ADHD and your social life as a parent

There are very few circumstances when that what you prescribe as a doctor is more a reflection of what a third party is expecting you to do than what you observe and this is one of them. A kid and a mother bring you a teacher's letter that asks you to stick him with Ritalin. You have twenty minutes to decide on that which a teacher has observed for a year. Brave and lonely are those doctors who have balls to swim against the tide.


It is traumatic to live with an attention deficit disorder (ADDH) kid as a parent, more so if he has hyperactivity as well. In that twenty minutes of consultation they can re arrange your office quicker than you can write a script, unless you have it pre written and waiting for rubber stamping as most tend to do. You begin to realize how blessed you are it was only a consultative visit, not a planned residency. If they were collecting signatures for commitment to God, the world would be full of saints. 

It is really unfair on them and they don't help their cause. They have very few friends unless the friends don't have to physically deal with them, like a varsity professor studying the ADHD editorials. If they sneeze, you will get to know. It could be from the teacher, people around them or worse still the priest at your next church service.

To start off, Ritalin is a stimulant very similar to heroine but unlike the expected effect in adults it suppresses their brain to a castrated dog level. Not brakes at all as a driver of a speeding car would be expected to do. We push them over the edge so to say. 

Everybody applauds you because there are no more broken televisions screens at home and the kid absorbs more of what the teacher gives as per daily lesson. The teacher gets fewer headaches, the computer and files don't have to be locked away next time the kid comes for consultation and best of all drug sales go up.

To say it is easier than Pilates judgment of Jesus Christ on that fateful day is an understatement. Mary Magdalene is banking on you. The world is banking on you, and you will fail given second chance, having read and slept on the script. 

The worst part is that as they grow older they don't want the medicine and they are much more likely to end up behind bars. Whether it is due to what we fed them as chronic treatment or the lack of it we're not yet certain, but deducing from what happens to adult heroine abusers, it can be either. Impulse control seems to be their Achilles for life. Nobody is prepared to hold off the shackles just  enough time to pause and study them objectively. 

The drug distributor could have appeared less culpable if they did not push their product that hard. To make matters worse they don't focus on doctors. You got easier targets. Targets that would probably co-pay if you prompted them to with even a feather duster. 

To try to look for options is a lonely road to nowhere. It has been found that restricting sugars and decreasing allergens does help to lessen the impact but we probably going to find out more only after pathophysiology of the disease has been better mapped.

If biochemistry and physiology of health are the elements of every mix, then results are assured.