Raw Foodist

If you observe a wild cub, or even a domesticated puppy, they run free like the wind, jumping, chasing, racing and stopping only intermittently to observe something with great intent. This is the way children are designed to be: spontaneous, excited, impulsive, curious and free. I am sitting here reading my guide to review for the pharmacy boards and I came across the chapter on ADHD. The first sentence says it is a behavioral disorder characterized by inattentiveness and impulsive or hyperactive behavior. I read a lot of things, but every once and a while I read something that just sparks me and inspires me to write about it. As soon as I scanned this sentence, a tiny jolt of anger shot through my heart. This is so ridiculous. We are taking the normal, fun loving state of children and diagnosing them with a disease because they don’t want to sit properly behind a desk for 6-8 hours a day. Somewhere along the evolutionary line we decided that today’s society should be a certain way, and rather than let nature and freedom run their course while using teachers to facilitate the ability to master our hearts and our lives, we have decided that children should act a certain way, starting, in my opinion, far before they are ready and that they should be confined to 12+ years of school to study what the government deems important. When kindergarteners would rather roll in sandboxes or put frogs on their best friends or focus on topics that they excel in, we decide they have a disease. How should we fix this? Logic would say to determine a child’s strengths and work with them to use these to their advantage but instead we give them no choice on what to learn and then when they go nuts reading about famous artists and photosynthesis we decide they need a drug to change them so they will fit better into our societal mold. In my book I came across a sentence that says Canada has suspended marketing of Adderall XR after reports of sudden death and strokes in patients taking the drug. When people ask me if there are controlled trials on the raw food diet I just about fall on the floor. Not because it is a silly question, but because thousands of parents run to the pediatrician begging for some fix for their child who wants to play instead of read history books and the last thing that enters their mind is to ask what controlled trials show about these drugs. (Keep in mind that the root of absolutely irrational behavior stems back from generations of poor eating, stress, genetic mutations, etc and that is a whole other topic of discussion.) I do know that some children’s’ behavior is so out of line with the physiological norm that they are limited in their ability to function in today’s’ society, and for parents who deal with these children I do not set out to belittle the situation. This is just a reality check because I see parents come in to my pharmacy with prescriptions for Ritalin or Adderall for all three of their children. All three of the children needing to be medicated tells me there is something that needs to be worked on environment-wise (diet, relationships, emotional conflicts, etc) or parentally speaking. This is not corrected by Adderall. Never has and never will be.