There is a lot of controversy regarding whether ADD even exists. There is no brain scan, no lab tests and no physical evidence documenting it exists anymore than there is documentation that Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy exist. And no, Daniel Amen’s “Brain SPEC Imaging” has never been proven with any double-blind placebo tests published in any medical journal. But we still talk about ADD and Santa as if they are real. I decided to settle this once as for all and looked it up in the dictionary. I don’t know why no one has thought of this before. Attention is the issue, and deficit is the so-called problem. Here is the dictionary definition of Deficit:
def•i•cit (de-fi-sit)
1. Inadequacy or insufficiency
2. A deficiency or impairment in mental functioning
3. An unfavorable condition or position
4. An amount by which something is less than required
5. Less than the standard or normal
Now apply that to your child. Add those traits to attention and do you have an accurate or true definition of your child? Is your child’s attention span:
1. Inadequate or insufficient attention span?
2. An unfavorable attention span?
3. A less than requited attention span?
4. Less than a standard or normal attention span?
It doesn’t fit does it? Here’s the fallacy, there is no standard or normal attention span. Think about it, where is the measuring stick for an attention span? What is normal and how did you measure it?
Let’s put it in perspective. To have a deficit you have to have a less than normal or standard starting point. When you opened a checking account you started at zero, right? Then you put $100 into the account, right? Then you wrote a check for $150, right! Right? Good, I thought I was the only one for a second there. Now you have a deficit of $50, which is less than the starting point of zero.
If you have an attention scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a low attention span and 10 being a long attention span then 5 would be a regular, sufficient or normal starting point. Then a 2 would be a deficient attention span or ADD. To justify 2 being deficient you have to justify 5 being normal, standard or required attention span. So what is the normal, standard or required attention span and how did you measure it?
If you don’t have a 5, you can’t have a 2. If you don’t have a 2, then according to the dictionary you don’t have Santa Claus or Attention Deficit. You have a fairy tale. To take it one step farther, what would you call a 10? Attention surplus? Would you need a pill for that as well?
Remember when teachers taught you to write with your right hand and not your wrong hand? Why did they teach that? Who made the right hand the correct hand and the left hand the wrong hand? The majority did. The simply minded thinking was that if most of the people in America are right handed, then the minority or left handed people must be wrong, are broken and need fixing. With hindsight being 20/20, that’s pretty stupid, huh?
So there is no such thing as ADD, but there is such a thing as a long or short attention span. Why did they invent ADD? One of the reasons is the majority of people have a long attention span and the minority have a short attention span. We have a short attention span, it’s not broke, it doesn’t need fixing, it’s not wrong to have one and we don’t need meds!
So 10% of us are left-handed and have short attention spans. Does this work? Yes! Pull out your yellow pages and notice 90% of the jobs in the world are left-brained, repetitive, mundane jobs. That’s where the 90% go. The other 10% are the creative jobs. Everything works perfectly; you don’t need meds for the minorities.
Next time someone tells you they have ADD, ask them to bring any proof that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy or ADD exists. A fairy tale is something someone tells another. Someone told you that ADD and Santa Claus are real, but where’s their proof? As you grew up you realized that Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny were a fairy tale because you never saw them or could prove they ever existed. You should use the same logic for ADD and you should use common sense before you medicate.
I’ll tell you a secret. There is no lab test for ADD/ADHD. But there are lab tests for every single one of the symptoms [they tell you is ADD] which expose their probable causes. Did you get that? There are scientific lab tests that will indicate where the symptoms came from, i.e. what caused them, but there is no lab test for ADD itself. Why not test for the causes and where they came from? Then treat the causes, not the symptoms. Click here for find out how:
http://www.resultsproject.net/lab_tests_vs.html