Tuesday, April 13, 2010
ADD Remedies
Talking about ADHD and other learning disabilities in class is something I have seen a bit of. My mom is a Special Education teacher in a town of about 2500 people. In high school I was a teacher’s aide in her classroom and now I’m a substitute teacher when I go home on breaks. I also have ADD myself and have been medicated for it. I do not have a severe case but enough to where it did quite a bit of damage in school. When I was first diagnosed, after an hour of questioning/questionnaires and reviewing my past academia extensively, I was put on Strattera. The side effects of this pill did not agree with me. I was then switched to Adderal, which had about the same effect as the first. After this, my mom tried to find alternative medications, mostly natural remedies, to help with my small problem. In some of the articles she found, the authors said that ADD can be caused by certain parts of the brain lacking certain minerals and nutrition, causing it to function not quite normal. At the bottom there was a website that was recommended that has the natural-type medications that contains mostly vitamins and minerals. I was put on these vitamins and I have to say they work. I found this very interesting that a dose of extra vitamins could help when not much else did, and without those horrible side effects. I’m assuming this remedy will not work for everyone as the first medications did not work for me, but for those who do not want to put their children on the pills, it certainly can be a start.
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I stongly believe that America as a whole is over-medicating several problems because they want a quick or fast fix. Medication makes it easy, where not a lot of lifestyle changes have to be made. I think medication, in most cases, should be the last alternative...not the first as the prescription companies have made it.
ReplyDeleteStatisctics show over 20% of children are medicated...how will this benefit them in the future. There are alternative explanations that we do not hear being talked about much a possible means to treat ADHD children.
Some very interesting evidence is presented in a complete guide to natural cures in relation to ADHD. Poor diet, food sensitivities, and vitamin/mineral deficiencies are shown to increase ADHD symptoms. This is very important because these things should be ruled out or even tried before automatically put children on medicine. A human body is not made to be medicated. Every system usually runs properly if everthing is in proper balance.
The following show examples of deficinecies and how the body properly uses these vitamins/minerals:
-B vitamins, calcium, and magnesium help relax the nervous system.
-Vitamin C helps remove toxins from the body.
-Iron deficiency is linked to the inability to concentrate.
-Zinc and copper deficinecies have been directly linked to ADHD
There are also several theories that hyperactivity is due to inactivity. There has been a large change in children playing outdoors...not expending their extra energy by sitting indoors.
These things should be seriously considered before putting young children on psychiatric drugs.