Crazy Dr. Experience and what did you do?

[JaiBH]

I strongly strongly believe my husband is ADHD we have tested online on sites various--- that have concluded the same. My husband believes or should I say believed that his sympoms were strongly symptomatic of someone with ADHD.



Problem we went to a Dr. the other day whom I might add was defintley in my opinion ADHD--- he and my husband both were sitting there fidgetting and tapping away while I sat still...... He also changed subjects about 10 times in 20 minutes. Everything from ADHD-- Assisted Suicide and Louis and Clark anyway-- this DR. Basicly told my husband and I that ADHD was a hoax and that it was a label that society wants to place on busy people. He also said the meds don't work and the online test were just a plow by the drug companies to get people to FAIL and seek help. He even admitted he failed.

My husband was already hesistant--- but he sat there trying to tell the Dr. about things that worried him. I did the same. My husband was already worried about taking meds and didn't want to change his diet. I am so annoyed. OH did I mention that this was a private physician that I needed to refer us to a psychologist because of our HMO. hmmmm-
ANYway I left Yesterday Very angry.... whoa is me

[exeter]

I think I'd call up the insurance company and find a different doc! Whenever anyone up front states that they think ADHD is not real, I think that is a signal to find a more open minded doctor.

[divinita]

What a nightmare...just what you did not need.
Any way you can do what Exeter said and get another opinion?
I hope so...

[mctavish23]

Please (seriously) report the doctor to the State Medical Board and also the Insurance (managed care) panel. Its unethical to deceive the public and ignorance doesnt count because the "accepted standard of practice" around the world is that ADHD is real.

The ethical thing for him to do would have been to tell you he was biased , in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and refer you to someone else.

The mental health field is rapidly moving towards "evidenced based practice." In other words your psychologist/therapist has to use techniques that are supported by research as being safe and effective; meaning they actually work for that condition.

If you would please go to Russell Barkley's website and look for the journal article entitled......... International Consensus 2002.........In it you will see that it is the most comprehensive study available on the proof of ADHD's existence; as it is signed off on by over 80 of the world's leading scientist's, with 19 pages of references all confirming its real.

What's more, the article goes on to say that ...... " ADHD is recognized as a medical condition/disorder by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics." You can throw in the World Health Organization (WHO) too for good measure.

So it doesnt matter if he was a medical doc. He is out of step with his own national association.The bottom line is that in taking the Hippocratic Oath, as my father,uncle and grandfather did, you pledge not to harm the patient. Depriving you of the correct ( readily available) information is potentially harmful to you in terms of the possibility of driving accidents, lost jobs, educational /academic problems, etc.

As if that's not enough, you can go to the link on the US Surgeon General's Report on Mental Health :Chapter 3: Disorders of Infancy, Childhood and Adolescence.

It goes into the history of ADHD over the years, starting with the first research study presented in a series of 3 papers to the Royal Academy in 1902 by London physician George Still. It also includes the reference to the research study that first discovered the genetic marker for ADHD in 1995 (Cook,et.al. 1995).

Both of those can be printed out. I REALLY WISH YOU'D PRINT THEM OUT AND SEND THEM TO THE DOC.

In all seriousness, I came out of "retirement" from posting to comment on this. As an adult ADHD, I am disappointed.

As a licensed(clinical/child ) psychologist and Board Certified Psychotherapist, I AM FURIOUS.

I wish you much luck

Please get a second opinion from someone who isn't incompetent. What you described is an ethical violation that should be reported. I hope you follow up on that.

There's a difference between personal opinion and professional competency.
Take care.

[speedo]

I'll agree , that in some ways ADD is a catch-all term. Mostly because everything from environmental stress to lead posioning to hyperthyroid, to tinnitus (and a lot more) can cause ADD-like symptoms. And, interestingly enough, sometimes ADD-like symptoms are caused by ADD!

The thing that doctor is missing is that the patient still has the symptoms , and is suffering.

I'm amazed the doctor did not even consider blood tersts for lead, hypoglycemia and thyroid problems. This is a biggie for adult males, and the tests are inexpensive and easy to perform....

The doctor is an ignorant churl... go find some proper medical care.

Find another doctor. The man is obviously paid off, or uninformed. In either case, you need another doctor when you say "it hurts" and the doctor tells you it does not, and writes off your health in order to save the insurance company $40.

Me

[scuro]

From the big man himself. Here is what Dr. Russell Barkley says about other possible reasons for attentional difficulties. People should read this guy. I hear he knows what he is talking about.
http://www.continuingedcourses.net/a.../course003.php



Thyroid Disorder

Resistance to thyroid hormone (RTH) represents a variable tissue hyposensitivity to thyroid hormone. It is inherited as an autosomal dominant characteristic in most cases. It has been associated with mutations in the thyroid hormone beta receptor gene, thus a single gene for the disorder has been identified. One study (Hauser, Zametkin, Martinez, et al., 1991) found that 70 percent of individuals with RTH had ADHD. Other research has suggested that 64 percent of patients with RTH display hyperactivity or learning disabilities (Refetoff, Weiss, & Usala, 1993). A later study was not able to corroborate a link between RTH and ADHD (Weiss, Stein, Trommer et al., 1993). In a subsequent study, Stein, Weiss, and Refetoff (1995) did find that half of their children with RTH met clinical diagnostic criteria for ADHD. Even so, the degree of ADHD in RTH patients is believed to be milder than that seen in clinic-referred and diagnosed cases of ADHD. The RTH patients often have more learning difficulties and cognitive impairments than do the ADHD children without RTH. Given that RTH is exceptionally rare in children with ADHD (prevalence of 1:2500) (Elia et al., 1994), then thyroid dysfunction is unlikely to be a major cause of ADHD in the population. An interesting recent finding is that RTH children having ADHD may show a positive behavioral response to liothyronine, with decreased impulsiveness, than do ADHD children who do not have RTH (Weiss, Stein, & Refetoff, 1997).

Environmental Toxins

As the twin and quantitative genetic studies have suggested, unique environmental events may play some role in individual differences in symptoms of ADHD. This should not be taken to mean only those influences within the realm of psychosocial or family influences. As noted above, variance in the expression of ADHD that may be due to environmental sources means all nongenetic sources more generally. These include pre-, peri-, and post-natal complications, and malnutrition, diseases, trauma, toxin exposure, and other neurologically compromising events that may occur during the development of the nervous system before and after birth. Among these various biologically compromising events, several have been repeatedly linked to risks for inattention and hyperactive behavior.

One such factor is exposure to environmental toxins, specifically lead. Elevated body lead burden has been shown to have a small but consistent and statistically significant relationship to the symptoms comprising ADHD (Baloh, Sturm, Green, & Gleser, 1975; David, 1974; de la Burde & Choate, 1972, 1974; Needleman et al, 1979; Needleman et al., 1990). However, even at relatively high levels of lead, less than 38 percent of children are rated as having the behavior of hyperactivity on a teacher rating scale (Needleman et al., 1979) implying that most lead poisoned children do not develop symptoms of ADHD. And most ADHD children, likewise, do not have significantly elevated lead burdens, although one study indicates their lead levels may be higher than in control subjects (Eskinazi & Gittelman, 1983). Studies which have controlled for the presence of potentially confounding factors in this relationship have found the association between body lead (in blood or dentition) and symptoms of ADHD to be .10-.19 with the more factors controlled, the more likely the relationship falls below .10 (Ferguson, Ferguson, Horwood, & Kinzett, 1988; Silva, Hughes, Williams, & Faed, 1988; Thompson et al., 1989). Only 4 percent or less of the variance in the expression of these symptoms in children with elevated lead is explained by lead levels. Moreover, two serious methodological issues plague even the better conducted studies in this area: (1) None of the studies have used clinical criteria for a diagnosis of ADHD to determine precisely what percentage of lead-burdened children actually have the disorder -- all have simply used behavior ratings comprising only a small number of items of inattention or hyperactivity; and (2) none of the studies assessed for the presence of ADHD in the parents and controlled its contribution to the relationship. Given the high heritability of ADHD, this factor alone could attenuate the already small correlation between lead and symptoms of ADHD by as much as a third to a half of its present levels.

Other types of environmental toxins found to have some relationship to inattention and hyperactivity are prenatal exposure to alcohol and tobacco smoke (Bennett, Wolin, & Reiss, 1988; Denson et al., 1975; Milberger, Biederman, Faraone, Chene, & Jones, 1996a; Nichols & Chen, 1981; Shaywitz, Cohen, & Shaywitz, 1980; Streissguth et al., 1984; Streissguth, Bookstein, Sampson, & Barr, 1995). It has also been shown that parents of children with ADHD do consume more alcohol and smoke more tobacco than control groups even when not pregnant (Cunningham et al., 1988; Denson et al., 1975). Thus, it is reasonable for research to continue to pursue the possibility that these environmental toxins may be causally related to ADHD. However, as in the lead studies discussed above, most research in this area suffers from the same two serious methodological limitations -- the failure to utilize clinical diagnostic criteria to determine rates of ADHD in exposed children and the failure to evaluate and control for the presence of ADHD in the parents. Until these steps are taken in future research, the relationships demonstrated so far between these toxins and ADHD must be viewed with some caution. In the area of maternal smoking during pregnancy, at least, such improvements in methodology were used in a recent study that found the relationship between maternal smoking during pregnancy and ADHD to remain significant after controlling for symptoms of ADHD in the parent (Milberger et al., 1996a).
Psychosocial Factors

A few environmental theories of ADHD were proposed over 20 years ago (Block, 1977; Willis & Lovaas, 1977) but have not received much support in the available literature since then. Willis and Lovaas (1977) claimed that hyperactive behavior was the result of poor stimulus control by maternal commands and that this poor regulation of behavior arose from poor parental management of the children. Others have also conjectured that ADHD results from difficulties in the parents’ over-stimulating approach to caring for and managing the child as well as parental psychological problems (Carlson, Jacobvitz, & Sroufe, 1995; Jacobvitz & Sroufe, 1987; Silverman & Ragusa, 1992). But these conjectures have not articulated just how deficits in behavioral inhibition, executive functioning, and other cognitive deficits commonly associated with clinically diagnosed ADHD as described above could arise purely from such social factors. Moreover, many of these studies proclaiming to have evidence of parental characteristics as potentially causative of ADHD have not used clinical diagnostic criteria to identify their children as ADHD, instead relying merely on elevated parental ratings of hyperactivity or laboratory demonstrations of distractibility to classify the children as ADHD (Carlson et al., 1995; Silverman & Ragusa, 1992). Nor have these purely social theories received much support in the available literature that has studied clinically diagnosed children with ADHD (see Danforth et al., 1991; Johnston & Mash, 2001).

In view of the twin studies discussed above that show minimal, nonsignificant contributions of the common or shared environment to the expression of symptoms of ADHD, theories based entirely on social explanations of the origins of ADHD are difficult to take seriously any longer. This is not to say that the family and larger social environment do not matter, for they surely do. Despite the large role heredity seems to play in ADHD symptoms, they remain malleable to unique environmental influences and nonshared social learning. The actual severity of the symptoms within a particular context, the continuity of those symptoms over development, the types of comorbid disorders that will develop, the peer relationship problems that may arise, and various outcome domains of the disorder are likely to be related in varying degrees to parent, family, and larger environmental factors (Johnson, Cohen, Kasen, Smailes, & Brook, 2001; Johnston & Mash, 2001; Milberger, 1997; Pfiffner, McBurnett, &Rathouz, 2001; van den Oord & Rowe, 1997). Yet even here care must be taken in interpreting these findings as evidence of a purely social contribution to ADHD. This is because many measures of family functioning and adversity also show a strong heritable contribution to them, largely owing to the presence of similar symptoms and disorders (and genes!) in the parents as may be evident in the child (Pike & Plomin, 1996; Plomin, 1995). Thus, there is a genetic contribution to the family environment; a fact that often goes overlooked in studies of family and social factors involved in ADHD.

[Albino Fox]

I'm noticing an interesting pattern here – psychologists with ADD end up either (1) recognizing it and make a great contribution to ADDers, or (2) denying it and dismissing ADD altogether as a hoax.

If you think about it, it's quite clear how this happens. The psychologist can learn about the disorder and either (1) recognize it in themselves, accept that they have it, and help others to do the same or (2) find its traits so 'normal' (having had it all their lives) that they deny the diagnosis's validity entirely.

Once again, we have an instance where ADD either becomes a great help or a great hindrance depending on the circumstances.