Using ADHD medications has become the modern solution for a child’s behavioral and academic problems. Medicating troubled children has become even easier with the American Academy of Pediatrics’s new ruling last month. They declared that children as young as 4 years old can receive the ADHD diagnosis and get treated with dangerous amphetamines like Ritalin. It just goes to show how drug companies have successfully marketed their “chemical imbalance” theory as the root of childhood behavioral disorders.

However, alternative theories to the causes of ADHD are also becoming widely accepted. One of these is the idea that family stress can be as toxic to children as it is to the parent, triggering troubled behavior and other symptoms that resemble ADHD.

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A parent recently posed a very interesting question – are sickly children more likely to have ADHD than healthy ones? Before her daughter was diagnosed with ADHD, she had frequent asthma attacks and was prone to ear infections. When she compared notes with a fellow parent who has a son with ADHD, she discovered that the boy also suffers from chronic allergies and experienced upper respiratory tract infections on a regular basis.

Most doctors would say that there is no connection between ADHD and these illnesses; after all, ADHD is a neurological problem while these common childhood illnesses are caused by environmental irritants, genetics, or bacteria. But if you look beyond the superficial symptoms and asses the body as a whole, you’ll find that these health problems are no coincidence.

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Lack of focus, forgetfulness, and hyperactive behavior – children with ADHD put up with a lot of symptoms and discomfort.  But these aren’t the only problems they have to deal with. Research shows that kids with ADHD are also more likely to experience allergies than kids without.  There is no easy explanation for why this happens but we do know that certain allergies, such as an intolerance to artificial food additives, can make the disorder worse for some kids.  Although many allergens cannot be controlled (e.g. high pollen count), it is possible to avoid triggers that aggravate ADHD symptoms.

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A medical diagnosis should never view the disorder in terms of black and white, especially with a condition as complex as ADHD.  What I mean by this is that the ADHD diagnosis should not be made after checking a list of symptoms, because there are many similar disorders that are characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, or impulsivity.  Additionally, there are hundreds possible reasons behind your child’s behavior, and if these causes are not treated properly, your child’s problems will continue to persist. A wrong diagnosis is just as harmful as no diagnosis at all. Not only is your child not getting the help needed, but he or she is being treated for a condition that isn’t there and needlessly suffering the side effects of this treatment.

So when should you get a second opinion? Here are a few instances.

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At the UnRitalin Solution, we ask the parents about the circumstances surrounding the pregnancy and birth of their child. It may seem unrelated at first, but the answers often yield helpful clues about their child’s ADHD causes and how best to treat their condition. Functional medicine refers to these birth and pregnancy complications as antecedents, factors that increase the risk of ADHD and other disorders. Certain triggers can set these antecedents off and cause full-blown ADHD symptoms to emerge.

One thing I’ve observed among my young ADHD patients is that many of them were born prematurely, came from complicated pregnancies, and/or had low birth weight. These antecedents interfere with the development of the nervous system, especially if the child suffers from complications. Using government health records, a study by Swedish researchers at Stockholm’s Karolinska Institutet found an association between premature birth and ADHD. The more premature the deliver is, the higher the risk for ADHD.

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Is there a smoker in the family? Here’s one more reason to kick the habit.  Researchers from the United States examined nearly 3,000 children, and discovered that those with highest concentrations of cigarette chemicals in their blood were more likely to have mental health issues and behavioral problems. The presence of ADHD symptoms was particularly strong in these kids.

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In the 1960s, Dr. Benjamin Feingold uncovered a relationship between ADHD and artificial food additives. He observed that upon ingesting foods with these additives, the children’s bodies reacted adversely and became hyperactive and aggressive. Some estimates suggest that the consumption of artificial additives doubled since the 1990s, which can explain the increase behind ADHD cases in recent years.

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Anyone who has ever taught, lived with, or spent time with an ADHD child has noticed that the disorder is more than just the three core symptoms. They are correct in this observation; inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are just the tip of a large iceberg.  What lies underneath its surface?

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Children age 12 and below need at least 10 hours of sleep each night, especially if they have ADHD.  Studies have shown that when ADHD children don’t get enough sleep, they become more hyperactive, inattentive, and irritable the following day. But what qualifies as “not enough sleep” and how bad do ADHD symptoms get? A new study in the scientific journal Sleep reveals that as little as one less hour of sleep is enough to make the academic performance of ADHD students deteriorate.

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Many parents I’ve spoken to make the same observation about their ADHD children’s sleep habits: they have a hard time falling asleep, staying asleep, or waking up in the morning.  When they don’t get enough sleep the previous night, they spend the rest of the day in an ADHD funk with their symptoms in overdrive. These observations are hardly surprising – sleep problems and ADHD are closely related because the regions of the brain responsible for attention also regulate sleep. While there’s not much you can do to change your child’s biology, there are a few things that can be done to help your child get enough sleep.

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