> mine that has found another way of dealing with it
 > without the use of "drugs".
Well, at the risk of getting raked over the coals by other people in this 
echo who do not agree with me, I feel like I really do need to answer you 
since you asked about ALTERNATIVE ways of dealing with ADD, and, as far as I 
know, I'm about the only one in this echo with actual experience with exactly 
what you asked about....
Way back in the 1970's, my (then) 5-year-old daughter was diagnosed as having 
"MDB" & hyperactivity-- later, they changed the terminology to ADD & 
hyperactivity.  The pediatrician prescribed Ritalin and a psychologist 
informed us that our child would not be able to function in school at all 
without Ritalin and probably only in "special" schools even with it.
We ended up not giving our child Ritalin, and we went ahead and enrolled her 
in public schools.  We didn't just ignore the situation, though.  Our general 
goal was to help our daughter emphasize her talents (of which many were ADD 
characteristics) and preserve her self-esteem, so that she could achieve 
success.  For instance, she seemed to need far less sleep than an average 
child, so instead of insisting that she sleep and making her sleep with 
medication, we taught her how to utilize those nighttime hours when everyone 
else was sleeping-- she would read late at night, or work puzzles.
We enrolled her in sports that emphasized her abilities-- soccer, because it 
has few time outs & rewards those with an ability to keep moving; roller 
skating, because it takes a lot of energy; NOT softball, which requires 
children to stand around waiting patiently for something to happen.
We learned by trial and effort which foods affected her behavior and which 
didn't.  In our daughter's case, milk and other protein foods had a calming 
effect.  We were not able to find any correlation with sugar intake.
We changed OUR expectations of how our child was going to be judged in this 
society.  We didn't demand that she get straight A's in school, because we 
knew that part of her grade might include "ability to sit still."  We 
supplemented her school education with weekend & evening educational 
activities and were able to do a lot of those at HER pace-- sometimes going 
through museums almost at a run and finding out that she absorbed more of the 
information than when she was forced into a more leisurely & boring pace.
We made sure she did not feel that ADD was a "disability"-- in fact, we 
treated it as a TALENT that needed to be developed and worked with, just like 
any talent.  Therefore her self-esteem was not compromised.
We feel we were very successful with our child.  She went through public 
schools, got accepted into a magnet high school, got scholarships to a good 
college and graduated with better than a 3.5 average on her bachelor's degree 
in psychology.  She's now 28, married, has a baby (who does not seem to have 
ADD symptoms) and is the best mother you can imagine-- has unlimited energy 
to care for her child. She's worked several part-time and full-time jobs 
since she was 17, and her employers have raved about the quality and 
especially the quantity of her work-- she can work rings around "average" 
people.  She's currently a child-welfare worker for a state agency.  She is 
also a very sociable person who literally has hundreds of good friends.
Despite doomsayers who predicted then and now that untreated ADD kids will 
end up taking drugs, dropping out of school, being criminals, our daughter is 
educated, has never taken drugs, doesn't smoke, certainly is not a criminal, 
and, in fact, works WITH the DA's office in their prosecutions of child 
abusers.
BTW, I have talked to several people raising children diagnosed with ADD or 
ADHD who recommend Reiki or Therapeutic Touch.  I am trained in both 
techniques now, but wasn't when my daughter was living at home.  Since those 
techniques both promote BALANCE and have a calming effect, I can certainly 
believe that they would be useful for children with ADD.
--- FMail 0.92
---------------