3dayrun said:
why is it that folks with absolutely no qualifications to make blanket judgements think it's best to avoid some medications?
Oh, so we're playing the credential card now, are we? Watch out! This could be dangerous when you know little about those with whom you discuss.
So I'll play: I hold a bachelor's degree in psychology, worked in a lab researching visual attention (from which I have one coauthorship), spending a good deal of time examining attention deficit disorder's effects on basic attentional control, partly in search of a reliable diagnostic tool (as none currently exist) (for which the aforementioned paper provides the theoretical background).
Amphetamines have been approved for ADHD for children for quite a while now and therapuetic doses have proven to be safe.
safe to what degree? Research that I've seen has shown administration of methylphenidate to juvenile rats at doses mg/kg equivalent to common therapeutic regimens to cause permanent changes in neural physiology. Keep in mind that this is a DARI, understood to be vastly less neurotoxic than, say, meth (for your kids, desoxyn), and somewhat less neurotoxic than DA releasers that don't affect 5ht. Granted, these are minor changes, not necessarily indicative of 'damage' (increased dendrite proliferation in the frontal lobes, IIRC), but nonetheless alarming.
Please also keep in mind that physiological side-effects which mimic natural stress aren't that healthy, increasing minorly the risk of adverse cardiac events (which is pretty low for youths) but more importantly taking their toll on mental health. Concurrent psychiatric medication to treat stimulants' side-effects in children is rather common in the US.
it just irritates me that a medication that is safe and works
How well do they 'work'? Research has shown these medications to, on average, lose effectiveness after two years, even with increasing dosage.
...
If these things work for you, then great, but they're hardly innocuous. What level of disorder warrants exposing children to these dangers without their informed consent?
ebola
