Archive for May, 2009

Taking an Attention Deficit Disorder Test

There is a lot more information on attention deficit disorder testing now than there was in the past. Today, there are many children that are affected by this disorder and need to be tested to diagnose their particular issues and help them to function more efficiently in school and every day life. Attention deficit disorder tests are very simple to complete, and for younger children they are usually completed by the parents and the teachers that the child has. The forms can be requested from most medical doctors so that the diagnosis can be made and the proper strategies and medications can be put in place to help that particular child. There are also attention deficit disorder tests for adults so that if they were missed as children, they can still be diagnosed and helped as adults.

Questionnaires

These attention deficit disorder tests for children are very comprehensive in most cases. Often, if the child is able to answer questions on his own, he will have a version of the questions that are designed for him to answer and the parents will have their version of the questions to answer about their child. If the child is school aged, there are also attention deficit disorder testing questions that are given to the teachers that he has so that they can give feedback as to what they are seeing each day in the classroom. Once all of the attention deficit disorder tests have been completed, they are then compiled to see if there is enough evidence to merit medication or other intervention for that child.

If the attention deficit disorder test comes back positive for the disorder, then the doctor will usually work with the parents to decide what steps to take to help the child be successful at home and at school. There are many different types of medications designed to help children focus during the day and they can be given in the smallest possible dose that is still beneficial to the child. The draw back to these medications is that many of them cause the child to lack an appetite, which causes developmental problems physically in some cases. It can also cause them to lack enthusiasm or change their overall personality when on the medication, so many parents do not like that side effect. There are plans that can be put in place in the school to help the child function better, such as seating them in the front of the room or in a place where there are the least distractions. 

Tags: attention deficit disorder test, attention deficit disorder testing info

The Importance Of Iodine In Your Diet

The bottle of iodine in your medicine cabinet has nothing to do with sex appeal, but it’s different with the iodine you eat.

There she goes, trig and trim, tripping down the street in the manner gentlemen prefer. She has everything, including ample thyroxine.

Here she comes, plowing down the avenue, slow as a tramp steamer and approximately as majestic—Sluggish Susie, slow and fat, with mental activity no greater than the law allows, and the oomph quotient of a blimp.

Of course Susie is just an example, and anyhow maybe her name is John. She isn’t anybody you know. She is just a subject for our text on iodine, one of the big four minerals—the others are calcium, phosphorus, and iron— likely to be lacking in American diets.

Grasp the front of your neck in a choking stance and your fingers and thumb will be on opposite sides of your thyroid gland. This is a potent little twin-lobed organ that is something like a saddle on your Adam’s apple. It filters out of your bloodstream every unemployed molecule of iodine it can lay its glands on and from it manufactures a powerful secretion, thyroxine, which represents the naturally not inconsiderable margin that separates you from imbecility.

By this time you are aware that your body produces a vast amount of heat energy. The thyroid gland is the thermostat that controls the rate at which the furnace burns. Too little of it brings listlessness, loss of energy, obesity, sluggishness, lack of mental and physical pep and ginger.

 Too much of it jacks your thermostat so high that you become excitable, overheated, constantly hungry; the mind is over-active, jumps like a grasshopper instead of following through on ideas; your heart races and the eyes tend to bulge.
But ah—a perfectly adjusted thyroid and you’re a good bet for any man’s or woman’s interest!

Iodine enters this charming picture because it makes up two-thirds of the secretion of the thyroid. When you don’t get enough iodine, the gland works overtime to make up the deficiency but the best it can do is increase its own substance and then the neck swells unattractively with simple goiter. There are complex relationships between the thyroid and the sex glands and general activities involving energy, as the search for romance assuredly does.

Iodine shortage is particularly common in regions of the country once covered by glaciers. The Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest regions have soils and drinking water particularly poor in iodine. It is now common practice to include iodized table salt in the diet and in this way the incidence of simple goiter has to great degree been controlled. But there are other types of goiter (not all of them cause neck swellings) that are made worse by excess iodine. The warning of authorities is that any person over the age of thirty who has a swelling on the neck should consult a physician before taking iodized salt or other form of iodine therapy.

There is no practical danger of your getting too much iodine from foods, however. Rabbits whose foods were limited to Brussels sprouts, cabbage, or cauliflower have developed toxic goiters, the result of excess production of thyroxine. This is not the result of excess iodine, but of the richness of these foods in cyanide compounds of an organic nature. Through chemical processes the cyanide radicles tend to create a shortage of oxygen available to the body; this causes the thyroid, which controls oxidation processes, to step up production of its secretion. The possibility of your limiting your diet to Brussels sprouts is reasonably remote, although some "reducing’* diets of a faddish nature are just about as wacky, which gives us another chance to work in a plug for a reasonable variety of foods every day.

Sea foods are the most abundant sources of dietary iodine—fish, oysters, lobsters, sardines. Canned salmon is an excellent source. Vegetables may contain much or little iodine according to the nature of the soils they are grown in. This variability is characteristic of the mineral values of most plant foods, which naturally cannot be expected to abstract elements from soils that have been depleted by intensive cultivation or are naturally deficient.

Now that you see how the thyroid secretion regulates the rate at which you burn energy, it is easy to understand the functions and dangers of thyroid extract as a reducing drug. In the case of Sluggish Susie, a little thyroid  might be just what  the  doctor ordered
 

Tags: iodine, diet, foods, healthy foods, iodine therapy