Slide 65:In October of 1996 she was moving along. Her
school noticed the improvement. She still, however, got distracted easily. This is a
critical point. We didn’t have a totally normal child. Academically, she could hold
her own in kindergarten fine. This child’s mother was very happy with her
academically. But, I’m not going to say that this child was normal at this point. We
still had to help her evolve socially and behaviorally. She would still act out like a 3
or 4 year-old kid at times.
Finally, it seemed apparent from her spect scan that she did have a legitimate
component of hyperactivity. This is another area that the spect scan has helped on. I know
that even though she suffers that temporal hypoperfusion, part of her brain was very
active. I would not use Ritalin or Dexedrine because unfortunately, Ritalin and Dexedrine
will not only shut down the bloodflow in that frontal lobe but they will also shut down
the bloodflow in the entire brain.
Unfortunately, what is suppressed out there, there is a NeuroSPECT article in our
references that show Ritalin on the brain is a vaso –constrictor; it shuts down
bloodflow. For the record there is no difference on an adult brain if you give them a dose
of Ritalin or you give them a dose of cocaine. What are we putting in our adolescents?
I chose to use a Catapres patch with her. It did what we wanted. It seemed to take off
that little edge. The parents noticed that whenever they would change the patch, she was
always off a little bit the first couple of days but did fine after that. Again, what
I’m always looking for and what I term fine tuning is that you want to keep cleaning
up all those rough edges. So, I changed her over to Tenex. She wound up evening out very
nicely. Tenex is a slow-release Catapres-type agent. She was no longer hyper, not spacey.
We actually began to increase her Prozac a little bit. She was doing well in school. Her
listening skills improved; her focus improved. The teachers were happy. Her attention was
improving.
