Posted on 05/16/2004 10:02:30 PM PDT by neverdem
Spending on drugs to treat children and adolescents for behavior-related disorders rose 77 percent from 2000 to the end of 2003, according to a study of prescription purchases by Medco Health Solutions, a pharmacy benefits management company.
The increase, to $536 a patient a year on average, reflected rising prices as growing numbers of young people used newer and more expensive drugs, said Robert S. Epstein, chief medical officer of Medco. The report is to be released today.
Sales of the behavioral drugs are growing faster than any other type of medicine taken by children, pulling ahead of the previous leaders, antibiotics and asthma treatments, he said. Most of the drugs were treatments for depression and attention deficit disorder, including prescriptions combining both treatments for the same patient.
Use of attention disorder drugs by children under age 5 rose 49 percent from 2000 to 2003, to half of all children taking any behavior-related medication. Scientists who have studied the trend called for more research on side effects and benefits.
"The benefits and risks of using these drugs in a preschool population should be studied systematically," said Dr. Julie Magno Zito, an associate professor of pharmacy and medicine at the University of Maryland who directs a long-running study of pediatric drugs.
The number of children in the sample of 300,000 taking antidepressants rose 15 percent in the first three months of this year, compared with the first quarter of 2003, Medco said. Last year, 65 percent of all children and adolescents taking behavioral medicines were on antidepressants.
Many of the children were taking both antidepressants and attention disorder drugs, or combinations of other behavioral medicines. Dr. Zito said there had been "a huge growth" in children taking combinations of these drugs although clinical studies of the risks have had little attention.
In March, the federal Food and Drug Administration ordered manufacturers to include warnings of a risk of dangerous side effects, including suicide, on these products. The Medco study did not review prescribing patterns after the F.D.A. order, Dr. Epstein said.
Why parent children? Drug them into drooling stupidity and then we wonder about society.
PING
Most of the parents are already drooling stupid from the drugs they did "back in the day" and some of the junk they still take now.
Drug 'em now, worry about the possible negative consequences later..
Law enforcement spends millions busting up meth labs, seizing property, jailing the perpetrators.
In the meantime, Doctors, with the encouragement of school administrators and parents, drug children with those same methamphetamines..
(To Whom It May Concern: Yes, they are "chemically" different, but the symptoms and side effects are the same.. I don't want to hear any justifications for rampant abuse of these drugs.)
One ADHD drug, Desoxyn is methamphetamine.
The public school system has become the legal "pushers" these days for these mind altering drugs. A child who needs attention is identified early on and can be recommended for behavior modification.
There is no need for "illegal" drug trade in this nation, the only thing stopping most from using prescribed drugs is the paper trail. However the "children" have no choice and their paper trail is begun in elementary school.
And when they become adults, and have this on their "permanent record" they will be unable to own guns legally.
The public schools and the big drug companies.
A prime example: http://www.adderallxr.com/
I do recall a columnist (Maggie Gallagher?) commenting that while there has never been a study tracing legal drug usage (e.g., Ritalin) to illegal drug usage, there does seem to be anecdotal evidence pointing that way. Ritalin is very similar to cocaine -- really, a legal version of it.
"Ok class, as soon you all take your pills, the D.A.R.E. presentation can begin."
He was showing signs of this in first grade (he just completed the fourth) and we let it slide, we figured it was something he'd grow out of. The next year, in the second grade, about a month into school his teacher ... a wonderful woman who still hugs my son's neck every time she sees him ... called my wife and I in for a conference. She and the principal, another fine woman, were there and after we opened the session with prayer ... one of the advantages of a Christian school ... his teacher began going over, in a very detailed fashion, with examples of his work, specific instances of things that had happened in class, etc., her observations of the situation with our son.
I'm not going to take up bandwidth describing everything that was going on, suffice it to say that he basically was not in the same area or zip code, and often not even on the same planet, with everyone else in the room, with a complete inability to focus and he would pretty much literally be distracted by a fly on the wall.
She had a sheet on which there were 13 indicators of an ADD problem listed, and our son was 13 for 13.
There was no pressure ... not one bit ... applied to us to take any specific course of action here. The teacher and the principal said they simply felt we should know this and that they would support us, 100 percent, in whatever course of action we chose to take.
That action proved to be consulting a doctor ... psychiatrist, required by our insurer ... who after a detailed assessment diagnosed our child as ADD. She advised that we put him on Ritalin.
That scared the you-know-what out of us, plus we had always sat upon our ivory tower and said, "We'll die and go to you-know-where before we drug our child."
But we researched it, thought about it, prayed about it and decided to move forward. What cinched it was a conversation with our Sunday school teacher, who also had an ADD child who had to take Ritalin up until his high school years (didn't hurt him too badly, he's now in the Air Force and is a crew chief in charge of maintaining a jet fighter, which kind of goes against the urban legend that if you've been on Ritalin nobody will ever let you do anything like that). She said something to the effect of, "This is something you can't see, but so is high blood pressure and you give people medication for that. This is no different."
So we went forward with the Ritalin. Our doctor said if there was no ADD problem, the medicine would have no effect on him. If there was an ADD problem, we would see an immediate effect. We saw an immediate effect. Within a week, our child's teacher called us in for another conference and said it was like night and day, the situation had gotten so much better. She kept describing it as "he's with me now." Bottom line, our child who had been struggling gradewise after only a month of school ended up on the A honor roll and winning an award at the end of the school for the child who'd overcome the most obstacles during the year.
He remained on Ritalin for another couple of years, then he began developing some eye tics, which can be a side effect. We IMMEDIATELY removed him from the drug and began looking for another alternative. We tried Adderall, which is amphetamine, again very fearfully, and we stopped that after two doses, it basically turned our child into a zombie who could barely stay awake and we simply were not going to have that.
Thankfully, a new alternative had just become available at that time called Strattera, which is not a stimulant and not a schedule drug, unlike Ritalin which is a schedule drug and can only be written in 30-day prescriptions with no refills, you can actually get 90-day maintenance prescriptions of Strattera by mail and can get refills, even refills phoned in by the doctor. And it has worked quite well for our child, it helps keep him on the same planet with everybody else but doesn't drug him to the point where he can't be a child (he plays basketball, plays piano, sings in the choir at church, is already extremely interested in history and politics).
The point of me going into this is to say that while I think anyone who would drug children into zombiedom just to make them behave and so they won't be bothersome is IMHO an unfit parent, and the prescribing of strong anti-depressants, etc., for children is quite scary, you can't just arbitrarily say that "medicating children in any shape, form or fashion or in all instances is wrong, 100 percent of the time, period." You have to look at individual situations. All I can do is offer the evidence, anecdotal as it is, of my situation for everyone to consider. It's worked for us.
The thing is, though, it is not a magic bullet. Our doctor told us on Day 1, you can't just give the child a pill and expect everything to be fixed, there are a lot of other things that have to be done by both parents and teachers if you're going to adequately address the situation. We've done those things, and you can bet we're a familiar presence around our child's school, we stay on top of things to point where the principal told us the other day they wished more parents would be like us (again, another advantage of private Christian education, public school teachers would probably say, "Go away and let us alone.")
Examples of the non-drug things: our child's teachers give him one paper to work on at a time, instead of three or four like the other kids might get ... also, our school uses Saxon Math, favored by home-schoolers, which is old-fashioned math, lots of equations and stuff. One of the deals is they have to complete like 50 or 100 equations in a set period of time. Our son, who's very good in math, was getting thrown for a loop by that, he'd get his paper and see all those equations and even medicated would zone out. So my wife came up with the idea, and the teachers have all gone for it, of taking an 8 1/2 by 11 piece of cardboard with a slot cut out of it, where he puts it on his paper and he sees only one row at a time, and that's worked wonders.
Again, the medication is not a magic bullet or a quick fix, it takes more, it takes being an involved parent.
And FYI, our child's doctor expects this to be something our son will grow out of and in fact has proposed letting him start the school year off his medication to see what happens.
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