Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, more commonly known as ADHD, is the “most extensively studied and diagnosed pediatric mental health disorder” (Fulton 2015).  Classified by a broad list of symptoms, the criteria set forth by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) is used by medical professionals to determine the presence of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder in children.  In everyday terms, children with ADHD are characterized by hyperactivity, impulsive and disruptive behaviors, and distractibility.  However, many doctors are mistaking immaturity for a neurological problem, explaining why over 11% or 6.4 million children in the United States received a diagnosis in 2011.  It was later discovered that, of those 6.4 million, “Approximately 1.1 million children received an inappropriate diagnosis in 2015, and over 800,000 received stimulant medication” (Frances 2016).  The parents of children with ADHD are misled by doctors to believe that medication is the best and only approach for treatment, when in reality the negative effects of these stimulant medications outweigh the possible positive outcomes that could occur when pursuing alternative treatment options.  Parents should instead look into other routes to succor their children, and take a mixed treatment approach, allowing the possibility of their child’s success, without the slightest concern of harmful side effects that stimulant medications carry.

Stimulant medications like Focalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, and Ritalin, to name a few, are evidently the main treatments prescribed by doctors for children with ADHD (Wolraich 1990).  Although these stimulant medications carry the possibility of immediate and effective treatment, the plethora of side effects outweigh the few of those that can be positive.  These side effects include but are not limited to: suppressed appetite, moodiness, irritability, tics, and insomnia.  More severe possibilities instigated by these stimulants can include causing sudden cardiac death, liver damage, delaying growth, triggering depression, exacerbating psychosis,  suicidal thoughts, anxiety, myocardial infarction, cardiomyopathy, heart disease, and potentially altering someone’s neurological make-up completely (Lakhan 2012).  If parents were better informed by their children’s physicians after diagnosis, regarding the possible toxic outcomes of medication, more children may find a treatment that carries no possibility of harm to their health.

Children should not be taught from a young age that resulting to a pill to solve their problems is acceptable, one of the many reasons medication is not an acceptable primary treatment option for ADHD.  All medications are classified by schedules, based on their risk for abuse, among other things.  The majority of stimulant medications are regulated Schedule II drugs, the same class as OxyContin, Morphine, Codeine, and Vicodin, because of their potential for abuse and addiction.  Corresponding with other stimulants, the medications that are used to treat ADHD carry the possible possibility of leading to dependency, or even abuse.  The abuse of these medications have proven to be uniquely associated with the abuse of other prescription medications, proven through a study conducted by Shaheen Lakhan. According to the study, “stimulant users were more likely to report use of alcohol, cigarettes, marijuana, ecstasy, cocaine, and other risky behaviors” raising the startling thought that due to the longevity of many prescriptions, these side effects compile over long periods of time in children’s bodies, and end up harming them more than helping (Lakhan 2012).  Taking into consideration that many adolescents are handed prescriptions beginning at a very young age, it is imperative that parents are fully aware of the detrimental side effects these stimulants can bring their children later on in life before allowing them to take the pills every day.

The idea that these stimulants are an immediate solution, concluded by the false information provided by doctors, is what pulls parents in, and causes them to instantaneously jump to medication as their decided treatment option.  The FDA, responsible for regulating medical products and drugs, has had countless issues with the drug companies that advertise stimulants like Adderall and Focalin for falsely and misleadingly advertising, encouraging doctors to make more diagnoses (Schwarz 2013).  Data shows that the numbers of prescriptions handed out by doctors are directly correlated with pharmaceutical companies wanting to push certain products to doctors and parents, presenting these pills as a cure with no possible side effects.  That information along with pharmaceutical representatives themselves that are supposed to be fully confident in the drug and everything it is advertised to do, are even hesitant about the drugs themselves, “Roger Griggs, the pharmaceutical executive who introduced Adderall in 1994 strongly opposed marketing stimulants because of their dangers, calling them “nuclear bombs to the brain” (Schwarz 2013).  For parents looking for comfort after realizing how dangerous these medications are, there is conclusive proof found by the Association for Youth, that children can find solutions to overcome their ADHD and the setback the disorder brings them without medication, which is a better option than taking drugs with such destructive effects.

Many providers feel that making a diagnosis is the only reasonable option, due to “pressure to conduct rapid assessments, and the difficulty of distinguishing between illness and normal variation” (Paris 2015).  The absence of a structured list of criterion needed for the diagnosis of ADHD, set forth by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), which lacks a concrete list of symptoms, is likely the main contributor to the unwarranted number of diagnoses made.  Unlike other mental disorders like bipolar disorder, depression, or anxiety, ADHD is not classified by a specific list of criterion that physicians are advised to use to directly and properly diagnose this disorder, or distinguish the severity accurately.  These rapid assessments that are being conducted by physicians should instead be conducted over an extended period of time, collecting accounts from different people in the child’s life, addressing the child’s behavior in multiple settings, and following up after other approaches have been attempted, before the thought of resulting to medication is even considered. No matter how many symptoms are detected, “We should let kids outgrow immaturity the old fashioned way by getting older, not treat it with a pill… Preventing over diagnosis and misdiagnoses requires multiple approaches, including improving access to behavioral treatments, adapting billing systems to reduce tendencies to diagnose questionable cases, and improving access to comprehensive evaluations” (Frances 2016).  Though these over and misdiagnoses are not the main problem at hand, nonmedicinal treatments do not necessitate accurate diagnoses, so any child with any type of behavior or attention problem can benefit from these treatments.  In order to increase the prevalence of nonmedicinal treatment as a primary treatment approach for children with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, doctors must be more thorough in their explanations of treatment options that parents can take, entirely explaining that nonmedicinal treatment may take longer to show improvement in their children, contrasting to the likely immediate expression of results that medications are shown to bring, the common side effects, along with the possibility of deadly side effects of stimulant medication are not worth eliminating a few months in time.

Taking a multimodal approach towards treating a child’s ADHD should be an approach 

that more doctors inform their patients and their parents about taking, rather than jumping to stimulant medication as the first and only option.  Concluded by a study conducted by Julie Zito, assessing the temporal patterns of office visits for ADHD and stimulant treatment among children between the ages of five and fourteen concluded that, “More than three quarters of youth visits for ADHD resulted in medication treatment” (Zito 1999).  Instead of primarily resorting to medications, which should be the last choice, the first step towards treatment of ADHD following diagnosis should instead be chosen from a list of nonmedicinal treatments, including: cognitive behavioral therapy, exercised-based methods, parental training, or neurofeedback training, choosing at least two, to try primarily.  What needs to be addressed is the way doctors are presenting different medications as a treatment options, leading parents to believe that there are few, if no side effects, when in reality the effects of these stimulant medications can be toxic, contrary to the nonmedicinal routes of treatment.  It has been proven that in countless cases following a diagnosis, the majority of families immediately receive a prescription, and instantly, incorrectly put their child on stimulants, “The paucity of nondrug therapies used with children with a diagnosis of ADHD is of concern given the findings that suggest the importance of multimodality therapy for long-term beneficial outcomes.” (Wolraich 1990) Studies have directly proven that taking a mixed methodology approach towards treatment, by mixing different nonmedicinal treatments offers long-term positive effects for the effected children, highlighting that parents should, if not informed by their physicians making these diagnoses, inform themselves regarding the help they can provide their children with, with no strings attached. 

Though ADHD impairs children in many ways, quite possibly even triggering self-esteem problems, and constant comparison to their peers, behavioral treatments used simultaneously with other nonmedicinal treatments, as a single component of a mixed methodology approach, has proven to not only improve the deficiency’s effects on a child’s performance, but also their entire morale, “A highly successful treatment for children who are inattentive and/or disruptive (regardless of whether they have ADHD) is cognitive-behavioral training; cognitive-behavioral therapy strategies have been shown to be highly promising.”  Thomas Power goes on to explain the approach, in his article titled “An Epidemic of ADHD diagnoses," that cognitive-behavioral therapy is a reward-based psychotherapy treatment that works on a child’s problem-solving skills, in hopes of changing their thinking patterns, allowing them to overcome their difficulties over a set of sessions.  This treatment option can also provide solutions to sleeping, anxiety, and depression problems, along with abuse problems.  Of all of the non-medicinal treatment options, one of the biggest advantages of cognitive behavioral therapy is that, in comparison to the other treatments, it is relatively short, only taking about five to ten months (Power 2013). In a Ted Talk given by Stephen Tonti, titled “ADHD As A Difference In Cognition, Not a Disorder,” Tonti opens up with his own personal life story of struggling with ADHD. He continues with the misconceptions many have heard regarding the disorder and the common acceptance of stimulant medication as a treatment option, but he provides his own personal solution, of encouraging children to teach themselves how to cope with the setbacks, and that our society, as a whole, needs to start to appreciate cognitive diversity instead of suppressing it with drugs.

The Dore Program, created by Wynford Dore, a businessman by trade, is a drug-free, exercise-based course of treatment offered to children with ADHD or other learning disabilities and disorders.  This program was created in hopes of curing Dore’s own daughter’s Dyslexia and ADHD, after Dore realized that medication was not going to be an option for their family.  The theory behind the program is that it helps stimulate the parts of the cerebellum that aren’t properly developed, due to the disorder.  The program, being run by Wynford Dore himself, has established itself in 50 different centers, called the “Dore Achievement Centre.”  The program encourages patients to perform daily cognitive and motor exercises, for 10 minutes, twice a day, in order to cure the delay in the cerebellum (Association for Youth 2009).  Chloe Roberts’s parents decided to start her treatment through the Dore Program, one of the many success stories featured in the eBook, choosing to keep her on the exercise-based regimen for nine months, and would assess her progress afterwards.  After a few months, though Chloe herself didn’t understand what these exercises were going to do for her, she unknowingly explained her improvement, “My school work is easier, reading and remembering things, too.”  This method, though only one of many, offers a remedy, of some sort to assuage the struggles that these children face on a day-to-day basis, with no possibility whatsoever of harmful effects to their health.

Parental training is also an option for parents to look into when deciding what methods to mix.  For any parent with a child that struggles with Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, it is important to learn how exactly to approach a lot of the problems that their child may be dealing with, and understand how to address them in an appropriate way.  Parent training and education allows parents to acquire the skills and approaches to implement rules and solutions for their children, indirectly addressing their struggles in hopes of alleviating them.  The topics that parents cover include: establishing house rules and consistent routines, using appropriate commands, offering their children positive reinforcement, but also setting consequences for inappropriate behavior, and, finally, keeping an at-home system for their child’s homework and schoolwork, to hold their child accountable for their work (Bailey 2005).  Parental training and attentiveness, will likely demonstrate noticeable improvement in a child, since children spend the most time at home, and the strategies consistently implemented in their lives along with their parent’s attitude towards the disorder as a whole are likely to be adopted by the children.

Though no one can determine if there is really such a thing as a “cure” for ADHD, there is a way to alleviate the setbacks it brings upon those who struggle with the disorder.  It is imperative that the negative effects of these medications that are pushed towards parents by physicians are more truthfully communicated, assuring that they are fully aware of what poisons they are introducing to their children’s bodies.  There are so many other ways to address a child’s inability to pay attention in school, or their inability to follow directions, rather than to just hand over a prescription that could have injurious effects on their health.  Taking a mixed methodology approach towards treatment, also called multimodal treatment, has proven to show improvement over the course of 14 months, using different combinations of medical and educational interventions, behavior modification programs, and psychological treatment, through a study conducted by the National Institute of Mental Health (Bailey 2005). Though many professionals mistake immaturity for ADHD, whether properly diagnosed or not, non-medicinal treatment options for ADHD are even applicable to children that don’t even have the disorder, offering them, too, a solution to their behavior and attention problems. With no worry regarding the ulterior motives of the treatments, unlike stimulant medication, approaching this impairment in a child’s life with a mixed methodology treatment carries no possible harm.  The plentiful misdiagnoses, though a problem of their own, are irrelevant when it comes to these non-medicinal treatments, because there is no possible harm in cognitive behavioral therapy, or exercise-based treatment plans.  The problem is not the parents of children with ADHD, but the poor judgement on behalf of the physicians that misdiagnose their children, those who lead these parents to think that their children “need” medication, for so many of the wrong reasons, and that it is the best and safest option, when in reality, it is not.  The approach parents take towards treatment in any sense will be adopted by their children, stressing the importance that medication should not be the first option. There are so many other ways to address a child’s inability to pay attention or follow directions, rather than to just hand over a prescription that could have detrimental effects on their health.  
