Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most commonly diagnosed, and misdiagnosed, disorders in children. This guide focuses on the root causes of ADHD and offers a natural and holistic approach to combat the disorder, encouraging families to find solutions that don't rely on psychostimulant drugs like Ritalin. Discover the many benefits of treating ADHD with a mixture of nutritional supplements, herbal medicines, and parenting techniques that foster self-esteem, creativity, self-discipline, and confidence. Aviva Romm is a certified professional midwife and president of the American Herbalists Guild. She has been an herbal medicine consultant to Reader's Digest Books and Baby Talk, Self, and New Woman magazines. She is co-author of ADHD Alternatives (Storey Books) and Naturally Healthy Babies and Children as well as The Natural Pregnancy Book. Aviva lives with her husband and her four children in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Tracy Romm, Ed.D., co-authored ADHD Alternatives with Aviva Jill Romm. Tracy is director of a high school for gifted students, where there is a large population of students diagnosed as ADHD.
Christopher Hobbs, PhD, LAc, is the author of Christopher Hobbs's Medicinal Mushrooms: The Essential Guide. He is an internationally renowned mycologist, herbal clinician, licensed acupuncturist, botanist, and research scientist with over 40 years of experience in herbal medicine. The author of more than 20 books, he lectures on herbal medicine worldwide. Hobbs has taught at universities and medical schools such as Stanford Medical School, Yale Medical School, Bastyr University, UC Berkeley, and the National School of Naturopathic Medicine. He lives in the Sierra foothills of California. 1 - The ADHD Epidemic
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a phenomenon of the late twentieth century. At no point in history have such large numbers of children thought to be diseased on the basis of what some might call unruly behavior. Yet in the past two decades, ADHD has become one of the most commonly diagnosed disorders of childhood in the United States. Controversy surrounds the precise numbers of children currently diagnosed with ADHD. Since U.S. doctors are not required to report their diagnoses to a central database, figures are extrapolated from surveys of smaller populations and from records on the production of Ritalin, the treatment most often prescribed for ADHD. The National Institutes of Health reported in 1999 that ADHD affected 3 to 5 percent of all school-age children in the United States, while Joseph Biederman, an influential ADHD researcher from Harvard Medical School, has suggested that as many as 10 percent is a more realistic approximation. Despite the lack of agreement, one thing is certain: The numbers are continuing to grow.
Records kept by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency on the production of Ritalin show a steady annual output of 1,700 kilograms of Ritalin through the 1980s, fluctuating only slightly each year. Beginning in the early 1990s, however, Ritalin production rose sharply - with a record production of 13,824 kilograms in 1997, 90 percent of which was consumed in the United States. This dramatic 700 percent increase led pediatrician Barry Diller to conclude that, since 1990, the number of adults and children diagnosed with ADHD in the United States alone has risen from about 900,000 to almost 5 million. It is clear that ADHD has become a public health concern of epidemic proportions.
The History of ADHD
The emergence of ADHD represents the medicalization of what have typically been considered normal childhood behaviors. What one ADHD expert calls the "holy trinity" of symptoms - poor self-control (impulsivity), poor attention (distractibility), and excessive activity (hyperactivity) - describes behaviors that seem to characterize all children at some point or another. So when did these behaviors become an illness?
Author and ADHD
