Jacqueline is curious about using drugs to offset the effects of ADD:
It’s been 13 years since I’ve taken anything for my attention deficit disorder — my childhood experience with Ritalin was awful. But things haven’t been going so well in school lately and I may have to relax my “no drugs, no way” position if I want to get it together and actually do the grad school thing.
Now, before I go any further, I need to put a big disclaimer on what follows: I am not a doctor — I don’t even play one on TV. I don’t have children. I don’t have ADD. I have never been on any prescription medication for anything other than antibiotics. I did go through a period of time when I was playing with recreational drug use, but that was confined to three drugs: a few instances of getting stoned (boring), three attempts at ‘shrooming (two of which times I went to sleep before they kicked in), and about two years of dropping acid on a fairly regular basis (fun for a while, then it was time to stop).
In other words, the following is opinion, and opinion only. Take it as such.
Now.
I have serious issues with the current obsession with ADD and the associated pharmaceutical treatments. My personal belief is that it’s an incredibly overblown and overmedicated issue. This does not mean that I don’t “believe” in ADD, or that I don’t believe that there are people who are affected by it and can benefit from treatment. What it means is that I believe that it’s often diagnosed too quickly, and that the current trend is too quick to depend on chemical treatments that are likely more detrimental in the long run.
My little brother Kevin was an unusually active baby. He had problems paying attention for more than a few minutes at a time, and was rarely still — even in his sleep, he was so constantly wired that he would bruise himself in his sleep thrashing around in his crib. Eventually, it got to the point where my parents were concerned enough that they decided to take him to a doctor and see if there was any medical explanation.
Now, this was back in the late 70’s, long before ADD/ADHD became the catchphrase of the decade. My brother was diagnosed with hyperactivity — an overabundance of energy and inability to focus, brought on by a chemical imbalance within his system. My parents were given a few choices on how to combat this. I don’t know if there were more options given than the two I’m about to mention, but I believe these were the primary options.
The first was Ritalin, a drug that is actually a central nervous system stimulant that has a calming effect on hyperactive individuals because of their unusual body chemistry.
The second was a more natural remedy — dealing with the hyperactivity by monitoring and adjusting Kevin’s diet. The chemical imbalance that triggered Kevin’s hyperactivity was brought on by excessive amounts of certain types of sugars in his system. The hyperactivity was believed to be an allergic reaction to sucrose and a few other compounds: essentially, he was allergic to cane sugar (sucrose), artificial flavors and colors, and honey. It was thought that by eliminating those elements as much as possible from his diet, it should be possible to regulate the imbalance and allow Kevin to lead a calmer, more normal life.
A little bit of Googling has turned up a few pages on the subject of hyperactivity and diet, leading me to this Q and A page that pinpoints this approach to treating hyperactivity as the Feingold Diet (further searching for “finegold diet” returned that same page as the top result). It’s apparently a somewhat controversial approach, as testing Dr. Finegold’s theories resulted in “mixed and inconsistent results” — see paragraph eight of the “20th Century History” section of Wikipedia’s ADD page for more information.
I don’t know how much was known about the Finegold Diet at the time that my parents were investigating Kevin’s unusual behavior, or how it was viewed at the time. Whatever the situation was, my parents decided that it was at least worth trying before resorting to drugs, and so Kevin’s diet was changed (along with the rest of us, of course — something that I’ve always half-believed is responsible for why I have such a sweet tooth: until the age of about four or five, I had a normal little-kid diet high in sugars; suddenly, nearly all sugars and sweets were removed from the house, and I missed them — but I digress…). We found that he could process fructose (fruit sugars) normally, and so that became the sweetener of choice in our family.
And it worked. It worked quite well, in fact. Suddenly, Kevin was manageable — at least, no more hyper than any other young child. And, in case there were ever any doubts as to whether it was the diet making the difference, the changes in his behavior when he did manage to get ahold of anything with high amounts of sugar were staggering (I remember one instance where after getting into a stash of Oreos I had hidden in my room he got to the point of physically attacking our dad — a rather scary situation for all of us). When his sugar levels did start to get a little high, all it took was a couple cups of coffee to calm him down, as the caffeine worked with his body chemistry in a similar way to how the Ritalin works: what’s a stimulant to a normal person acts as a depressant to a hyperactive person.
Now, obviously, no two people are going to have the same body chemistry, and a solution for one person isn’t necessarily a solution for all. Even when one solution does present itself, something as simple as time can make a huge difference — as my brother aged, he became less and less adversely affected by the sugars that sent him into fits as a child, and to my knowledge, he hasn’t had to worry about any medical dietary restrictions for quite a few years now. According to the above referenced Wikipedia article, testing on Dr. Finegold’s methods resulted in wildy inconclusive results, with sucess rates reported as anywhere from as much as 60% to as little as 5% of the test subjects.
So no, it’s not a catch-all, and I harbor no wild beliefs that because it worked for my brother, it will work for everyone else. However, I know it helped my brother, and even working with the low end of the reported success rate — five percent — if four million children are diagnosed with ADHD each year, then that’s around 200,000 that could see a substantial difference simply by experimenting with their diet (and I’d bet that choosing your foods wisely is a lot cheaper than filling a Ritalin prescription for years).
It just seems to me that if there’s a possibility of being able to help someone with something as simple as a little attention to their diet, than shouldn’t that be one of the first things investigated? It may not work — there may even be a 95% chance that it won’t — but if it does, than it’s easier, healthier, cheaper, and it would probably take no more than a few weeks or a few months to be certain as to whether a different diet is making the difference. Why start with the howitzer when a slingshot might be all you need?
What concerns me are two things: firstly, that I rarely (if ever) hear of people who know about the potential benefits of the dietary approach; and secondly (and more importantly), I really wonder sometimes if people these days are overly quick to assign their children the label of ADHD.
Quite simply, children are supposed to be hyper! Yes, if it’s excessive, get it checked — but please don’t jump to the conclusion that a child is hyperactive simply because you’re having troubles controlling them. Children need to be active and interested in everything around them, it’s how they learn. They’re plopped down in the middle of this huge world, with all sorts of stuff to explore and investigate and taste and pound on and break and put together and figure out how it all works — and it really worries me when it seems to me that some parents are in far too much of a hurry to drug their children into insensibility because it would make their life easier.
Okay, I think I’m done.
</soapbox>
“Put That Hump (In Your Back)” by DJ Kool from the album Let Me Clear My Throat (1996, 6:11).
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Interesting. I’ve written about this before on my own blog. I was diagnosed with ADD as an adult, about 3 or 4 years ago. I guess I’m one of those who didn’t outgrow it. It wasn’t until I talked to a friend who had been diagnosed that I even looked up a definition of ADD and found out what the symptoms were. When I did, I was blown away. The tricky thing about ADD is that when you look at the symptoms, they could apply to almost anyone, because they’re characteristics that lots of people have. The key is the frequency at which the symptoms occur, and the degree to which they disrupt the live of the the individual. It’s only a problem when it becomes debilitating.
For me, hyperactivity was never the problem. The type of ADD I have is known as “inattentive type.” So, in school I was never the kid who disrupted the class with hyperactivity. Perhaps if I had been, I’d have gotten a diagnosis and help sooner. Instead, I was the kid who quietly drifted off into daydreams and missed much of what was going on in class. It got worse in high school, but I managed to compensate for it, and graduated. In college, I finally hit the wall. I had to accept that I couldn’t handle a full course load, and ended up going part time, taking six years to graduate instead of four. When I entered the working world, well I found it was even harder to compensate and I crashed and burned several times. That cycle repeated until I got diagnosed and treated.
For me, treatment is a combination of medication an behavior modification. It took a while to find the right medication. I was reluctant to use stimulant medications, until it became apparent that I wasn’t experiencing real improvement. I experienced real improvement, in terms of being able to focus and get things accomplished, when I started taking a ritalin-like medication. The only problem was that it tended to wear off towards the end of the day. Then there was the matter of not being able to get refills, and thus having to remember and get to a doctors appointment once a month, while also dealing with my first year as a parent. Finally, I switched to a new, non-stimulant medication that works just as well for me as the stimulant did. Besides medication, I worked for two years with an ADD coach to work on developing tools and methods to help me manage better, and read a number of books to help with the same. In the last few years, things have gotten a lot better.
I’ve never tried diet modification, so I don’t know what benefits I might derive from that. It’s entirely possible that it could be beneficial. Currently I’m a non-smoking, non-drinking, ovo-lacto vegetarian, for what it’s worth. From my own experience, if response to treatment is any indicator, then ADD is quite “real” for me. I will say that when it comes to ADD different approaches work better for different people, and there’s really no “one size fits all” treatment. Some medications work better for some people, and not at all for others, and some get better results from diet and behavior modification. The important things are to get a diagnosis and then find something that works.
It’s not my diet — I was on the Atkin’s diet for several months, no sugar at all, remember? And I still had a nonexistant attention span. All the studying and schoolwork I get done I get done in 5-15 minute bursts. I can’t sit down and complete a whole assignment or chapter without jumping up a dozen times to do something else.
Like you, I was very skeptical of ADHD and very cautious of any diagnosis from any mental health perspective. And psychopharmaceudicals are not to be taken lightly. You’re messing with brain chemistry and in my opinion, that isn’t good.
Well, I was diagnosed with ADHD two years ago. I’m currently trying to decide whether I should re-start treatment. I was diagnosed when being treated for depression (MS management and depression are highly correlated due to some of the medications used to treat MS), when we stumbled upon something a bit fishy. The only medication that helped my ability to concentrate (one of my main symptoms of depression) was an ADHD drug. So I was screened. I score very high on hyperactivity, but I don’t seem hyperactive. My hyperactivity manifests itself in nervous ticks like pacing, nail biting, hair twirling, total lack of patience, and a completely inability to sit quietly. And after doing a lot of reading, it fit my personal history quite well. I was a horrible student and flunked a couple of grades in grade school, until around high school when I was able to force myself to focus by working in environments without any noise or distractions and by self-medicating with copious amounts of caffeine. This also worked through my undergrad years. Well, it stopped working and after struggling through graduate school, I started using a stimulant. And I cannot believe what I huge difference it makes. I know I can function without it, but I probably don’t need to put myself through that.
My concern about ADHD is the public opinion of the condition. Due to the coverage on popular news shows, people and many doctors don’t believe in the condition at all and medication that can help people better function. But I am skeptical about the claims of “over diagnoses” of ADHD. Is it over diagnoses or is it that years ago, we didn’t expect most people to receive the same level of education that is required today? Today, we expect children to sit quietly and pay attention for rather long periods of time. So it might be that ADHD is simply more problematic in today’s culture than it was only decades ago when it wasn’t expected that everyone go to college and when most careers didn’t involve sitting at a desk all day.
As for medicating children, I don’t know. I have to claim complete ignorance here.
But I am very skeptical of any claim that diet plays a role. I hear about diets for every medical condition you can think of and at least once a year, a well meaning family member sends me some article claiming that if only I ate more fish or less refined sugar, I wouldn’t have MS. Yea, right. I’m happy that your brother was helped by diet refinement, but it should be pointed out that a 5% success rate sounds a lot like a placebo effect. Sugar pills are routinely used as controls in drug trails and they almost always see a certain number of people helped by taking them, regardless of the condition. The mind is a powerful thing and shouldn’t be underestimated. I personally see no impact on either of my medical conditions by diet (although exercise helps all of them), although I would love it if I did see a dietary effect. It would be so much easier and would require a lot less time in doctor’s offices.
I’ll be the first to admit I know nothing about ADD and even less about Ritalin but I do understand food, diets and the effect on the body. The very first “Cooking school” I went to the teacher spent a YEAR just on nutrition and diet and if you didn’t pass with a 3.0 or higher (B) you never went into the kitchen and you didn’t touch food. She said many times “If you don’t understand the effects of different foods on the human body you can’t be a good cook” I am constantly amazed at the general public’s misunderstanding of food in general and how the ½ pizza you ate today with the bag of chips can effect how you feel two weeks from now. Our first lesson was to write down every little thing we ate including chewing gum and we also made a chart where we rated one to ten on how we felt each day, with labels such as grumpy, tired, drained. We did this for a year. At the end of the year she had us look up those dates where we felt the worst. We then matched up what we had eaten the week before and it was amazing to see the same food pop up and match up to our bad days. She stated “correctly it now turns out” that we were in fact allergic to that food in some way and the bad feelings we felt a week later were the result of that allergy.
Different foods have a PROFOUND impact on us and we need to understand that. The bad part is most people don’t have a clue.
I’m not saying you need to go vegan or no carbs or anything like that I’m saying each of us is different and each of us responds to our diets differently and we need to fine tune our diets to ourselves and no one else.
As a side note, “Sugar” as we know it isn’t really a food. Yes I know about cane sugar and beet sugar but as far as our body’s go and the way they treat it, sugar is much more of a drug. I’m saying the body reacts to sugar the way it reacts to drugs. It is not processed like a food. And in that regard sugar needs watched much more closely than other food items you eat. Again I’m not saying eat less I’m saying watch your reaction to it that much more closely. Like all drugs the effect on everyone is different.
And I speak as a large man (over #200) that can get shit-faced drunk and pass out before I finish my first beer.
We all are different; take the time to find out what’s right for YOU.
I have been keenly interested in ADHD because my ex was diagnosed with ADD when she was a young child, and had been given high doses of pseudo-ephedrine, a.k.a. speed, as treatment.
DeAnna brought up a critical point. Success rates of various treatments are completely meaningless without an associated placebo rate. It is not possible to discuss the efficacy of either dietary or medication-based treatments for a specific condition without this figure.
In general terms, however, I believe that dietary treatment programs are both over-hyped and under-utilised. They are under-utilised because of scepticism in the medical community, this being due not to a lack of effectiveness, but the fact that each patient will require a very different diet program than the next patient, whereas with medications, usually only the frequency of medicating needs to be “tuned” for each patient.
But dietary treatments are over-hyped; as DeAnna said, “I hear about diets for every medical condition you can think of” - and this is understandable. If one patient responds to dietary treatment, either due to placebo effect or efficaciousness, then they will naturally extol its advantages over medication that is expensive, physiologically harmful, or in some cases, simply non-existent.
The dilemma for doctors is obvious: to avoid harm from the side effects of powerful medication, they would probably want to attempt a less-destructive, dietary-based, approach. But what if that dietary approach eventually fails, or it takes considerable time to find the right diet, and more harm is done in the meantime by allowing the condition to continue when the medication could have reduced or eliminated that harm originally?
I apologise for the long comment - but I think it is my first one here! Can I just say that Eclecticism is one of my favourite corners of the web; the maturity and knowledge displayed in the posts and comments are excellent, and the discourse always sensible, entertaining and informative. It is far more enjoyable than the rancour and taunting that passes for discussion on a lot of other blogs.
Wow — thanks for all the great comments! I seem to have touched a nerve with this one.
I don’t think that that’s anything new, though. Sure, schooling lasts longer overall than it did in the past, but expecting children to be able to sit and pay attention is hardly a recent development. Actually, I’d guess that it’s just the opposite — that we’re less likely to really expect long periods of study than we used to.
As far as that goes, I think it’s more that we live in such a rapid-fire media-centric world that we may actually be (in a sense) training kids to exhibit many of the symptoms of ADD, even if they don’t actually have the medical condition. Everything seems to be “faster, faster, faster,” from music videos to TV shows to movies — quick cuts, short scenes, and so on.
Put the average kid of today who’s been brought up on that form of media in front of a classic Hitchcock thriller and they’re likely to be bored to tears and unable to pay attention…not because of ADD, but simply because it’s a style of presentation that they’re entirely unused to. Long shots, exposition, real dialogue, even atmospheric sequences without dialogue, and so on, are incredibly rare these days, and I really think that a lot of kids have difficulties adjusting to it.
Oh, I know. No matter what the topic, there are always going to be a sizeable number of people convinced that there’s some form of homeopathic natural miracle “cure-all” that will take care of everything. Skepticism is a good thing.
From a statistical standpoint, sure, that’s a very real possibility, and may very well have been the case for some or many of the test subjects. I’m relatively certain that this was no placebo effect, however, having grown up with seeing Kevin’s behavior (and besides, if nothing else, I’m not sure how effective a placebo trial would be on a child just a few years old — but when I say “not sure,” please take that literally as in “I haven’t got a clue”, not as “I’m skeptical about”).
I certainly don’t want anyone to think that I’m trying to proclaim the “one true way” or anything like that — while I’m very convinced that this was an effective treatment for my brother, and feel strongly that there’s at least a possibility that it could be for other people if they investigated it, I’m not making any claims that it is the cure for everyone.
Never something that needs to be apologized for ‘round here.
Wow — thanks a lot! It’s always nice to hear things like that — especially when I occasionally go through bouts of wondering whether it’s worth continuing to foist my drivel upon the world.
Thanks to all of you who do stop by, comment, and keep the conversations here worthwhile!
It is interesting to read all the different comments and opinions on this matter. No matter what the issue there will allways be opposing veiwpoints. I think that it is important to remember that “To each is own” and there is not one thing that will allways work for every single person.
I have recently been learning more about the ways in which food affects our bodies. I wrote a bit about it back in September on my blog. From a very personal perspective I have witnessed how dietary changes can affect behavior in some people.
My cousin was diagnosed at a very young age as being Autistic. On top of that he was also extremely hyperactive. He used to climb the walls, not to mention on countertops, furniture, and everything else in his path. It was next to impossible to control his behavior problems. He would have something sweet to eat and burst into fits of laughter, run around, and just reak all kinds of havoc. He was really out of control almost all of the time.
My cousin was diagnosed with autism, and hyperactivity early on, but it wasn’t until later that sugar was removed from his diet. When I was a kid I was told he couldn’t have sugar because it would make him hyper, and we were never to give him anything sweet. I remember when he used to be out of control, and then I remember when his behavior resembeled that of an average child. It made a remarkable difference in him. Eliminating sugar from his diet never did anything to help his Autism but it defintely controlled his hyperactivity.
I have another small family member who gets very hyper after she has sugar. She has drastic mood, and behavior changes when she consumes sugar, and also when she misses a meal, when her blood sugar is low. If she is being cranky, irratable, and really misbehaving she has usually had something high in sugar content to eat very recently, or she hasn’t eaten. I can see how it would be hard for her to concentrate on schoolwork or anything else when her brain is telling her to bounce all over the place. It would be easy to slap a label on her and say she is displaying some symptoms of ADHD. While this may or may not be the case, in my opinion the symptoms she displays communicate a sensitivity to sugar that should not easily be dismissed. I think it is a very real problem that should be addressed. Based on past experiences I think she would benefit greatly from some form of dietary change.
It doesn’t mean that everyone who has the same symptoms or disorders will benefit, but there are some people who do. On the flip side, there are some people who have very real disorders that greatly affect their lives. Diet changes may do nothing to help them, and medication may very well be a necessary treatment for them. It is human nature to try to fit everyone into a neat little box in order to figure out how to treat them accrodingly. But, not everyone, and not every disorder fits into a neat little box. It is important to look at all aspects of different forms of treaments (without immediately ruling out one or the other), and to find out what works best for that particular individual.
Good post. This issue always touches a nerve with us because Mr. Man has been “accused” over the years of a variety of alphabet-soup disorders and syndromes, and various teacher etc. types have hinted he might be subduable (is that a word?) with “medication.” I say, no way. Bright children in particular have been “diagnosed” with all sorts of syndromes and disorders just because they are CHALLENGING. We have fought the system but some other parents don’t have the time, knowledge, or inclination to do the same. I think the overmedicating of America is a CRISIS — today’s report about almost half of all Americans taking some kind of drugs, should be cause for alarm, not the benign celebration that the health “authorities” have turned it into. The report says almost a FOURTH of all Americans under 18 are on at least one drug. I am glad for the drugs that are truly saving lives and curing diseases but I am CERTAIN that we do not need MILLIONS of kids to be taking brain-changing drugs just because they’re handfuls to deal with. (and that’s MY soapbox)
Recently my younger cousin who is in middle school was diagnosed with ADD, and was given Ritalin. Later on, he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Which got me to wondering if there is a link between Ritalin and bipolar disorder. If anyone has any relevant information, please email me. Thanks!
To make a long story short, I had both my kids on the Finegold diet way back when. It worked for them with a few modifications or should I say flexibilities. That was years ago but if memory serves me correctly, while processed sugars were big on his list of nos, his biggest objection was food additives & preservatives.
Wheatear or not you agree with the man is immaterial because the scientific community is now finding that those same chemicals are causing cancer. But I do remember the good Doctor being poo hooed because the small amounts of these chemicals were very acceptable. The real problem at that time, no one had studied the cumulative effects of the chemicals. But of course not the can because they have had time to accumulate in our systems. But alas, too late a discovery for some.
If processed food with additives and preservatives are so good for us why are we as a nation so unhealthy? Yes some remedies do not work for some but remember this; a diet can be varied in thousands of ways. Even Dr. Finegold admitted this in his book (If memory serves me correctly).