Ritalin: stay away from it!

RITALIN - Stay away from it! (Concerta is the other name for methylphenidate = Ritalin)

Parents, patients and medical colleagues, please read the lines below and, above all, the text in the link, and reflect on them, changing your conduct and outlook if necessary.

1 - A child who gives a hard time may well just be a brilliant child, who therefore doesn't deserve to be sedated or doped up, but to be approached and developed properly!

2 - There are a lot of people out there diagnosed as having ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) who actually don't! This diagnosis is wrongly overestimated these days.

3 - Many cases of ADHD and similar can be solved (or at least greatly improved) without the need for medication, by improving lifestyle habits (icaro.med.br/12habitos), behavioral changes, good psychological support, GABA, natural tranquilizers (mulungu, passiflora, valerian, among others) and various much more natural measures than robotizing (gradually turning a person into a zombie) with the use of ritalin (methylphenidate and similar). We should always look for and treat the cause of a disorder and not spend a lifetime just medicating the symptoms and causing new, increasingly worse and more serious ones!

4 - It is very common for patients to need higher and higher doses of ritalin in order to maintain the effects they had before with lower doses. In other words, with time and increasing doses, the overwhelming majority of patients begin to experience more addiction, unpleasant effects and complications than any benefit.

5 - Ritalin is a member of the amphetamine family! Would you really use a drug that is potentially addictive and full of side effects? Would you give it to a child?

6 - There are health professionals out there who are criminally renewing ritalin prescriptions several times without even properly reassessing the patient, carrying out tests, listening to them... There are even many who are obtaining prescriptions without even being seen by the doctors who prescribed them, sometimes years ago... This is wrong and dangerous (even though it makes easy money for many)!

7 - Ritalin (and similar drugs) have been indicated excessively, indiscriminately, abusively and Brazil is the second country in the world that consumes the most ritalin (a position it has rapidly reached in recent years) - does anyone here really think that in years the number of ADHD sufferers in Brazil has really risen that much? Or is there a disease industry profiting handsomely from all this?

8 - What is the future of our country when we are silencing questioning children and young people, who could change the world for the better, by drugging them with ritalin and the like? Think!

Anyway, read this here.

Parents, medical colleagues and adult users: please reflect in your conscience on what I have written above and the content of the link, also this link.