Health experts are prescribing some powerful attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) pills for some low-income children without the disorder, to help them improve their academic performance.
Dr. Michael Anderson, a pediatrician for many poor families in Cherokee County, north of Atlanta, revealed to The New York Times, prescribing Adderall, a psychostimulant drug used to treat narcolepsy and ADHD to improve focus and impulse control of these children.
Apart from that, he also revealed categorizing these children under ADHD a "made up" and "an excuse" and as a remedy to improve the poor academic performance in inadequate schools.
"I don't have a whole lot of choice," Dr. Anderson told The New York Times. "We've decided as a society that it's too expensive to modify the kid's environment. So we have to modify the kid."
ADHD is a disorder that affects one in 11 American children. ADHD children experience problems of attention, trouble in controlling impulsive behaviors or acting without thinking about the consequences and hyperactivity.
According to the media reports, the method of prescribing ADHD medication to struggling students is becoming more popular among health experts.
"We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective non pharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families," Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, a child mental-health services researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children told The New York Times. "We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications."
As a support to the report, a study conducted by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), based on the 2002-2010 records of sales and prescription reports for more than 2,000 drugs recently found ADHD medication for U.S. children escalated by 46 percent or about 800,000 prescriptions a year.
Following are some of the side effects of Adderall provided by the eMedTV ADHD Health Channel:
* Tachycardia or increased heart rate
* UTI (urinary tract infection) and other infections
* Asthenia or weakness
* Heart burn and fever
* High BP (temporary)
* Stomach ache
* Anorexia or loss of appetite
* Insomnia or difficulty sleeping
* Headaches, dizziness, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea
* Dry mouth
* Weight loss
* Emotional changes
