January 2008

  … a pediatrician’s advice on ADHD and other child behavior and developmental issues

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD There is so much talk about children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD).  Does it exist or not?  How do you figure out if a child has it?  Does everyone need a medicine?  What else can be done, besides medicine? I will address these questions in several articles, from the point

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD I talked, above, about diagnosing Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), look-alike problems, and how young children learn to regulate themselves.  Now let’s consider older children.

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD Last time I talked about mental energy, consistency, and sleep problems in attention disorders (ADHD for short).  Today I’ll talk about the processing or “input” controls.

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD I already talked about mental energy (alertness, effort, consistency, and sleep) and the input controls (deciding what is most important, things glancing off the surface of the mind, making connections, and how exciting things need to be to hold attention).  The third part of attention is the output controls.  These are

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD A friend of mine was featured in the New York Times on October 8 and 10, 2006, in an arresting article called “An Elephant Crackup?”  An ecologist and psychologist, Gay Bradshaw has joined with elephant researchers, psychiatrists, and a neuroscientist to show why elephants are becoming violent—and, in the process, to

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD Some years ago a man’s sight was restored who had never had sight.  There was a blockage in his eyes which kept the light from getting in, which was fixed by surgery.  The rest of the structures were there—the retina for receiving the light, the optic nerves for transmitting retina signals,

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD A doctor friend put me onto some amazing research lately, research with the power to change how we think about a host of the important diseases—obesity, diabetes, and heart disease among them.

—Nina Pierpont, MD, PhD Temple Grandin, PhD, professor and author of Thinking in Pictures, was born autistic.  Dr. Grandin didn’t talk until 3½, and as a young child screamed, threw tantrums, and got stuck doing simple movements over and over.  Today, however, a third of the livestock in the US are handled in equipment and

Some advice as you compose your letter (for more detail be sure to read Terms of Service). Each of us has strong feelings about certain topics. Strong feelings are okay; expressing those feelings abusively or maliciously, or as a tirade, is not. We’ve all written heated, intemperate letters and fired them off to the object of