Ritalin: Three Steps Out of Addiction

ADHD and OCD are just a few examples of how the medical profession functions these days: If you don’t know what it is, give it a grand sounding name. This secures income for life. You don’t know what to do? Why care as long as you have a patient in for frequent and regular checks and sell him your drugs? Yes, get them while their young.

It is typical for the pharmaceutical industry to produce drugs for a minor problem that turn high sprung children into robotic zombies. This is called opening a multiple stream income source. As Ritalin or any other drug can’t cure the disease, it guarantees lifelong dependency on part of the patient. As we are talking about behaviour aberrations, to use a strong term, it is no wonder that there is no cure. For a cure, there must be a sickness first. The problem is that so many different behaviour patterns are mashed into ADHD and OCD that clear view is fogged. This is made to full intent by the medical profession to secure income.

Ritalin is highly addictive, more than most drugs, though all drugs are addictive. A study by Bavarian police published in 2000 showed a direct link between the use of Ritalin and further addictions to other drugs. The head of Bavarian police called Ritalin a door opener for any kind of drug. Drug addiction amongst teenagers had gone up steadily since the sixties. But the yearly rise had been comparatively small. Suddenly, the rise each year sprung up to ten times its former figure. The year of the first increase was the first year after Ritalin had appeared on the market. The study has meanwhile been suppressed.

As the ADHD and OCD labels are criminally inexact, actually just collecting boxes for ‘I don’t know’, parents must find out what is wrong with their child on their own. It’s a process of trial and error, but it should be worth the time, don’t you think?

By today’s standards, I would probably have been a ‘case’ in one of these boxes. I couldn’t keep still and was always on the move. But I was very lucky. I had parents who didn’t begrudge me their time to keep me occupied. Once my mother found out that I was simply bored during lunch or dinner, she allowed me to read a book while eating. That quieted me completely down. I read a book a day, during school time, and two during holidays. In school I was lucky as well, as my teacher just took the four hyperactive ones apart and gave us more difficult homework. That kept us happily occupied. And the doctor we had was one of the old fashioned ones. Those you can’t find anymore today. Loving his work, seeing patients at home day and night, he didn’t believe in drugs.

In Switzerland different tests had been run on ADHD children whose parents absolutely refused to drug them to death. It showed that each case was highly different from the other, on one hand. But it also showed certain affinities between the individual cases. It ran down to three main points:

In families with an ADHD child, stress is a permanent factor for all family members. Irrespectively of stress being caused by the child or ADHD being aggravated by stressed parents, it is in direct proportion to each other. So dealing with the problem means reducing stress for all family members and getting them into a quieter frame of mind.

All children showed a high copper content in their body. When these children were taking additional zinc from natural sources, the symptoms of ADHD were considerably lessened. Copper and zinc should be in a natural balance in the body. When there is too much copper, additional zinc helps the body to get rid of the surplus copper. One of the main copper sources is water. When houses were still built with lead piping, most of the copper attached itself to the piping; very little came up with drinking water. Copper doesn’t attach itself to plastic; the new piping in houses is made of plastic. Therefore we consume much copper than our grandparents did, which explains why there are so many more ADHD cases today.

All children showed one or another deficiency in amino acids. When the (right) amino acids were added to their diet, the symptoms of ADHD were even further lessened. Amino acids in their natural form may be found in algae. It is a process of trial and error to find the correct algae or the correct combination of algae for your child as different algae contain different amino acids in different compositions.

It goes to show that there is a way of dealing with ADHD and OCD without resorting to drugs. If your doctor is willing, there is also a way out of the drug. If your doctor is not willing, then it is time to change the doctor.