Neal Boortz and ADD

The following are short pieces recently written by Neal Boortz regarding Attention Deficit Disorder and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, appearing in Neal's Nuze:

More and more medical and psychological professionals are speaking out against this phony disease of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Dr. Bob Jacobs, a psychologist, is on the advisory board of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology. He recently told a conference in Australia that ADHD is a behavioral problem, not a medical disorder. He correctly points out that there is no proof that ADHD exists.

Jacobs notes that many children who are “diagnosed” with ADHD – children who it is said can’t pay attention – are perfectly capable of sitting still with a video game and paying rapt attention for hours on end. He also points out that when parents pay attention and change the way they are treating and handling their children, the ADHD symptoms go away. “A real diseas doesn’t go away when somebody else does something.”

I just love it that this debate is surfacing again. Sure, Ritalin works. It’s a drug, of course it’s going to have an affect on children. It makes them more docile and compliant. Take that word “compliant” and put it next to “government.” Would anyone argue that government doesn’t just love a compliant citizen? Then why wouldn’t a government school teacher love a docile and compliant child? It sure makes their job easier, doesn’t it?

In 2001 U.S. drug companies made more than $600 million profit in ADHD drugs like Ritalin. If ADHD goes away … so do those profits.

It’s time for you parents and teachers to stop looking for the easy way out here. Your easy way out is a potential disaster for your child.

The controversy over my comments on ADD/ADHD continues. Station management continues to feel the effects of an organized campaign to have me either silenced or fired. Hey, I don’t blame these people. If I was drugging my child for a non-existent disease I wouldn’t want anyone reminding me of my irresponsibility either.

Just to fuel the fire, here are some excerpts from letters and e-mail I’ve received in the last few days:

I am a Special Education teacher in Kansas --anti-NEA, extremely conservative: endangered species. Agree with you on ADHD. Problem - liberals insist all students with behavior problems have the right to disrupt the education of others, so meds used to control behaviors. In Kansas, ADHD students receive special education services under the label of Otherwise Health Impaired (OHI). Some of us know that OHI really stands for Otherwise HOME Impaired. Please do not use my name publicly -- retaliation from liberal dominated administration probable

Before you delete this please read on. I am ecstatic on your position on add and ADHD. I have a son that was so diagnosed, they, she who is always right, put him on Ritalin. it is a devastating drug, they are doped up and not themselves. Chris is adopted has a handicap and parents that care. i took on the problem, the problem was not a condition it was a matter of wills. i withdrew him from the medication and worked my ass off making the difference. Neal is right, get off the medication, instill confidence, give a damn about how they behave and stand firm. today my son has a 4.0 average in his junior year of high school and has been accepted to Penn State, will get a partial scholarship and is a GREAT KID. Not bad for someone the system wanted to put into a stupor. Dad's can make a difference, although you may not be the most popular guy around. God Bless

Man, when your right your right! The stories that I could tell you about my ex-wife and hooking my son on this drug since he was two are unbelievable. Parents and teachers are not alone in this. Doctors who are prescribing this and other mind altering drugs are the number one problem. My ex-wife found a doctor in Miami that did "testing" on my son only by giving him some blocks to assemble, and when my son started looking around instead of putting all of the blocks in place that was it, instant A.D.H.D. Oh yeah, this boy was not only A.D.D. He was hyper as well.(here's a clue HE'S TWO YEARS OLD!!) Needless to say this eventually lead to our divorce, but to make matters worse, there are judges out there who believe this crap also, so I did not get custody. He's now 15 and my Ex-wife and I have another court appointment to settle this issue.

This will be the next great fad disease for school age children. Oppositional Defiance Disorder. The “ODD child” is a child that gets angry or frustrated and defies authority. In other words … a child. He argues with adults, he loses his temper, he has a negative attitude, he blames others for his mistakes. Teachers.net has a chatboard discussing this grand new disease. One post by a teacher says: “Today was a really bad day. I have been teaching grade seven for four years and today was the first time I was called a "Whore," by a kid who has Oppositional Defiance Disorder.”

Stand by folks, this is soon going to become a full-fledged disease and some drug company is going to develop some mind-altering drug that will make these kids compliant and passive. Oh man, are the parents going to love this one. Here’s a link on this new fad-disease so you can start getting your excuses ready. http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Valley/9346/odd.html

There’s been quite a firestorm of controversy on the show since I started talking about the various experts who are debunking the ADD/ADHD craze. We had Dr. Bob Jackobs, a psychologist, telling a youth conference in Queensland, Australia that there has never been any proof that ADHD exists. Then there was neurologist Dr. Fred Baughman Jr. who, in a 1998 letter to Attorney General Janet Reno called ADHD “the single biggest health care fraud in U.S. history.” This has all been very unsettling to parents who have decided that drugging is certainly easier than parenting when it comes to controlling the behavior of their children. These parents really know that ADD stands for “Adequate Dicipline Deficiency.”

But, alas! There are many parents out there who have been unable to find a doctor or a shrink who will write that invaluable Ritalin prescription. Wow! You poor saps have actually had to deal with your children being … children!

Well, maybe there’s hope. There’s a new disease on the horizon out there. It’s called ODD! Oppositional Defiance Disorder? With any luck, your child may have this nifty new disease! As a public service, here is some help diagnosing your very own child to see if they might have ODD! The symptoms are:

Arguing with adults. Losing temper. Angry or resentful of others. Actively defies adult’s request or rules. Negative attitude Blames others for their own mistakes misbehavior Seems touchy or easily annoyed by others Deliberately annoys others Acts spiteful or vindictive. The psychiatrists are telling us that if your child displays four or more of the above traits … you may be a winner! You may have a child with ODD! Now you don’t have to feel so left out when the neighborhood moms get together to discuss their children’s afflictions. Looking at that list again, I would suggest that if your child doesn’t display at least four of those traits, he’s probably in a coma on a respirator.

Now … the really good news! The Psychiatric Alliance of the Blue Ridge is studying an “investigational medication” that may help children with ODD! So, in the very near future you may not only be able to discuss your child’s hideous new disease, you may actually be able to DRUG him!

I am not too familiar with Boortz but for reasons other than ideological, I don't know what his own experience with ADD/ADHD is. But I can tell you I have had 7 years worth of experience dealing with an ADD child. Our daughter is ADD. (I still feel she is AD/HD but that's an expanded topic.) Adderol has been a miracle drug for her.

From the time my daughter was about 4 we had noticed that she could not keep her mind on one task for more than a few seconds. This girl has been in an excellent Catholic school since first grade. However, her conduct grades for grades 1-5 were consistently unsatisfactory. She has had detention because of conduct, forgotten homework, lost homework, lost anything and everything, more times than we care to remember.

The last straw was when she stayed last summer with one of her out-of-state aunts for a couple of weeks. The original plans were for her to stay a week or so with the aunt, then another week or so with her grandmother. Since they only see our daughter maybe every other year when either we go up there or they come here (we're 1200 miles apart), they were not completely prepared for having an ADD child staying with them. Her grandmother cut her stay short saying she couldn't handle her. It was an unpleasant experience for everyone involved. And, it was then that, after debating for more than a year, we finally decided to have her tested for ADD.

As we suspected, she is ADD and was placed on 10mg Adderol, the lowest dosage available. Subsequently, the dosage was upped to the 15mg dosage once a day. The change has been absolutely amazing. This child has gone from being a C - D student to straight A's the last report card. Her conduct grades are mostly "Outstanding" with the balance being "Satisfactory".

I don't appreciate in the least Boortz' statements that ADD is a parenting problem. To be nice about it, unless Boortz has an ADD or AD/HD child, he doesn't have the first clue what he is talking about. Boortz tips his hand about his motives when he talks about the government and docile citizens. Boortz is not concerned about children, and children's welfare. He really appears to, for some unknown reason, fear being drugged by the government and is using ADD as some sort of front.

I will put my and my child's mother's parenting up against anyone anytime. You will NOT find a better home than what we have here. We have tried every approach possible to get our daughter to focus. We have had serious around the dinner table talks about personal responsibility. We have both had serious one on one talks with her about personal responsibility. When "being nice" hasn't worked, she has been grounded from her favorite things more times than we care to remember. We have prayed as a family together about this problem. She has told us she has prayed in church about it. She is as aware as any of us that this is a problem. I have no doubt that she wants to be able to focus but just does not have the ability to focus for any extended period of time.

Yes, I suppose if we wanted, we could become absolute tyrants for parents where every single lost train of thought by our daughter would incur serious consequences but at what cost? If we wanted, we could scar the poor girl for life and she would hate her parents for being parental tyrants. And, yes, she might comply for short periods as she has with our "nice" approaches but the compliance would be out of fear. Is that really fixing the problem? Not hardly. This type parenting is extremely destructive and probably just as importantly, it wastes valuable time in this child's life.

She is in sixth grade now. She is 6 years away from starting college. Her grades need to be maintained where they are now so she can go to college in order to give her the best chance of making it in the world. If Adderol gets her there then that's all the better. Hopefully, as the doctor said, she will outgrow this when she matures and will not need the Adderol.

Mr. Boortz points out that Dr. Bob Jacobs "correctly points out that there is no proof that ADHD exists." At the same time, there is often no physical proof that headaches exist. People will report the symptoms of a headache but often even a CAT scan will show no reason for the headaches. This by no means indicates that someone's head really does not hurt. And, when someone has a headache, they can also take two tablets of acetylsalicylic acid, more commonly know as Aspirin. Scientists believe that aspirin's ability to reduce the body's production of hormone-like "prostaglandins" is the reason for both its effectiveness in relieving pain and reducing inflammation... but they don't know. Similarly, no one knows exactly why Adderol and Ritalin work, they just do. I don't know what kind of proof Mr. Boortz wants, or if he even wants proof.

As a side note, our daughter is not completely free of losing her trains of thought. She is still an "air-head" at times. She still loses things. She still forgets what she is supposed to be doing. The difference has been that the degree and frequency of these lapses has decreased dramatically. We have learned that you cannot give this child a list of things to be done in order to complete a task. She simply loses it after the second step. Last Christmas, after a minor emergency here when her mother received an electrical shock and had to go to the emergency room, I asked her to help me clean up some of the things that were broken in the accident. The task involved about five steps that I started to describe to her. After the second step, I could tell from the blank look on her face that I had lost her. I then wrote down each step for her. She completed the task perfectly. I see this as more "proof" that ADD exists. I suppose if we continued to increase her dosage she would be laser focused and maybe "docile". But that is not what we're after.

So, I take it very personally when someone like Boortz insults my parenting by insinuating that ADD is a parenting problem. We have a very fine home. You will find no better. And, our daughter is doing fine, Mr. Boortz. Thank you very much.

Now, flame away!

We have learned that you cannot give this child a list of things to be done in order to complete a task. She simply loses it after the second step.

And yet I'll bet that if she reads and enjoys a book she could repeat it to you in amazing detail or give you the particulars of an event that occured weeks ago. Right?

We had my daughter tested two years ago and she was diagnosed with the inattentive form of ADD. She had been on Concerta since then and, like your daughter, has shown a marked improvement. While discussing the results of the tests that the doctor performed, the doctor told us that there are there are different forms of memory. We think in terms of short term and long term memory but there are sub-sections of each. Like our daughter, you daughter has a problem with what is called 'stacked memory'. This is the process in which the brain takes a series of instructions, stores them in order and then retrieves them in the order in which they were given. If I were to guess I would say that your daughter remembers the first instruction and often the last but loses everything in between. This is why children with this problem are thought of as air-heads and also often have difficulty reading at their grade level. When reading long sentences they lose track of the sentence structure and the meaning is lost, requiring that they reread the same passage. Fortunately as people get older they can easily develop skills that help them cope with the problem. If you know people addicted to to-do lists and meeting minutes it's likely that they suffer from this problem to one extent or another.

So no flame from this end. Just understanding and an equal contempt for Bortz for pontificating on something he knows nothing about.

Oh, and for Bortz's information, not that he would give a damn, but the reason ADD children can concentrate on video games and TV is that there they both provide a constantly changing visual stimulus. It's far different from reading a book or sitting in a classroom.

You said...

"If I were to guess I would say that your daughter remembers the first instruction and often the last but loses everything in between. "

You nailed that one.

And, you also described my wife with...

"If you know people addicted to to-do lists and meeting minutes it's likely that they suffer from this problem to one extent or another."

I didn't address my wife's similar condition in my first post as I had already gotten too long winded.

In addition to the lists my wife keeps, she also takes verbatim minutes for the meetings she attends. What she doesn't get during the meeting, she gets off a tape recording. I've asked her why she does this as per Robert's Rules of Order she doesn't need verbatim minutes. She is just as familiar with RR of O as I am and knows this, but insists that's what she wants. It made no sense to me and seemed like a lot of unnecessary work. Now I understand.

As a bit of preemption, I'm sure the Boortz's of the world would argue that my wife's methods mean that the problem can be dealt with without medication. What that argument does not consider is the lost productivity and lost time and a lot of frustration from having to use elaborate frameworks to deal with everyday tasks that everyone else does without thinking twice. Bottom line is she whouldn't have to develop and use these methods for everyday tasks if there was no medical condition. My wife is trying to get our daughter to start using these techniques but our daughter just can't focus and remember to do it. Again, that goes back to the remembering the first and last instruction in a series.

Many, many thanks for the insight into this medical condition. You've motivated me to start educating myself on the memory process so that I can better understand what is really going on. But of course, regardless of any of this, I love them both!

I'd challenge Boortz to a debate any time. It absolutely infuriates me too when this guy makes these absolutely irresponsible statements.

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EACH TABLET CONTAINS	5mg	10mg	20mg	30mg
Dextroamphetamine Saccharate	1.25 mg	2.5 mg	5 mg	7.5 mg
Amphetamine Aspartate	1.25 mg	2.5 mg	5 mg	7.5 mg
Dextroamphetamine Sulfate USP	1.25 mg	2.5 mg	5 mg	7.5 mg
Amphetamine Sulfate USP	1.25 mg	2.5 mg	5 mg	7.5 mg
Total equivalence	3.13 mg	6.3 mg	12.6 mg	18.8 mg

Amphetamine
DEA Number	1100
CSA Schedule	II
Classification	Non Narcotic
Other Names	Dexedrine, Adderall, Obetrol