When Help for ADHD is really not Help for ADHD

Read any article on ADHD, and there is always alarm expressed over how there is such an epidemic of these cases these days. Sometimes, they wonder if doctors just overdo it these days with these diagnoses. A recent study though, appears to be able to throw a little light on this situation. Apparently, a full 25% of all adults who come to psychiatrists and other doctors claiming the symptoms of ADHD, are only there to get their hands on a prescription. They aren't looking for any help for ADHD because they don't have it. What they have is a dependency on ADHD drugs.

Not all people who fake ADHD by exaggerating or even lying about their symptoms are actually after drugs for a dependency problem, however. Some people do it merely because they struggle with their lives, not getting where they wish to go, and they hope that it'll take a load off their conscience to know that they have ADHD or something that affects their ability at work. Sometimes, they have other health problems, like depression, but they still somehow have their hearts set on ADHD and exaggerate their symptoms to be sure to be diagnosed with it.

So what kind of people are they who actually consciously fake symptoms to get chemical help? A lot of them happen to be college students who need to study extra hard for an exam or another scholastic event. Drugs like Ritalin help even normal people focus to abnormal levels. Some people just look for these drugs for some kind of high. And it isn't as if doctors have been completely unaware of this. Often enough, (actually 40% of the time), doctors prescribing medication as help for ADHD suspect that the patient might be faking symptoms. Usually, a person who fakes symptoms has done a bit of homework and read up about what symptoms he should lie about. But usually, he gets the mix of symptoms and severity wrong. Doctors know a "patient" is lying when they report feeling symptoms of such intensity that no human alive has ever reported anything like it.

So is there some kind of test that a doctor could give a person who comes asking for help for ADHD? There's the problem - there is no test for ADHD. This is what makes it easy for a person to fake it - all he has to do is to say the right things, and the doctor will do the rest for him. If it were a child, the doctor could depend on the corroboration of the parents. What does one do with an adult? It would be the patient's word and nothing else.

Everyone Knows That IPods Cause Hearing Loss, Right?

“One in five iPod-hooked teens suffers from a certain amount of hearing loss” “No turning back from teen hearing loss”, go to headlines. People have been reading about this sort of thing for so long now that it's kind of become accepted truth - iPods and other personal music players cause hearing loss among adolescents because they listen to music that is best experienced loud.

There are new studies coming up though that are beginning to challenge this kind of traditional understanding about how MP3 players cause hearing damage in  young people. It's not that scientists don't believe that loud noise (okay, music) can damage one's hearing. It's just that scientists don't believe that we're actually seeing any additional hearing loss among teens than before music players of any kind became popular (that would be before the Walkman).

Wait a minute, didn't the Journal of the American Medical Association just publish a study that proved that hearing loss among teens was up 5% since 1990? They did; but they didn't say it was because of the MP3 player. It was other studies all around that made the connection. In Britain, and Australia, study after study shows that young people listen to their MP3 players all day with the volume turned all the way up. The connection between this and hearing loss seems almost too obvious to even question. They keep pointing to how in some instances, earbuds, especially the ones that are designed to go right into the ear canal, can put out sound levels as loud as a  jet engine.

Still, there is room for doubt. Scientists today are beginning to point to how these studies have measurement errors. Sometimes they measure hearing loss to be 10% higher than it really is. These studies that implicate MP3 players in teen hearing loss are a classic case of how the media can take up a piece of science and then try to sensationalize it.

To measure that a teen has hearing loss, these studies usually give the child in question a hearing test where an audiologist plays tones over headphones and asks the child to raise a hand if he hears anything. Those kinds of tests can bring up lots of false positives where they put down a child is having hearing loss when there is none. Equipment can be poorly calibrated, earwax buildup can account for some of it and so on.

Here's more proof that these tests can be way off. In this study that measured the hearing of members of a marching band, they found that about one out of five members had hearing loss. But they didn't just test once. When they tested repeatedly over the close of the year, they found that half the time, people made a remarkable recovery. It just goes to say that our testing methods are pretty undependable. None of these studies that blame the MP3 player for hearing loss has ever done multiple hearing tests on subjects over a course of months. They just test once and then cry Hearing Loss. That isn't fair, now is it?

Fast Dinner Recipes

I'm a father who works from home raising a couple children, and juggling work and family obligations isn't easy. I try to cook fresh food for my family every night, but usually I only have about half an hour to prepare a meal. I've learned a number of fast dinner recipes over the year to keep my wife and children happy with minimal prep time.

Surprisingly, a lot of the best fast dinner recipes involve soup. If you keep some broth or bouillon on hand, making soup for your family is incredibly easy. You pour the broth into a pot, bring it to a boil while you are cutting up some vegetables and throw them in along with a few herbs. That's all there is to it! The broth is already pretty flavorful, so you don't really need to wait for the flavor of the veggies to soak into the soup. For other fast dinner recipes, I use a seven beans soup mix which comes complete with everything I need for a hearty stew. Usually, I'll throw in some chunks of beef, some fresh basil or something else to spice it up.

Speaking of basil, pesto is one of your greatest assets for making fast and easy dinner recipes. Often, I'll prepare a bowl of pesto at the beginning of the week and serve it several times with different meals. Pesto is great over pasta, with toast, with chicken – you name it and you can serve it with pesto on it. It also keeps very well, which means that you can make it ahead of time instead of using it all at once.

One of the keys to fast dinner recipes that I've found is to be creative in how you reuse leftovers. Often, I'll have some leftover soup, but not enough to serve for another meal. When that happens, I usually cook it down and use it for something else. Bean soup becomes bean dip, chicken soup is great over rice once it is concentrated down, and left-over tomato soup along with ground beef makes some world-class sloppy joes with a bit of tinkering.

I also use my children's tastes to my advantage when I'm making fast dinner recipes. My wife is not a picky eater, and my kids love hamburgers, hot dogs, french fries and other typical American junk food. I don't let them eat it too often, but at least once a week I put together a simple dinner of microwaved hot dogs or grilled hamburgers. The kids get a treat and so do I: an extra 20 minutes of free time.

When you choose to Adopt a Child in a rather Unconventional Way

Your friend has been going on out her plans to adopt a child for months; and now, the day seems to finally have arrived. She proudly shows you a darling tiny little engraved silver feeding cup that she's planning to give the daughter arriving that day. You’re kind of happy for her and you decide to show up that evening and you go shopping for a nice fluffy teddy bear for the little tot. When you arrive at your friend's house, the welcome is rather gracious; but you wonder about the funny look they give your teddy bear present. They take you to the living room to introduce you to their new daughter. Why, she must be 30 years old.

Perhaps your friend should have warned you that when she spoke about her plans to adopt a child, she planned to get on board America's hottest adoption trend - adult adoptions. Evidence that this happens to be a popular trend is anecdotal at best; adoption records are sealed in most states. But the trend clearly exists. So is this something crazy that people have thought of – like adopting virtual babies or something? Well, not exactly.

In many of these cases, it's just a very healthy and deeply meaningful thing going on. Foster parents who raise foster children can grow very attached to them; often, they find it heartbreaking when the children are moved to another home. When the child grows up though, these foster families reunite with their foster children in a ritual of adoption. In other cases, children who for some reason end up losing touch with their biological families, miss being part of a family so much that they become friendly with childless couples they come to know of and ask to be adopted. A family isn't just something you crave when you are a child. While people may joke about having to meet their crazy families over Christmas or Thanksgiving, people who don't have families can truly crave such a connection their whole lives.

We live in a time when the definition of family appears to be in for some serious change. Same-sex couples who can't legally marry in their state, sometimes use adult adoption to make sure that when one partner dies, they can make sure their property goes to the other partner. But then, there are adoptions like the friend described above where there is no previous relationship in existence that could justify the whole exercise. In the case above, the adoptive child (or adult, rather), happened to have parents of her own. But they were terrible parents - drunken, abusive, promiscuous. That unfortunate child picked herself up by the bootstraps to make something of herself. She met her adoptive parents as colleagues at her place of work and just formed a bond.

In some states, the law requires that there be a certain age gap between adoptive parents and children. But in most states, no such requirement exists. Since the child being adopted is an adult, the parents don't even need the permission of the adult child's parents. It’s the new wave in choosing to adopt a child.

Finally - Something Real to Help Your Colicky Baby With

For a condition that affects such a large number of babies (the government believes that one out of five babies in the country suffers from colic), doctors sure seem to know precious little about it. And yet, colic is a condition that is familiar to anyone - anyone who's lived in the same home as a baby - and heard a colicky baby crying incessantly for some reason to do with their tummies.

Scientists, as they try to gain some kind of understanding into what exactly causes colic, have from time to time suspected everything from hormonal additives to milk to stress during pregnancy and all kinds of allergies. As of now, medical researchers have abandoned the more exotic possibilities in favor of something far more plausible and far more regular - they believe that a colicky baby is a baby that suffers from inflamed intestines that get that way because the baby doesn't have enough good bacteria in her tummy. And a surfeit of the bad ones. Studies such as a famous one done at the University of Texas for instance, found that a baby with colic often had, not just some kind of inflammation of the intestines, but also bad bacteria that usually do tend to inflamed things. They also found that babies that are healthy have all kinds of bacteria that a colicky baby never does. So is it that simple? Do you just need to get a doctor to write out a prescription for a capsule (small enough for a baby to swallow of course) of beneficial bacteria? Is that all that it's going to take to solve a problem that's never left mothers or babies in peace for a very long time - probiotics?

You might be tempted into thinking that all this comes about because mothers tend to not breast-feed their babies enough anymore. Actually, it seems to have very little to do with breast-feeding. Research done about five years ago in Italy took up dozens of babies up to study for the colicky baby syndrome. And all of those babies were breast-fed ones. The study ran to about a month and involved giving some babies with colic, medication to help with gas called simethicone; and others, a probiotic supplement with the same bacteria found in yogurt (called L.Reuteri). They found that every colicky baby that received the probiotic cried far, far less than the babies on the simethicone.

Since then, they've studied this time and time again and found nearly the same thing. The next time your colicky baby acts up, perhaps you could give your baby a probiotic supplement. It really is that simple.

Judging the Authenticity of Baby Carrier Reviews

Like most consumers who judge the quality of products based on its popularity among other consumers, parents rely on testimonies from other parents when judging the suitability of baby items. However, the sheer number of competing items available in the market complicates the decision process for most patents. Purchasing baby carriers is no different. Any parent who has compared the different baby carriers available in the stores can attest that one can easily get confused. Luckily, the internet is awash with baby carrier reviews. As most parents may attest however, it is not easy to differentiate between the genuine and accurate reviews, from the illegitimate reviews usually posted by marketers in an effort to push their products to the consumers.

How then is one to rely on baby carrier reviews if their authenticity cannot be verified? Well, with technological advancement, parents no longer have to rely on written or spoken word only. Video-based reviews posted on different forums on the internet are more appropriate than the written word. The video reviews give the parents a visual illustration of the carrier and are therefore more believable than the written word. The only shortcoming with the video reviews is that the online shopper cannot verify the texture, fabric, quality, or maintenance tips as given by the reviewer.
      
The advent of the video baby carrier reviews does not entirely discredit the written reviews. As any experienced person would know, the credibility of reviews can be judged on the variety of opinions contained therein. Reviews on carriers whereby, ‘users’ post positive reviews only, without finding even the slightest fault in it may not be authentic. Why do I say this? Well, common sense dictates that one cannot please all people at all times. As such, it is only natural for any product, regardless of how good it is to attract some negative feedback. After all, people have different preferences and none of the consumer items in the market can claim to satisfy them all. 

For the adventurous parents, relying on baby carrier reviews is not always satisfactory enough. The adventurous spirit in them keeps pressuring them to find some of the ‘valuable gems’ that have neither received enough marketing exposure or whose buyers have not found the time to write insightful reviews about the same. To such parents, the credibility of the carrier reviews is of little importance. Instead of trusting what people say, such parents prefer to tour different baby items stores and checking the different carriers personally. This presents the parents with an ideal chance to verify that specific carriers are fit for use on their babies. For parents who rely on the reviews however, trusting that reviewers are sincere in their evaluation of the carriers is important if at all they will purchase the items based on other peoples’ words.

Baby Bedding Sets

Buying cute items for your baby is one of the most fun parts of being pregnant and waiting for your baby to join you in the world. Clothing items are cute, but one of the most fun things to buy would be the baby bedding sets that you want to use in your baby's crib. These come with many parts and pieces, and some should be used right away, and some should wait. Make sure you get the right set with the look you love, and don't forget to buy some extras to go with it, as you will need more than what you get in just one set. Some people buy two or three sets and mix and match. Do what you want and what you can afford.

Some people like to get baby bedding sets after they know the sex of the baby. For girls, these sets can be more than just a bunch of pink stuff, but if you want to keep in simple, one colored sets are a great idea. However, there are many colors that are popular for baby girls that include colors like fuchsia and purples, bright blues as accents, and even some yellows and greens. These have themes like lady bugs, bunnies, butterflies, and anything else that reminds you of a little girl. Girl sets are more plentiful than boys items, so shop around. You will find something that you love.

When it comes to boys baby bedding sets, you can again go with something simple and get something all in shades of blue. You can also find sets that are a bit more colorful without having to commit to one of the themes out there like airplanes, dinosaurs, or trains if you don't want to do that. Boys sets are not quite as plentiful as girl sets, but there are plenty of great ideas out there. If you don't find something that you like you can look online for great choices. You can also go with something neutral that can be for a boy or girl, which works for both sexes either known or if you are waiting to find out when your baby is born.

With both boy and girls sets, make sure you buy extra fitted sheets that fit the crib mattress, as you will change these quite often. The sheets are going to get dirty awfully fast as most babies wet through or spit up a few times a day no matter how attentive you may be to their needs. Some people buy white sheets or these come with baby bedding sets, but they are hard to keep clean. You  probably don't want to use bleach on something your baby will be sleeping on quite often. Instead, get colors that match your sets and keep enough on hand so that you can change a few times in between laundry times.

One thing you want to take out of most baby bedding sets would be the bumper. Don't throw it away, because you can use it later, but these are dangerous for young babies. As you know, SIDS is often caused by baby getting his or her head in a position where they can not breathe and they can not roll away. Bumpers in baby bedding sets can be problematic. Do not put a bumper on your baby's crib until they are one year old or until your doctor says that it is okay. They look great, but can be very dangerous for your baby at a young age. You can store them away and use them later.