“Will you please call my insurance company?”
I often hear that question from my patients.  The question comes more frequently from patients with ADHD than from others.   The Central Nervous System stimulants, among the best medications  for that disorder, are controlled substances.  Some of the best of those medications are among the newest and therefore most expensive: [...]
….he’s telling you the diagnosis.”  That was the clinical maxim of my training at McGill University’s Faculty of Medicine in the 1960s.  It stood me in good stead then, and it helps me now as I listen to adults and try to decide if they have ADHD.  Diagnosis is a clinical process.  Rating scales and outside [...]
Researchers have shown that, compared with normal children, youngsters with ADHD have  less brain matter in the areas involved in attention and in executive functioning. These are the brain areas for planning, organizing, and implementing actions in every day life. New studies show that the same features are true of adults who have ADHD.*
Hold onto your seatbelt for this paragraph. [...]
The sprightly music of William Boyce sounded. The curtain at Wolf Trap Park of the Performing Arts rose, and burly male dancers exploded on stage in the opening section of Paul Taylor’s  “Arden Court.” Soon women joined them. In duos and trios and quartets they ran and stretched and twirled to the music.  Nearly naked, [...]
Her dark eyes flashing, the woman patient sitting opposite me hurled the challenge.
“Yes, actually,” I said. A recent study supports my assertion.*  Clinical researchers studied 363 individuals aged 18-26 in the Pittsburgh ADHD Longitudinal Study (PALS).  They compared the responses of the ADHD young adults (the “probands”) with controls who did not have ADHD.
The ADHD [...]
ADHD rarely presents by itself in adult patients. It’s typical to have at least one other psychiatric disorder present. Of the possible other diagnoses, one of the most worrisome is bipolar disorder (BD),  or manic-depressive illness.
ADHD and BD share common diagnostic features,  including restlessness and distractibility, racing thoughts, and loss of normal social inhibitions. How to [...]
Ridgely, Maryland
The little town of Ridgely is off the summer tourist path in Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Near Easton, it’s far from the beach fun scene of  Ocean City.  Ridgely is the home of the Benedictine School,  founded in 1969 by a small group of Benedictine nuns to care for disabled and handicapped children.  The nuns started with one class [...]
That headline on the front page of the Business Section of the Washington Post on June 21, 2006, certainly caught my attention.*Â Â I eagerly read the article, hoping to find information about the business consequences of ADHD.
Well, I was wrong. The article,  instead, is about the determined efforts of a small group of Washington budget [...]
Happy as I am to have different medications that help patients with ADHD, I am always looking for alternative, non-drug treatments. So I read with enthusiasm a report about potential helpfulness of neurofeedback (abbreviated NFB) for the disorder.
Neurofeedback is a method of trying to train brain wave activity. Â You measure the results using electrodes on [...]
At center stage the great mezzo-soprano Cecilia Bartoli stood waiting,  proud and strong. Behind her, several musicians began playing the first bars of an aria by Antonio Vivaldi, the Eighteenth Century Venetian composer.  Bartoli is a spendid,  full-bodied Italian woman.  She piles her sumptuous dark hair high on her head, tendrils curling seductively at her neck.  After the instrumental introduction finished, her eyes [...]
