Posts Tagged: add articles

ADHD News — No Comments
19
Nov 10

Myths About ADHD Article

The folks over at Huffington Post showed up in my ADD news alerts, which seemed odd since it’s more of a politics / news website than a science website or a health information site. Of course, that means that a journalist came up with a sensational enough angle on ADHD to get an editor to give the green light. Most of the time, the results are not good for either ADD education and awareness or for the propagation of stereotypes about ADHD.

The angle that got a spot on the huffingtonpost.com front page was ADHD: 12 Myths and Facts. (Kudos on the SEO title, guys.)

So, what "myths" and "facts" did they come up with for their bite-sized review of all ADHD science and ADD research?

  1. Pesticides being linked to ADD. — They call it a fact. They aren’t wrong only due to careful wording. The real fact is that a recent research study showed that children with higher levels of one pesticide chemical were diagnosed with ADHD at higher rates. That leaves out a lot, like all of the children with ADD who do not have high levels of organophosphate as well as all the kids with high organophosphates, but no ADD.
  2. ADD Risk Higher When Mom Smokes or Drinks During Pregnancy — That’s true of just about everything.
  3. Food preservatives linked to ADHD – Researchers linked hyperactivity, which is not the same thing to some food preservatives.
  4. Sugar Causes ADD – Big fat myth. Good catch on this one.
  5. TV and Video Games – Myth
  6. Bad Parenting – Myth
  7. Brain Injury – Myth, but really inconclusive. Specific brain injuries are not common so finding a link it tough.
  8. Diet – Myth, at least the way people talk about it. Of course, eating better always helps. There IS some evidence that Omega-3 levels are low in ADD kids, but that isn’t the same thing as saying more Omega-3 would help ADD symptoms.
  9. ADD Genes – This one is starting to be accepted as a fact, at least among scientists and researchers.
  10. Over-diagnosis of ADD – Possibly true, although many kids with ADD are never tested, so maybe it’s a wash. Ironically, the most over-diagnosed condition in children is actually sinus infections. Doctors just hand out antibiotics when there is green mucus, even though a real diagnosis takes either a scan or 14+ days of symptoms. So many parents "know" that their kids have a sinus infection that it just isn’t worth the doctor fighting them on it.
  11. Lead Exposure – Not a lot of science here. Again, lead exposure isn’t that common, so getting a pool is tough. It’s a possibility though. Lead messes up a ton of stuff in the human body.
  12. Other Chemicals – Some chemicals are very harmful to the brain and nervous system. Assuming that ADHD can be "caused" at all, harsh chemicals might be one of the things that could cause ADD, although there is no actual link established by any legitimate research.

All in all, not a terrible article, if not very informative. Of course, as a bite-sized digest in the form of a slide show, you could do a lot worse.

News — 2 Comments
14
Nov 09

New Article About What Is ADD

I am always curious about new ADHD tips or developments in ADD research or treatments, but I’m also interested in the ever changing perception of ADD-ADHD in the public consciousnesses.

For a while there it seemed as though everyone without any personal or professional experience with ADD-ADHD and its affects thought that is was something phony made up by shrinks to explain away bad behavior by children.

Then, for a while it seemed like EVERYBODY had ADD, or thought they did. That finally seemed to culminate when Britney Spears went crazy and shaved off her hair, then proclaimed that sometimes she was like a kid with ADD even though I’d be she could barely even spell ADD.

The public fascination with ADHD seems to have calmed down as of late. I see far fewer articles in the newspaper and even fewer stories on T.V.  This is good news for the ADHD-ADD community. The less surface-level attention ADD gets, the better.

To test my theory a little bit, and because I know the topic well enough to write about it very quickly, I recently published an article about what is ADHD on another website. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, HubPages is what is known as an article directory, or more derisively as a content mill. In a nutshell, it is a website that allows anyone to sign up for an account and then write articles about whatever they want and publish them on the Internet from the HubPages.com website.

There are several reasons someone would want to do such a thing ranging from pure vanity, all the way through to the purely mercenary function of creating more links to other webpages or websites for the purpose of building up Google reputation, or PageRank, in order to get higher search engine rankings for certain terms.

Anyway, I have an account over there that I started for the mercenary reason, and then sort of evolved into a good place to publish the tons of things I write for which I have no home. Sometimes, the articles are not about the kind of topics that people are willing to pay for and they also don’t fit into the themes or categories of other websites or blogs that I own. (For example, no one reading this blog, which is focused on ADD-ADHD information, would be charmed by an article about Arabian Horse that I posted here just because I didn’t really have anywhere else to put it.)

Thus, HubPages has become my sort of catch-all for any and all articles that I want to put up on the Internet, but otherwise am not willing to find a more traditional publishing location for.

The article I wrote was called simply What Is ADD?

I didn’t put any real effort into linking it or pushing it up in the search engines, although I did do the standard social bookmarking thing to make sure it got index properly in Google and Bing and the other search engines. But, for the most part, I was just curious if ADHD was a hot enough topic these days to drive the curious onlookers from the HubPages community to this particular hub.

So far, the answer would appear to be, that ADD is not a hot topic these days. As I’ve said before, I’m fine with that. I plan to leave it published there as a sort of canary in the coalmine. If all of the sudden, it starts to get lots of traffic, I’ll see it and we’ll know that another wave of looky-loos is coming.