AD/HD Office Updates: Home and Away

The operant word for this fall: Busy
It's been intense gang – home and away… this small picture gives you a little of the feel for the current activity level: 
much of the travel is teaching/discussing aspects of the AD/ADHD experience – viewed by other ADD treatment docs, – and by some very interesting brain injury folk I'll tell you about in the next post:

Take note:
Changed the intro audio on the main page, only 1.5 min, and added

An AD/HD Problems with Medications Audio Outline: 17.25 min audio discussing in more detail the 10 Biggest Problems with ADD/ADHD Medications, – it goes with the 1200 word article available when you sign up for updates on the ADD book [also over there on the upper right of the post] – then, quite happily, notified the folks in my book database of the audio upgrade – another techno-hurdle.

First, an Apology –
In the last several weeks I've been in Greenville, SC, Tampa, FL, Bristol, TN, Jackson and Battle Creek, MI and some spots around VA, speaking with many [more than 200] of my medical colleagues about their experiences regularly treating AD/HD, thus the apology – I have been off my writing schedule here.

The AD/HD Philosophic Reception
The discussion about aspects of my new book has been, quite interestingly, uniformly positive. The theme in my medical presentations is simple, and often addressed here at CorePsychBlog –

• we often do not use precise parameters with our AD/HD treatment targets, – current diagnostic criteria are imprecise, superficial, amorphous and "move about" too much- does that cover it? If we don't see it how can we hit it?
• we don't appreciate the specific trajectories of the drugs we use, and thereby often miss the mark just because we don't adjust our sights correctly, but, rather, too often blast away. Are we shooting howitzers at wrens?
• we do regularly see drug interactions that are relevant, and come up frequently with generically available cheaper meds like Prozac and Paxil, secondary to the inappropriate pressures of managed care – said another way: those two cheap drugs are making the whole treatment scene much more difficult with stimulants – for the patients and the docs. Plumbing issues abound.
• the public and many professionals do not accept that AD/HD is a contextual diagnosis that appears in certain realities, and not in others – it's not like a bacterial infection – so the diagnosis is often completely missed… It's there, but the radar is not tuned to see that incoming.
• and these are but a few of the points that haunt thousands of patients and offices everyday… These experiences aren't odd, but rather pandemic in the trenches – thus the book.

Stay tuned for more reports from the front.