Your Child Taking Drugs ... for ADHD?

If you have a child that has any indication of cardiovascular or heart issues, and he/she is on drugs for behavioral issues, you may want to speak with your doctor and get them off the drug as soon as possible. You may just want to speak with a doctor or psychologist anyway if your child is taking or has been suggested to take drugs to ward off ADD or ADHD.

Even though the drug companies say their ADHD drugs are safe, sometimes they may not have researched every possible complication or effect of their drug.

In this case, ADHD drugs like ritalin can have a negative effect on the cardiovascular system, leading to heart arrhythmia, strokes, heart attacks, and death. Wonderful, huh?

Now the rant: Teachers are selfish imps that should be stripped of their teaching licenses if they demand your child take drugs for behavioral issues, without a thorough psychological evaluation with a competent psychologist and medical doctor. There are many other physical and mental issues that could be the underlying issue for your child's behavior, and treating the symptoms with drugs instead of researching the underlying causes may do more damage than good.

The teacher needs to be able to establish rapport with her students, be able to control child who are unruly, and work with children who need additional guidance. There's a significant amount of work entailed in such teaching endeavors, so thank goodness they get summers off, they deserve it.

When I went to school, doing drugs were bad, and the government spent a significant amount of money to keep kids from doing drugs (remember Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign?). Now, an ever increasing amount of kids are forced to do drugs by schools. And these aren't just another type of Tylenol, these are major drugs! Say no to cocaine, but here's some Ritalin (which has very similar components and affects the same areas in the brain).

What's the message here?

(In child behavioral cases where drugs were the first resort...do I really need to preface this? Oh, yeah, the same people I am talking about here get terribly offended, too. Good grief.) Teachers are lazy, parents are ignorant, and society will suffer because we are drugging our kids. This is the new drug revolution and if it continues, we are doomed.

Is legislation needed to make sure teachers and parents are assessing our children that show signs of behavioral issues with the appropriate psychological and medical evaluations, and using non-drug treatments as the first resort, exhausting all non-drug measures, before falling back on what ought to be the last resort: drugs? Maybe. This is our future we are talking about.