Empowering Women in Chiropractic -New insights about ADHD! Monika Buerger DC

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Elizabeth and myself would love to thank ChiroSecure for giving us this platform and always having our backs and giving this opportunity to help enlighten the world about kiddos and chiropractic. Elizabeth is gonna take a mad nap while we continue on and she'll be back to see you at the end.

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So have a good nap there. Miss Elizabeth. Today we are gonna drop some amazing information about A DHD. Have we been getting it wrong all these years? What is the science telling us? We're gonna dive in and dig into that. So stay tuned. Follow me. I'm Dr. Monika Buerger, and I am excited to bring you this updated information pearls that we should be starting to consider for those kiddos that are struggling with learning attention and behavior set.

First of all, back in 1999, they started this ongoing study. It's called the MTA Study, multimodal Treatment for A DHD. So it started in 1999 and it's a progressive ongoing study. And out of that came the findings that for A DHD, the first line of defense should actually be da drum roll. Behavioral therapy with the kiddos and with the parents learning how to interact and some behavioral strategies with kiddos.

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And in 2011, the American Academy of P, American Academy of Pediatrics adopted this. These recommendations, however, have they been followed? Let's take a look as of recently what the findings are is. Get, you get this. Four to five year olds haven't even started school yet, ages four to five. Over a little over 42% of those kiddos are being put on medications, stimulant medications, within 30 days of their first diagnosis of A DHD.

Now, mind you, these recommendations were first line of defense should be behavioral therapy for at least first six months. Okay? So within 30 days. Getting a diagnosis, 42, little over 42% of kiddos, ages four to five, haven't even started school yet, are being put on medications. About four, little over 14% are being put on medications within six months of their first diagnosis, and by the time they hit age seven, about 68%.

Kiddos are being put on prescription meds for a DHD. So the whole idea behind this MTA study and behavioral intervention as being the first line of defense has really not taken root, sadly. But just recently more more thought is going into this and researchers and neuroscientists and behavioral therapists are all looking at.

What really needs to happen? What is going on with the quote unquote A DHD individual? A neuroscientist and psychiatrist researcher out of King's College London, which I'm proud to say, I'm finishing up my master's there right now. Edmond UA bark states that we have a clinical definition of A DHD that is increasingly unor.

Neuroscience and that clinicians can't really objectively measure the individual for A DHD. In other words, there's not really a sound neurobiological reason underlying pinning for most cases of A DHD. Now, there's the cases where, you know, like fetal alcohol syndrome and. And those type of insults in that prenatal period, that will definitely lead to dysregulation of neural pathways and can lead to a DHD like behavior and symptoms.

Okay, so we've got that, but the increasing the increasingly accepted plausible. Cause be behind a DHD. Expressive behaviors. You know how I'm using the term expressive behaviors is weaknesses, difficulty between physical and emotional, adapt, adapt, adaptability, and the environment. As I've said for many years, a person, especially a kiddo's, neural expressive behavior is a window into their neurological integrity.

So if they have physical and or emotional immaturity for some reason, when they try to fit into certain environments, their expressive behavior becomes a, an issue. The MTA study has also shown that within the first 14 months of stimulant therapy, they've seen a help benefit from stimulants.

However, by 36 months that is no longer seen, they no, they don't no longer see that. The other interesting fact is that the study started in 1999. That 40% of the control group that were not, did not receive a diagnosis of A DHD back when it, when the study started later on, received a diagnosis of A DHD.

So what happened in between that time and the current accepted theory is that it is a difficulty within our environment that individuals across all ages and stages are having a harder time adapting to their environmental situations. So take for instance, the five-year-old that's starting school. Maybe they start maybe their birthday's later in the year, and many studies have shown that kiddos that have a later birthday and they start school that fall, they do tend to struggle more or they never went to preschool, or this is even better for us chiropractors, they.

In the early years, especially those first two years of developmental maturity didn't receive the proper sensory environment. They didn't meet their motor gross fine language or social motor milestones, and now they get put in an environment where the demands are greater. The 13 the teenager that maybe thrived.

During the school age the primary school ages because there was more activity driven assignments, and now there are, the demands are more sitting still, more time reading in fact, we're finding increasing demands. Of taking classes that are prerequisites for college. So the demands go up.

They thrive when they were able to be in environments where they could be more doing and more activities. And as that starts to diminish in that junior high school years, they start to struggle. Even the adult that graduates from college now, they get thrown in a high stressful environment in jaw in, in the workforce.

More demands may be more multitasking, more technology. And again, they don't have that neuro adaptability to thrive in that environment. So that's the new model of thinking in the A DHD world. However, we have to understand that ourselves. As practitioners that are working with families and kiddos, and we need to be able to to articulate that and help educate practice members in some things that could be beneficial for those that are struggling.

The, one of the biggest talked about environmental stressors, so to speak, is sleep. A lot of the researchers, the scientists that are looking in this arena on behavioral strategies and neuro adaptability in their environment, take sleep as a primary example. When you're tired, you just.

Everything's out the window, right? It's harder to concentrate, to sit still. One of the theories is the reasons that stimulants might work sometimes or temporarily with those that struggle with learning attention, behavior, and A DHD. Is because just like a truck driver or an individual that works midnight shifts and so forth, a stimulant can help them get through that period of time, that short period of time more successfully.

But it doesn't help over a long period, over a long period of time. And that's the same line of thinking. So the shift is happening into looking at more conservative strategies. For those struggling with attention issues rather than medication. And for us as chiropractors, that's it. This is the gist of what we do.

Not only have we shown in the adult we don't have the studies to back up the kiddos yet, but in the adult brain that the specific chiropractic adjustment helps modulate. Incoming sensory input into the brain in order for us to respond more appropriately in the motor capacity. And that's essentially what we're looking at in the new paradigm of the A DHD individual.

First of all, if we have vertebral subluxations early on in life, and those little fiddle farts, and I've talked about this a million times, those little fiddle farts can't get into the right developmental motor patterns. Tummy time rolling supine, bringing their nose, their toes, getting up on all fours, rocking, creeping, crawling.

These developmental motor patterns are priming the brain. For later on, executive functioning and learning and attention behavior skills in the classroom or in the workforce, if they're missed for any reason, including vertebral subluxations, that's going to cause a discrepancy between what's going, the information coming into the brain and being able to properly narrowly adapt in their environment.

When. Things are on more of a command or demand basis. So bottom line for us, chiropractors getting in and laying the foundation, laying the down foundation for developmental health. And if that is skipped, the consequences that they might struggle with down the road, but it's never too late to make that up.

We can still get in there. We can clear vertebral subluxations if they're 5, 6, 18 years old, and we can start to re-pattern those neurosci circuits in the brain so that now that they can better narrowly adapt to their environment. If you want more information and really learn the nuts and bolts on this, scroll down, dive in, dig in to my foundations of neural development.

You can't miss out because this is incredibly essential information that you need to turn the tide for generations to come again. Elizabeth and myself, Elizabeth, got up from a nap. Wanna thank ChiroSecure for giving us this opportunity? Hopefully you will learn and dive into these tidbits and pearls and enlighten the world about why kiddos need chiropractic.

We'll see you next month.

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