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Originally posted by Zanzibar
Seems the general view here is that the drug is evil. I don't know much about it, but I had a friend that took it and it helped him alot. His grades went up, he was less hyper, etc.
The only negative side effect he complained about was how hard it was to get to sleep.
Just my two.
Originally posted by annestacey
and then they damage your brain
Originally posted by AlphaAnuOmega
As far as foods are concerned, they can cause ADHD symptoms. My cousin is allergic to food coloring. When he ingests more than his body can handel he displays multiple symtems that are identical to children with ADHD. Also, when he has had massive amounts of sugar with these colorings (soda), he displays autistic results. I suggest getting anyone diagnosed with ADHD an allergy test.
Originally posted by Zanzibar
Originally posted by annestacey
and then they damage your brain
I agree with everything else you've said except this. My friend didn't seem to have a damaged brain, unless being able to concentrate and learn are classed as being damaging.
Or do you mean that his brain wasn't like this before, so having it changed is damaging?
I only have an onlookers perspective of the effect and I'm not going to pretend that I know what it's like. What I do know is that this drug changed his life for the better, surely that's a good thing?
If you give someone an antidepressant, and that tries to keep serotonin levels too high in the brain, it does exactly the opposite. It stops producing as much serotonin as it normally does and it reduces the number of serotonin receptors in the brain. So someone who is on an antidepressant, after a time ends up with an abnormally low level of serotonin receptors in the brain. And here's what Hyman concluded about this: After these changes happened, the patient's brain is functioning in a way that is "qualitatively as well as quantitatively different from the normal state." So what Stephen Hyman, former head of the NIMH, has done is present a paradigm for how these drugs affect the brain that shows that they're inducing a pathological state.
SS: So the paradox is there's no evidence for modern psychiatry's claim that there is any pathological biochemical imbalance in the brain that causes mental illness, but if you treat people with these new wonder drugs, that is what creates a pathological imbalance?
RW: Yes, these drugs disrupt normal brain chemistry. That's the real paradox here. And the real tragedy is, that even as we peddle these drugs as chemical balancers, chemical fixers, in truth we're doing precisely the opposite. We're taking a brain that has no known abnormal brain chemistry, and by placing people on the drugs, we're perturbing that normal chemistry. Here's how Barry Jacobs, a Princeton neuroscientist, describes what happens to a person given an SSRI antidepressant. "These drugs," he said, "alter the level of synaptic transmission beyond the physiologic range achieved under normal environmental biological conditions. Thus, any behavioral or physiologic change produced under these conditions might more appropriately be considered pathologic rather than reflective of the normal biological role of serotonin."
Originally posted by AlphaAnuOmega
As far as foods are concerned, they can cause ADHD symptoms. My cousin is allergic to food coloring. When he ingests more than his body can handel he displays multiple symtems that are identical to children with ADHD. Also, when he has had massive amounts of sugar with these colorings (soda), he displays autistic results. I suggest getting anyone diagnosed with ADHD an allergy test.
Fitzgerald: We looked at some of the studies done in the later part of 2005, examining the synergistic reactions between aspartame -- the synthetic sweetener that is found in thousands of products now -- and MSG, along with two common food colorings. This was a study done in England at a university in the later part of 2005. The result was found that when MSG, aspartame and these two food colorings were mixed together, they create a synergy that kills nerve cells. It causes neurological damage. We are only now at the threshold of medical science beginning to do any systematic examination of synergies.
Mike: Just to put in a real-world example of that, I would like to add that you can get that combination by drinking a Diet Pepsi and eating a bag of Doritos.
Fitzgerald: Absolutely. It is a children's meal. In fact, these researchers, at the University of Liverpool, wanted to examine what children commonly consume every day. That is why they picked aspartame, MSG and these two food colors, because they are so commonly found in all of the junk drinks and foods that children consume. The results should alarm us all.