if you were planning on your child someday growing out of ADHD, you had better change your plans.
Myth 3: If my child was diagnosed with ADHD, it means that he has ADHD
This is the mistake that almost every parent and almost every doctor makes. Even if your child has been diagnosed with ADHD, it does not mean that he has ADHD.
Why?
Because, ADHD is very complicated and difficult diagnosis to make.
Here is how the diagnosis of ADHD should work:
To make the diagnosis of ADHD properly you need an evaluation by four or five different types of specialists who observe your child over many hours, evaluate him medically, speak with his teachers, test his learning aptitude and communication skills, etc. This usually takes weeks to complete. Then when the evaluation is over, the team of specialists gets together and share there results.
If after discussing your child and analyzing the medical, psychological, academic, and behavioral information they have gathered, they cannot find any other explanation, then they conclude that since they can’t figure out what else it could be, your child probably has ADHD.
That means that even when your child is evaluated properly the diagnosis of ADHD is a ‘good guess’ diagnosis.
So what if your child didn’t receive a thorough evaluation by a group of specialists. What if, like most parents you brought your child to his pediatrician told him that he was out of control and walked out 5 minutes later with a prescription for Ritalin and a diagnosis of ADHD.
If when a team of highly trained experts evaluate your child for many hours over the course of many days and their diagnosis of ADHD is only ‘a good guess’, then what is it when your pediatrician does it his office after five minutes.
A ‘bad guess’?
Fact: There are no less than 50 different conditions that mimic ADHD
I spent an entire year researching 203 medical books, articles, and research papers to find what conditions mimic ADHD and how to treat them. Based upon what I found I created the program How to Help the Child You Love.
And guess what else-
Unlike ADHD, many of these fifty conditions are completely curable. That means that if you identify and treat these causes your child will be better. He’ll be a normal child like everybody else.
What happens if your child has one of these conditions and you don’t find out?
Well, the best thing that can happen is that you will give him drugs for ADHD and they won’t help. Eventually someone will realize that your child is not responding to the treatment properly and he will re-guess the diagnosis. Maybe this time he will get it right.
What usually happens is that your child gets a little better. Not enough to help him function properly, but enough to convince everyone that you are on the right track. Then your child will spend the rest of his childhood and adolescence going from medication to medication, treatment to treatment trying to find the right balance. Eventually he will be listed as one of those ADHD treatment failures.
“This is the best we can do,” you will be told and your child will go through is life being seen as a bit abnormal.
If your child has been diagnosed with ADHD, then:
It is quite possible that your child may have some condition other than ADHD that is easily treatable, but that is probably being ignored or missed.
It is quite possible that your child was misdiagnosed and is not receiving the proper medical treatment.
If you do find out that your child has something else going on other than ADHD, he could be better in as little as four days!
This is what the current research shows and it has also been my personal experience. This is what I was able to accomplish with my own children. If you want to hear more about what I did and what you should consider doing, go to:
http://addadhdadvances.com/aboutus.html
I describe there what I did to help my own children. If you want to find out how you can find what is really wrong with you ADHD child and what to do about it go to How to Help the Child You Love.
