Trouble waking up?

Ever have trouble waking your child up? You might relate to this:

FDA issues warnings to marketers of unapproved ‘chelation’ products

On October 14, the FDA warned eight companies that their over-the-counter (OTC) chelation products are unapproved drugs and devices and that it is a violation of federal law to make unproven claims about these products. There are no FDA-approved OTC chelation products.

You can read the FDA press release here.   Although I realize that some parents may reasonably argue that saying something is “unproved” doesn’t mean it is “disproved,” remember that many OTC products are not without their own dangers.

ADHD and Executive Dysfunction

From CHADD:

In celebration of ADHD Awareness Week, CHADD would like to offer you some of the most popular Attention articles to download and share. Today’s free article:

Executive Functions: Describing Six Aspects of a Complex Syndrome
by Thomas E. Brown, PhD

Attention is an incredibly complex, multifaceted function of the mind. It plays a crucial role in what we perceive, remember, think, feel, and do. And it is not just one isolated activity of the brain. The continuous process of attention involves organizing and setting priorities, focusing and shifting focus, regulating alertness, sustaining effort, and regulating the mind’s processing speed and output. It also involves managing frustration and other emotions, recalling facts, using short-term memory, and monitoring and self-regulating action.

Observing the problems that result when attention fails has allowed me to notice the effects of attentional processes on multiple aspects of daily life. Documenting the interconnected improvements that occur when attentional impairments are effectively treated has shown me the subtle but powerful linkages between attention and multiple aspects of the brain’s management system. All of these observations have led me to conclude that attention is essentially a name for the integrated operation of the executive functions of the brain.
Read more

The author of this article, Thomas E. Brown, PhD, is is assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and Related Disorders. He is a former member of CHADD’s professional advisory board.

Read more about CHADD’s plans for the week and download the ADHD Awareness Week poster

Attend CHADD’s conference on ADHD in Atlanta, GA November 11-13.

Participate in CHADD’s Parent to Parent classes online.

Protect your privacy!

I always tell my patients not to put anything in an e-mail that they wouldn’t want to see published all over the Internet. There’s so much malware out there these days that it seems that accounts are getting hacked or compromised left and right. I use secure connections for my e-mail but if patients save a copy of any e-mail they send me, then tons of personal information may be sitting in their saved folder that any hacker could access, read, or send out to everyone in the contact list.

Last night, I received an e-mail from a patient that she sent to everyone in her contact list, telling us that her account had been hacked, and we should be careful in case any request seemed to come from her. Thankfully, she had taken my advice and never put anything in e-mail other than to check on an appointment time.

Today, I got an e-mail from someone else with a link in the body of the message. I didn’t click on it, noted that it was sent to everyone in his contact list, and e-mailed him to tell him to check his security as it looks like his account had been used to send spam or malware. Note that whatever compromised his system sent out an e-mail to everyone in his contact list and displayed the contact list to everyone. Would you want everyone in your list to see the names and e-mail addresses of everyone you e-mail?

It can happen to any one. Even if your e-mail account seems secure, what about the person you send e-mail to?

Protect your privacy and your family’s privacy when writing to your doctors or your children’s doctors. E-mail may seem convenient, but it poses risks that using the telephone doesn’t pose.

A “Home alone” experiment that didn’t quite work out

[Post deleted as it turned out to be an urban legend and not real.]

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