Posted by health_junkie on June 12, 2003, at 18:16:23
Have anyone investigated the early antibiotics use and ADHD connection? Recently, my son had strip and was taking ant-cs-- and lo and behold, his med for ADHD (adderall) suddenly stopped working, in fact he behaved worth than ever, even without the medication. I went on the Net, and found article-- about very recent enviromental medicine conference in Wash.DC. They were talking about this connection- and about possible role in antibiotics in promoting autism as well, when given in infantile age. Long story short, I reasoned that the first thing antibiotics do is to kill off all the good probiotic flora, which impares food absorbtion and toxins accumulation also becomes possible (together with a lot of other gastrointestinal problemms). If that happens in early age, it can somewhat destroy normal gut function for the rest of life. Another thing to think about, how malnutrition and poor toxin illimination affects brain development-- especially in children with "finer-wired", more delicate brains (my son is very talented boy and briliant underachiver, and so are a lot of kids I know with ADD). There can be other enviromental hazards in addition to antibiotics abuse (or just nessesary use, unfortunately). Maybe, the brightness of these kids is not the consequence of ADHD, but the ADHD is something that attacks talented children (resulting in a mild damage to the certain type of brain, which leads to exageration of general 'liveliness' and 'energy' into what we know hnow as ADHD symptoms). That would explain why ADD wasn't so common in the past-- the enviroment was much healthier.
As the result of this musing, I started to give my son some high quality probiotics every day-- and saw his symptoms subside to a great degree. Right now he's not on adderall (he still should be, but his father objected and doesn't give it to him when the boy is with him, unfortunately, and doctor refused to prescribe it after that), his symptoms are better than before when he was taking medication irregularly (when he was with me, about 70% of the time. He is still distracted, and has problems focusing and remembering things, but there's no more aggression, tantrums, and trips to the principal's office anymore. I would say, the overal improvement is about 40%. I read somewhere, they had nice results with autistic children as well, when giving them probiotics. My son was born prematurely, and we both got bad infection-- and were on strong antibiotics for a month. I wonder, whether once intestinal flora is distroyed in such early age, the body cannot support it naturally, and it must be supplied on a regular basis. Any way, everybody, try giving your guys probiotics-- and start with much higher dosages than recomended-- the more the better, it's something that can't be overdosed, since whatever not needed and unused will be eluminated.
poster:health_junkie
thread:233504
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20030609/msgs/233504.html