Overdiagnosis Of Add

How to Distract Your Kid Into Paying Attention

It’s the oldest trick in the book: If you have a boring task, make it seem like fun. Maybe others will pitch in. You might even start enjoying yourself. Remember Tom Sawyer living it up while whitewashing the picket fence? The best teachers I encountered while researching “Now You See It:  How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn” captivated their students’ attention by providing interactive and collaborative challenges with clear rewards.  We can adapt some of their tactics.

Whether it’s the teacher in rural western Canada who used the old-school trick of a weekly spelling bee or the teacher in New York City who used a chess period as a reward for math success, great teachers find ways to encourage even rote mastery of facts with game tactics and merit-driven rewards.

For younger children especially, physical activity can help kids concentrate on the activity. In one classroom, 30 third-graders played what was essentially musical chairs. Except once the music stopped, every child in a chair was asked a question. If she answered incorrectly, she had to relinquish her seat to a classmate without a chair.

The “losers” could also be asked for a hint, like asking the audience on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.” It was a brilliant way of prepping kids for the mind-numbing memorization required for the end-of-grade tests currently required by our No Child Left Behind national educational policy. Combine play dates with learning games and even the parents might have fun.

Making kids take responsibility for their own conduct also works. I spent time in a sixth-grade classroom with a boy diagnosed with ADD. His disruptive nature could turn the whole class into a circus. But his teacher knew the boy loved a certain problem-solving video game, so he made  a pact with him. The boy set a timer for 20 minutes as soon as he came into the class. If he could sit still until the timer sounded, without disturbing other students or being distracted himself, he was allowed to spend the remaining 20 minutes of class playing his video game. Twenty minutes is when most of us start to lose focus, so this teacher always broke his class into two or three segments, even for the straight-A students.

When medical screening leads to overdiagnosis | Calgary Beacon

If you feel like you have something wrong with you, don’t delay, go to your doctor and get it checked out.

But if you are healthy and otherwise feeling fine, should you ask your doctor for tests to see if your body is harbouring some kind of disease or another? Everywhere you turn it seems there is someone or some group urging you to you to get tested for something to stay healthy.

Medical testing is big business

It’s important to realize that whether it’s a cholesterol test, a check of your bone density or a probe of your prostate, the modern medical testing juggernaut is eager to “screen” you for disease, ironically, in order to prevent it. Frequent and routine screening is good for giving doctors steady business and puts dollars in the pockets of the medical testing and pharmaceutical industry. And many of us appreciate it: After all, better safe than sorry, right?

Wrong. Or should I say, “mostly wrong.” There are a few reasonable instances where the evidence supports screening entire populations of healthy people to find diseases before they can cause harm (screening for colon or cervical cancer, for example) but most others are often little more than exercises in futility for healthy people.

Has he lost that loving feeling?

Let’s look at one case in point.

There is an ad taking up to a third of the page of a major Canadian newspaper, showing a couple in bed, separated by words etched into granite asking: “Has he lost that loving feeling?” It’s obvious there is something wrong in the sex department with this couple and the ad is part of a bold new campaign to get men – and their physicians – thinking differently about what it means to be male and getting old. In days of yore before every aspect of our lives was colonized by the pharmaceutical industry, it was perfectly acceptable for a guy approaching 50 to start taking naps and losing interest in sex. But today pharmaceutical manufacturers cast a lusty eye on large untapped markets of boomer decrepitude, in this case the natural drop in testosterone as we men age.

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