The_Medicated_Child

“The Medicated Child” A PBS Documentary For well over 20 years pediatricians, family physicians and social workers have tried to help out distressed parents and their afflicted children. Parents have sought out their help for many reasons. In the piece we saw today, it focused on four families with children that presented abnormal symptoms of behavior and the over prescription of medication these children were receiving. One thing that was clear in the story is that most of the featured doctors only spoke to the parents of the young child and not the affected child directly. One doctor even advised against the parents going to go see a child psychologist which could have alleviated the need for adding one more drug or upping the dosage to the already overloaded medicated regimen this child was already receiving. The doctors’ diagnosis for these children had been ADHD, ADD or Bi-polar disorder. There has been an ever increasing diagnosis on Pediatric Bipolar Disease by the staggering increase of 4,000%. Most of the doctors are following the theories of Dr. Beiderman who believes that most children have been misdiagnosed and should be re-diagnosed with Pediatric Bi-polar disease. It became all too clear in this presentation that the diagnoses that were prescribed were only mere educated guesses as to how to “handle” and not cure the child’s symptomatic behavior. Guesses! That is absurd! Over the course of time, there have been no real findings that any of these behaviorally challenged children were helped at all by being given the medication of both the harsh Atypical Psychotropic Medication vs. the SSRI’s. It wasn’t until 1997 that President Clinton ordered the Pharmaceutical Companies to begin conducting study trials on children to see what the effects and adverse reactions these drugs were creating in these children. The drug companies were also given a very generous kickback of exclusive rights to future drugs and also 1 Billion dollars in funding. Some of the findings were conducted on Zoloft and Paxil. After the study concluded it resulted in labeling these drugs with a black box. This labeling was also found to have adverse reactions in that doctor’s started to shy away from using these drugs and started using the more harsh Atypical drugs. In conclusion it is starting to become obvious that doctors around the world need to come together to share the information they have from their patients so that future generations can benefit from this knowledge and the children will not be so over medicated.