Today, I want to talk to you about ADD and ADHD. What are these conditions that so many kids in our country are suffering from nowadays? 

ADD, or attention deficit disorder is a condition where a child just can’t focus. Maybe they’re daydreaming in class. They can’t think exactly like we would expect them to. ADHD adds in that hyperactivity. These are the ones that are much more easily diagnosed because these kids are bouncing off the walls, having conversations all over the place, and they just can’t keep their thoughts straight.

So why is it that in 1997 about 6% of children from the ages of 3 to 17 were diagnosed with ADD or ADHD, but now in 2016, that number has almost doubled to 10%?! Why are our kids suffering from this condition that causes hyperactivity, delayed learning, or just diminished attention in general? Well, I’m a millennial, and I experienced this stuff. I wasn’t an ADHD or an ADD case, but many of my friends were prescribed drugs to counteract their hyperactivity or their attention deficit. Actually, very recently, one of my best friends tried to get off of one of his medications. He was diagnosed with ADHD at a young age and decided he wanted to get off his drugs because he didn’t want to take them for the rest of his life. Once he got off of them, the withdrawal symptoms were awful – severe migraines, lack of focus, things just weren’t exactly what they needed to be.

And so, he called his doctor. He said, “Hey, what is going on? I’m trying to get off my meds and I just can’t do it. I have to take it to function.” And his doctor said, “Yes, this is a very common sign.” When you try to get off these medications that have been changing your biochemistry for years and years, it’s hard to get off of them. It took him almost two months to finally get back to normal where he could function without his medication. This breaks my heart, especially when 10% of kids are dealing with this and being diagnosed at very young ages. Basically, these drugs are there for the rest of their lives, and when kids want to get off of them at an older age, it is really hard to do. We know that drugs are really just toxins in your body that can cause a lot of side effects over time, and we don’t want our kids dealing with this forever.

So how does upper cervical care help ADD and ADHD kids? We have a lot of kids in our office that suffer from these conditions. What we’ve noticed is that when we start to take the pressure off the brainstem, a lot of these symptoms start to go away. How does that happen? The brain and the brainstem work in coordination constantly. Every thought, memory, and emotion start in one part of the brain, it’s relayed down to the brainstem, and then back to the brain to be interpreted. If there’s a distortion to that message from the brain literally back to the brain, then we start to see things occur like ADD and ADHD. Not just that, but depression, anxiety, learning disabilities, like dyslexia; things you can imagine that go on with the brain can definitely be caused by interference at the brainstem.

If we know that there’s an upper cervical misalignment putting pressure on the brainstem, now that thought, memory, or emotion traveling to the brainstem gets distorted, so that when it’s relayed back to the brain, it doesn’t interpret it as the original thought. This is where we start to see hyperactivity. This is where we start to see the kid can’t think properly. Happy thoughts turn into depression. Normal thoughts turn into anxiety. This is how the brain works. That’s why with upper cervical care, in our office, when we take the pressure off the brainstem and put those upper cervical bones back to where they need to go, we see normal messages going from the brain to the brainstem and back to the brain. We start to see ADHD and ADD go away. Kids start getting better grades, start to focus better, and they listen to their mom and dad much better.