My Nursing Education

The following passage is an article regarding Attention Deficite Disorder and Attention Deficite Hyperactive Disorder. Try to read the passage in ten minutes and attempt to answer the questions afterward. Practing reading comprehension examples can be obtained at the Nurses Learning Center. Many students find that the reading comprehension section of the N.E.T. is the most challenging tests of them all. Perhaps the reason for this is due in part to the use of required knowledge of the nursing process and as it relates to critical thinking. Students who have previously taken anatomy and physiology should be familiar with the type of critical thinking needed to pass such tests. At the Nurses Learning Center, students have access to over 1300 questions, tests, tutorials and explained answers. Try your best while reading the passage not to go back over the text. Read it once and that’s it. The look at the questions that follow and try to recall exactly what the author was really trying to say.

Millions of children throughout the United States are being treated for ADHD. Is this a syndrome that has always been with us or is this a fairly new phenomenon over the past twenty or thirty years. The medication is usually readily prescribed by Physicians when approached by anxious parents concerned about their child’s behavior. To what extent do we know how the medications that are prescribed for ADHD affect our children? NEW YORK (Reuters) – Richard Scruggs, the lawyer who led the settlement between U.S. states and the tobacco industry in 1998, called the lawsuits against the makers of hyperactivity disorder drug Ritalin the country’s “next class-action battleground.’ Do we think that our children have immunity to any of the side effects of medication? Pediatrician/author/ T. Barry Brazelton [Washington Times, 3/?/03], breaths life into the lie/illusion of ADHD as a “disease”/ “chemical imbalance”–one needing a “chemical balancer”–Ritalin, Adderall—amphetamines-all!

All physicians (psychiatrists included) study the normal (no disease) and abnormal (disease) and are responsible for telling one from the other. When no abnormality/disease is present, there is nothing to make normal; no need for medical treatment. A third to a half of patients seek help for psychological/psychiatric symptoms, and have no abnormality/disease. Yet day in and day out parents give their children a pill to help them behave. This is in fact what we are doing. Giving our children drugs to alter their behavior. Anyone who studies toxicology will in fact agree that a child’s body is very susceptible to the effects of drugs. Particularly the brain. Even in today’s medical elite, the brain remains a mystery. Perhaps parents need to look at the school system and determine if they are pushing children to far to fast for their ages. Whatever the rationale, forcing people, particularly children, to take dangerous psychotropic drugs is a totalitarian practice. The use of state-imposed psychiatric treatment–including the forcible administration of mind-altering drugs–was one of the most terrifying practices used against political dissidents in the former Soviet Union. Perhaps we all need to look at food additives in our everyday diet. The point is that children are taking into their systems unnatural chemicals daily from the food that they eat to the water they drink. Becoming a more healthy nation begins in the home and we as parents have a responsibility to become informed.
References:
Article from: The New American

http://www.rense.com/general3/adhd.htm

ADHD: TOTAL, 100% FRAUD
Fred A. Baughman Jr., Neurologist, Pediatric Neurology

Reading Comprehension Questions;
1. The Author uses a negative intonation when referring to ADD and ADHD
a. True
b. False
2. The authors opinion is that ADD and ADHD have been invented by pharmaceutical companies just to make money.
a. True
b. False