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Are we over trusting our Doctors?


Lately I've watched "The Medical Child," for my psychology class.  "Marcel Gaviria confronts psychiatrists, researchers and government regulator about the risks, benefits and many questions surrounding prescription drugs for troubled children."  Interviewing doctors, families, and those who responsible to do research on the medication that children take.

http://www.chiro.org/pediatrics/DISCONTINUED/ritalin.gif
Since 1990's, the bipolar disorder is skyrocketed among children.  More and more parents are told that the way their child behaves is not normal, therefor medication is the solution.  The bipolar disorder is "A psychological disorder marked by manic and depressive episodes" (Taber's Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary).  In other words, the mood swing back and forth from being hyper to a depression mode.  But can you really do this analysis on the children? What if that's a normal behavior for being a child?  

How do we know this is a disorder or not? What is the disorder and what is the normal behavior? The way that disorders are identified is, scientist take a category of people and observe how they behave.  To understand this better let's put a number to this.  For example, let's say scientist were observing 1000 people.  Out those thousand people, eight hundred behave the same (which would identified as normal behavior) and two hundred are different.  So scientist would take these two hundred people and do more studies on them.  They would recognize that those two hundred people split in five or six groups.  For those five or six groups, they would come up with a name and do more studies on them.  But is that a disorder or a normal life?

What happen with bipolar disorder, usually this disorder is in adults.  But they took this disorder and applied it to children life—and that's a mistake.  There are behavior that are normal in childhood but are not normal in adulthood; things that are normal for adults would not be normal for children.  For example, children would be running around all day long and still have energy, but for the adults, two/three miles is enough for the exercise and then comes exhaustion.  When children fall, they get up and continue running; when adults fall, they lay there for couple of minutes and then take another day to regain their normal activity.  Children behave and act very different from an adults.

For generation, parents had five, ten children and took the responsibility to discipline them, but now it all changes.  Parents do not want to cope with the child's hyper active behavior so they use the drugs to keep them calm.  Talk about an abuse from a parents side.  That's not all, these drugs have an side affects that ruins the child future.  This child will be obligated to use those drugs for the rest of his life.  But is this the way to treat your child behavior?  

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/view/#morelink
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RhiannonPurcell said…
I agree with what you have had to say about the lack of parents taking responsibility for their children and how they behave. Medication on such young brains can alter the natural functions and chemical balances that our body was meant to do on its own. Yes their are people who have an imbalance , I myself included, but I do not blame my behaviors on the medication or lack of. I feel parents should be more of an advocate for their children and become more educated rather than just medicating a child that has a behavioral problem. I know as a parent, when I see my children acting out, I will take a step back and see what as a parent is my part in it and what I can do to better the situations or the behaviors in my child. It is a touchy subject, and I don't deny that it doesn't help for some children, t just need to be better regulated by the doctors and the government.
February 6, 2012 at 5:10 PM
liz said…
I think that you are very right I also believe that the age of media has helped this expansion to creating children that are hyperactive they are also educated in a system that says you need to be a certain way, we have no room to teach to anyone that is not the mean, if you don't fit in this system we need to fix it, it is too much work otherwise, and parents today are very busy many working many jobs stressed about paying their bills, worried about keeping their house, worried about so much that when they have a child that needs lots of extra help it is easy to say medication is the answer. I am not saying that medication does not help but what I am saying is how quick are we to try it did we try other things and if so for how long, maybe the very thing that makes them different and special needs to be view as OK so you don't fit the norm we need to find something that works best for you. Just a thought
February 7, 2012 at 6:31 PM
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