ADHD? Or just Naughty?

Little Matthew Thomas enjoys running around outside, climbing jungle gyms, walls… anything he can find. No matter how many times his mother tells him it’s dangerous to be running around the pool, he still attempts to climb over that fence at least once a week. Every week he gets into trouble, but it seems that he just won’t listen!

Don’t even start with Matthew Thomas in school. The kids all call him Mat for short, but to the teachers, he is “Ma-thew-Tho-Mas!“. He doesn’t sit still. Halfway through any lesson, one can almost always expect a screech to arise from one of the girls because he has just pulled her hair, or is throwing little bits of eraser into her ear. He hates doing homework, and he gets bored sitting through tests. His mother, while she loves him dearly, has long-since lost patience with trying to tutor him. If anything, she’s starting to feel like a bad mother and wondering what she’s doing wrong.

Is she doing something wrong? Or is there nothing she can do about it anyway?

In current scientific literature, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is stated to affect about 6% of children and is 4 times more prevalent in boys than girls. ADHD is behaviorally diagnosed. This means that if the child displays enough of the ADHD symptoms before the age of 7, (These including hyperactivity, impulsiveness and inattention both at home and in school, which lead to problems with learning and making friends) the psychologist can diagnose him with ADHD.

If a child is diagnosed with ADHD, there are various options of treatment, the most common being the use of stimulant drugs like Ritalin® and various amphetamine salts that are effective for approximately 70% of patients. These drugs work by activating the dopamine system of the brain, something that cocaine does too well. Of course ADHD medication at low doses are much safer than cocaine, but common side effects like stomach aches, headaches, drowsiness and heart pulpitations can make taking the drugs rather unpleasant. Also, do we need to pump our kids full of drugs to keep them under control, and make them learn the way we want to teach? Even worse, drugs can change the way the brain is wired, how do we know if the child actually has ADHD, or if he’s just a problematic naughty kid that requires a more creative method of education? What if we aren’t re-wiring the brain for the better? Psychologists now also diagnose adult ADHD and many desperate students all over the world have managed to fool them into prescribing ADHD drugs that also enhance the mental performance of non-ADHD persons.

Clearly there is a need for a biological marker to verify the behavioural diagnosis. Tuberculosis and the common cold both cause coughs, but correct treatment can be given by determining the particular organisms that are causing the problem. HIV and hepatitis C are both immune-compromising diseases, transmitted in the same way, but require vastly different treatments. For a definitive treatment, one needs a definitive cause. And herein lies the crux of this puzzle.

We don’t yet know the exact cause of ADHD.

Leading scientists in the field have done many fascinating experiments to try solve this enigma. Large scale genetic studies say that ADHD is hereditary, but it’s not just one gene causing one problem. It’s lots of genes with little snags, which accumulate to become the mystery that is ADHD. Brain images have shown that certain areas of the ADHD brain are smaller and others larger when compared to normal children. So is the behavior caused by the brain being born this was way because his genetics said so, or did the brain re-wire to become this way to try compensate for the flawed genes while trying to be a good boy? In fact, when scientists compare ADHD children to normal children, did their on-board psychologist really get the diagnosis right when choosing subjects? How do they know that they aren’t mistakenly comparing the children resultant of better or worse parenting??

And that’s the essence of the scientific chase; trying to work out answers to our chicken-and-egg questions. Finding ways to pause the brain, just long enough it to take pictures of signals that happen in milliseconds, and attempt to explain how and why we are the way we are. It feels like trying to catch up with an ADHD child running away from you while you’re holding his medication in one hand and trying not to spill the cup of water in the other. Often, exasperation dominates a scientist’s day, but don’t You wish we could get to the bottom of it all?

Is there a theory of Everything?

I'm no mathematician or physiscist, but this is how i see it.

It becomes very long-winded when trying to describe how a lot of things all relate to eachother all at once, using their proper long names, so people have decided to use other, shorter symbols to replace these long words. Equations written from these variables describing their relationships then allow us to predict what would happen if somethings else happened and we we don't know some of the variables.
When they try to describe the way the physical world works - because most of it seems quite predictable (and we'd like to be able to make exact calculations so that we can predict costs of building things and whether what we're spending so much money to build will actually stay up and not collapse etc) - people have decided to call it "physics".

So naturally the quest is to describe our physical world. We live in this world, it exists already. (We will not go into a philosophical debate of whether or not the word in fact exists, neither will we go into a neuroscience debate and talk about how the world is perceived differently by each person and how that arises.) I will talk from the assumption that the physical world that we can see and touch exists. In which case the "Everything" is already there. It's not really that outrageous an idea that everything is related in some way or another. It's the physicist's job to figure out what the "things" in "everything" are, and how they all relate, which way and to whom.

A "theory" is just someone's idea of an explanation for something. it needs to be tested to see if it actually describes nature correctly. if it doesn't, then the theory is wrong.

So, is there a theory of everything? No. No one has come up with it yet.
But does it exist?
Of course it does.

Everything exists. if you're curious enough, you may be able to figure out How it all exists together.

Afrikaans is NOT such a nightmare

Dear Redi,

I was listening to your show about having Afrikaans forced as a subject at schools.

There is more than one issue here.

Firstly, even if another official SA language is offered at the school already, a lot of kids realize that it is not a better option, and secondly, students have an attitude problem.

I matriculated in 2004, and my home language is Mandarin Chinese, so as far as i was concerned Afrikaans would be the fourth language that i'd learn. English was giving me hell as it is, so any more languages on my shoulders were NOT welcome. I guess, in hindsight was lucky that my primary school taught Zulu as well as Afrikaans until grade 7, and my public high school did offer Zulu as a second language, so in high school i could make a choice. 

Understand that Afrikaans was(and sounds like it still is) a HATED subject at schools. When i started school in SA, i adopted the attitude of the kids around me and HATED Afrikaans in Primary School. BUT we ALSO hated Zulu. In fact, we just simply hated every subject which didn't have a "fun"/"nice" teacher - and the way we classified these teachers into the "nice" categories were not scientific! :p

Anyway, the attitude of hating the languages and various other subjects carried on to High school. The attitude against Afrikaans was worse in my high school than for Zulu, and several non-Zulu speaking students opted to take Zulu instead, and i thought seriously about it too. But the second language is taught at the "second language level", which means that we go into much less depth than for a first language (so we didn't need to interpret "how the author felt when he wrote that paragraph, and how did he communicate this"), but it is required to learn the STRUCTURE of the language, construct sentences and learn to change tenses etc. Most of the non-Zulu speaking students who chose Zulu ended up reverting to take Afrikaans because Zulu is just SO much more difficult at a second language level than Afrikaans is.

The structure of Afrikaans is simpler, and at the second language level, there are fewer rules that needs to be learnt. it is also much more similar to English than Zulu or the other venaculars, so your mind needs to do a lot Less bending. I eventually realized that Afrikaans was in fact the EASIEST subject at school because (Even if i was really good at maths) there were MORE rules in the "Factorization" section in maths than is the WHOLE of Afrikaans. It eventually became clear that my attitude of Hating Afrikaans was unfounded. I was following the feelings of everyone around me, which meant that i was being a sheep - the most disgusting form of mentality in my book. Once my attitude toward Afrikaans changed, it became even easier, and I went on to share the Top in Afrikaans trophy in matric.

The HATE of Afrikaans is an attitude that students adopted from the early years in primary school. I don't know where the other students got it from, but i got it from them. I also thought that it was unfair and stupid that we were FORCED to learn it. but ANY other second language is the same. the Canadians HATE learning French as their second language, the Taiwanese HATE learning English as their second language. Somewhere in their minds they have it that if it's the one subject they do really badly at, it must mean that it's really really hard and that's another excuse to keep hating it. That's a VERY detrimental mindset and it's up to parents to get it out of their heads. 

For parents to entertain this negative attitude to the point of whining about it on radio instead of setting the kids straight only shows that these parents have the SAME attitude, and that THEY are infact those who instilled it in their kids.

These are KIDS, they HATE WORK, they want to PLAY. in High School they want to have girlfriends, and cool clothes, and nonchalant attitudes like the stars on TV. They will find ANY excuse to hate ANY subject. These are Very easily influenced pre-Individuals and we need to take care what kind of guidance we give them. We can't just sympathize and entertain their every complaint. They've got to jack themselves up and learn to become real people - who have do a LOT of things that we don't Want to do. Afrikaans is the least of their problems!

-- 

Jennifer Hsieh
MSc Neurophysiology
Dpt Human Biology
University of Cape Town
+27 21 650 6599

Chairperson
Golden Future Project
University of Cape Town
Cell: +27 82 906 8108