Children overmedicated

A thought-provoking article I just read in “The Washington Post National Weekly Edition,” states that the debate over the effectiveness of long-term drug treatment of children with hyperactivity or attention-deficit disorder has been reignited. For years, millions of parents have assumed these drug treatments were safe and okay to administer to their children over the long run. A recent study builds a case for an opposite conclusion.

The article stated, “In August 2007, the MTA (Multimodal Treatment Study of Children With ADHD), researchers reported the first follow-up data, which by then no longer showed differences in behavior between children who were medicated and those who were not. But the data did show that children who took the drugs for 36 months were about an inch shorter and six pounds lighter than those who did not.”

In light of this study that says that the drug treatment stunts the growth of children, I wonder what other aspects of the child’s experience is stunted? The study confirms short term benefits in child behavior modification, but over the long term the effects disappear and there is no difference between children who are medicated and those who are not, except that the medicated children are stunted.

Hmmm, this is not cool…

The article adds, “With the MTA having followed the children for eight years, the latest data have confirmed that there are no long-term differences between children who were continuously medicated and those who were never medicated.”

As I read this study, I grew increasingly grateful for the Christian Science approach to healing. People sometimes complain that Christian Science requires “too much work.” In other words, Christian Science demands reformation and spiritualization of thought for genuine healing. Some people don’t like to put in the work that spiritual healing asks. They want an easy way out. They don’t want to face their demons and conquer them. They turn to drugs. "Pop a pill and all your troubles go away," so some believe. But, as this study confirms, this is temporary illusion. There may be a short term effect, but the long term is not good, and can be quite the opposite.

Confirming many people’s tendency to dose with drugs rather than commit to character transformation and improvement, the article ended with this observation: “A yet-to-be-published study…found that 95 percent of parents who were told by clinicians to first try behavioral interventions for ADHD did so. When parents were given a prescription for a drug and then told to enroll their children in behavioral intervention programs, 75 percent did not seek out the behavioral approaches.”

It sounds like its time to get back to the “old-fashioned” approach and give the children what they really need. And that’s not more medicine, but more love, attention and care that enables them to feel closer to God, comforted by divine Love, and able to gain the resulting peace and calm that comes from being spiritually minded.