Treating ADHD with What? Marijuana!

Marijuana Being Used To Treat ADHD–Really?

Marijuana - Tx
Yes, it’s true. Apparently parents and doctors are using marijuana on kids who have been diagnosed with ADHD. It seems that this use was discovered by accident when teenagers who were supposedly ADHD seemed to be calmer and be able to focus better when they started smoking pot.

From that, word has spread that marijuana is a useful treatment for ADHD. California allows for the medical use of marijuana which has been found to be helpful for nausea from chemotherapy. Now it seems they’ve found another medical use. I can certainly understand parents wanting to use a safer treatment than the current ones we have.

Marijuana  and Ritalin—Both Controlled Addictive Substances

Perhaps marijuana is an improvement over the first and primary drug used for ADHD, Ritalin. Ritalin or methylphenidate is nearly identical to cocaine. Researchers report that methylphenidate goes to the same receptor site in the brain as cocaine and it causes the same high when taken in the same manner. Cocaine and methylphenidate are actually used interchangeably in medical research.

Adderall, another ADHD drug, is nothing more than straight amphetamines. That’s all it contains. Both drugs are controlled substances because they are addictive. Yet, with all this information about Ritalin, Adderall and the other ADHD drugs, they are still heavily prescribed.

Some say marijuana is safer than the drugs currently used to treat ADHD. That might be true but it hasn’t been studied for that use. Marijuana has been touted as an entry way drug, one that leads to other and potentially more serious and dangerous drug use in the future. I don’t know if that is the case either but there are studies indicating that methylphenidate (Ritalin) is an entry way drug. That would make sense to me because it is so much like cocaine.

Treating ADHD WITHOUT Drugs

No More Ritalin EbookAs far as I’m concerned the entire subject is moot. In my opinion we should not be using marijuana or any other drugs to treat ADHD. We should be taking the time to find the real medical and/or educational cause of the problems and treat those.

ADHD is a subjective psychiatric disorder. The diagnosis is made from a checklist. Where else besides psychiatry does medicine make diagnoses with a checklist and without doing any medical work-up? Your doctor doesn’t decide you have high blood pressure or high cholesterol by a checklist. No, she takes your blood pressure and draws your blood.

Find and Treat the Underlying Causes of ADHD

Instead of Covering Symptoms with Addictive Drugs

I don’t make medical diagnoses with a checklist. I do a full medical and educational work-up on my patients to determine what is wrong with them, to hopefully find the underlying cause of their symptoms and then treat them for that cause. My goal is to get them well, not to just cover symptoms with prescriptions.

Because I do a thorough medical and educational evaluation on children and adults who have trouble focusing, concentrating and often misbehave, I actually have never found anyone who actually has ADHD. There is always a medical or educational reason for and a cause of the symptoms. Treating and fixing the cause allows them to have a full and successful life without a psychiatric label and without a psychiatric drug.

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Dr. Mary Ann Block

Dr. Mary Ann Block is Medical Director of The Block Center, an international clinic for the treatment of chronic health problems in children and adults. She is an international expert on the treatment of ADHD without psychiatric drugs. Her approach is to look for and treat the underlying problem instead of covering the symptoms with drugs.

5 Comments

  1. Avatar for Joy Rigberg Joy Rigberg on December 5, 2010 at 1:46 pm

    Just one word describes how I feel after reading your post…HALLELUYA! The work you do, and the message you’re sending is so incredibly important and needed.

    I work with so many children who I believe have also been misdiagnosed with ADHD and put on meds. It breaks my heart!

    As a veteran elementary school teacher and now an Educational Coach, my purpose and intention is to help children remember their strengths and their natural born potential. By helping children to become self-empowered and confident is in my opinion the best medicine there is!

    Thank you for everything you do!

    With warmth and blessings,
    Joy

  2. Avatar for marijuana 411 marijuana 411 on March 21, 2013 at 1:25 am

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  3. Avatar for chelsey chelsey on June 20, 2013 at 11:36 am

    Im in need of help for mt husband. He has been diagnosed with add since a kid and been given adderal and ritalin. Which is basically speed! He has even mentioned himself he doesnt like it. But now he is looking into marijuana and self medicating with it. I do not want this for our family. I just had a baby and its so important to me that my child grows up to not feel she NEEDS something to make her beyter or feel better. He is an addict/alcoholic as well. I feel like he is not add he just has underlying issues that have not been talked about. We do not have insurence through our place of work and I dont know what to do!! I live in Roseburg Oregon and would love any advice help or input. I absolutly love my husband with everything and I know hes worth something better than drugs.

  4. Avatar for Mary Mary on August 20, 2013 at 4:23 pm

    Hello. I am intrigued by your post. My son is almost 8 years old and has suffered from some sort of disorder since before he was a year old. They call it severe ADHD. I refused medication until about 2 years ago. I tried diet, routine, counseling and homeopathics. He showed improvement but was still a danger to himself and others. Finally I put him on a low dose of medication and saw good results immediately. He could focus on his work, he made friends, and felt better about himself. Unfortunately the good results were short-lived. He now has anger issues and seems to be restless irritable and discontent on a regular basis. He has really good times but not enough. the doctors now want to up his dose but I don’t feel that that is the answer. There has to be a better way. What secret miracle do you know that we have not tried?

  5. Avatar for Brandon Sisneros Brandon Sisneros on September 14, 2013 at 4:17 am

    I have had many problems throughout my life. I am very intelligent and hardworking. The fact that I have such a high IQ has delayed my diagnosis of ADD. I didn’t even know that I had any type of mental illness because I am so smart. It wasn’t until recently when my aunt said that her son reminded her so much of me and that he had recently been diagnosed with ADHD that I even started thinking about it. After doing a little bit of research on the subject it is like I got struck by a lightning bolt.
    Ever since I can remember I have felt like I was a horrible person. My parents were always getting after me for not keeping my room clean and for always procrastinating. I thought that I lacked self discipline or that I was lazy because that is what others made me feel like. Because I was so smart and always got average grades my parents were always getting after making me feel like I was a bad child. Because I didn’t show any of the symptoms that people neurotypically associate with ADHD like hyperactivity and restlessness nobody even considered that I had a problem.
    I went many years feeling worthless and even tried to commit suicide a few times. I finally found hope when I tried Marijuana for the first time. After starting to use marijuana my senior year my habits and actions stared to change dramatically I started getting straight A’s, I would get up early in the morning and I actually looked forward for to go to school and work instead of dreading it. This was short lived though, after my parents found out that I was smoking pot they became extremely disappointed in me and threatened to kick me out of the house. I felt horrible and quickly slipped back into deep depression. I spent the next few years just barely getting by. I actually don’t know how I even made it through these years because I felt like a complete failure and that if this is what life was suppose to feel like that it wasn’t worth living.
    I learned to cope with my problems in a very destructive way. I started using OTC cough medications just to give me a reason to live. It stared off innocently enough but quickly progressed into a major drug addiction. I was completely out of control but yet I had felt like that my whole life so at least I could numb the disappointment if only for a little bit. During these years of addiction I had to be rushed to the emergency room a half a dozen times to get my stomach pumped because I had taken at least 20 times the normal dose of cough medicine. I had a few productive years here and there but that is when I had a steady supply of marijuana. I even started going to college during these years.
    Because of the negative stigma towards marijuana people in my life told me that what I was doing was bad and that I needed to quit so I often quit only to return to the cough medicine shortly there after. My life finally changed when my aunt told me about her son. I went to a doctor and told him that I thought that I suffered from ADHD after asking me a few questions about my symptoms he quickly agreed and prescribed me Adderall. When I took it it calmed me down so much just as marijuana had done for me. I actually felt like I was saved because I finally had a drug that relieved my symptoms and nobody told me what I was doing was bad. Since then I have done a lot of research on the subject and I found out that many people with ADHD have found that marijuana is beneficial in reliving ADHD symptoms. This comforted me so much in knowing that I was using marijuana to relieve my pain and not just to get stoned.
    Currently I don’t use marijuana and haven’t for a while mainly because the state where I live is very against marijuana use. Adderall does work for me and has greatly improved the quality of my life along with behavioral therapy and research. However there are many side affects of Adderall that I don’t like, especially the fact that I no longer enjoy food and rarely feel hungry. Also I have suffered with insomnia for as long as I remember and Aderall makes it worse, but the benefits are so good that I will tolerate those negative affects. I hope that one day people will get rid of the negative astigmatism that marijuana offers little to no benefits. I also hope that people will stop and think before they criticize people for doing what is deemed socially unacceptable because more often than not there are underlying causes as to why people do the things that they do.

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