Saturday, January 17, 2009
ADD-ADHD Treatment - 7 Tips on Finding the Elusive Top of the Therapeutic Window
Psychiatric medications are just like any other medications: they must always be adjusted correctly to work correctly. The patient's size and weight no longer matters. Today, medication adjustments are all about this little known Mind Bio-marker: the Therapeutic Window We used to think that weight and body size were the two most important variables to understand proper dosing. Today those somatic parameters are old news. What does matter a great deal demonology 2008: metabolic rate, how the meds are burned, and if they are burned correctly.
It sounds complicated at first, but in the end, it's really easy, and the benefits are clearly measurable. We are hosted exchange services taking medication understanding from using only somatic surface appearance as predictors, to the molecular and cellular level: metabolism, metabolic rate, is the key predictor to unlock that challenging door, and to correctly adjust stimulant meds to treat ADD/ADHD challenges. If medications are correctly adjusted the patient lives right inside that Therapeutic Window: They don't go out the top, nor do they bump on the bottom. They float right inside that important window as follows: Simply stated: The Top is too much, the Bottom is too little.
Overview: After recognizing these fundamental Window Lessons the patient becomes an essential partner in the complicated process of medication dosage adjustment. Without this essential information, medication adjustment becomes a roll of the dice, reactions occur frequently because "How do you feel?" is but a small, often macro, inaccurate measure of subtle micro processes of each person's metabolic activity -- their burn rate. And the good news in this regard: The Therapeutic Window actually isn't hard to find or measure, it just takes a little more time.The Therapeutic Window represents the body's ability to metabolize the medication effectively. Seven easy Tips to Recognize the Top of the Therapeutic Window apply here:
- The Reasonable Objective - No side effects: If the medication is just right in dosage and duration you will feel that you are simply floating through that effective Window opening -- no problem, and no, or very few, "side effects."
- Recognize Too Much: If the medication is too much, too high in dosage, you will have signs of toxicity, and will hit the top of the window - bump your head on the top of that window.
- Toxicity Timing: All Day Problems - Toxicity may appear as absolute: All day buzzing and can't think, just out the top of the window, feeling stoned, or so full of thoughts you can't get anything done.
- Toxicity Timing: On and Off Problems -Toxicity may appear as cyclical, mercurial -- off and on -- with hyperfocus and subsequent inability to focus. This is the most frequently missed side effect at the top, and the most important clinically, because it encourages regular, predictable negative med consequences. Most often with amphetamine products such as Adderall IR, Adderall XR, Vyvanse, and Dexedrine a person at the top of the window will have periods of hyperfocus appearing later in the morning, then fluctuations later in the day in the noon range of time. It looks like the meds are almost working, and is often confused with the bottom of the window: not enough. Adjusting upward without recognizing this essential top of the window problem can become catastrophic -- because becoming toxic and completely out of control becomes highly likely. An easy mistake: interpreting only the part of the cycle on the unfocused side as insufficient meds, - that's why you have to step back and review the entire day.
- "Drugged" Is Too Much: Simply feels like you are toxic, it's just too much. You shouldn't feel stoned or drugged.
- More Symptoms at the Top: Confusion, disorientation, cognitive stress, anxiety, are all increased, while self-expression diminishes.
- Different Stimulant, Different Tops: Stimulants Adjusted Incorrectly: you can feel moody and depressed all day - and relieved in the evening as they have a shorter 1/2 life with an expected duration of less than 12-14 hrs. If you feel better when they are gone from your system, - this is a big hint. [Big drops in the PM are also associated with comorbid depression - more later.] With amphetamine stimulants too high you might feel buzzed, an uncomfortable intensity, too overly attentive, with angry and often sad mood swings. With the methylphenidate ['Ritalin-like'] products you may feel more "stoned and out of it" if meds are adjusted beyond the top of the window.
If you feel these kind of symptoms for the first couple of days after starting a new med, usually no problem. If symptoms continue, urgency is called for and an adjustment is very likely necessary, -- see your doctor, and feel free to pass along this article to your medical professional and to your friends.
This is the first article in a series dealing with dosing of ADD/ADHD stimulant medications. I will be back with tips on the "bottom of the window," "duration of effectiveness" and other important a practical Therapeutic Window tips for medication management. We strongly support your medical team and hope this helps with your progress.
Bottom Line By following simple guidelines and the metaphor of the 'Therapeutic Window' you will be more able to adjust dosing correctly, and effectively - so you and yours don't feel like treatment failures. I invite you to sign up now for the early bird special set of gifts for my new book "Fixing the ADD Madness: A Patient's Guide to Stimulant Medication Details," over at corepsychblogcorepsychblog - And enjoy the bonus gift on the thank you page for signing up early -- simply to express your interest in the book: a 1200 word article on The 10 Biggest Problems With ADD/ADHD Medications, and a 17 min audio review of the article. At CorePsychBlog you can also sign up to keep posted on upcoming ADD/ADHD teleseminars and other training opportunities to further understand ADD medication challenges.
Best to Test
The scene is a sidewalk winding through a vast and neatly manicured lawn, belonging to a public elementary school with a flag waving above it. Two neatly dressed girls wearing sensible shoes converse as they walk away from the school, bent forward at the waist from the weight of their overstuffed backpacks. They appear to be average, innocent-looking middle-school-aged kids, with the exception of their oddly pubescent breasts. A blonde-haired girl with a bob haircut looks defeated as she complains to her worried looking pony-tailed companion, So far all were learning is car insurance insurance quote to take a math test, how to take a science test, and how to take a reading test.
In the same boat as many parents, teachers, schools, taxpayers, and most importantly students, the cartoonist, Bob Englehart opposes standardized testing and the pressure it puts on children. The contrast created in drawing childish-looking girls with untimely large breasts highlights the unnatural pressure placed on children in the U.S., giving the impression that children today grow up too quickly. The anxious expressions on the youngsters faces imply that they are being pushed to meet the current and increasingly rigid standards, and the overstuffed backpacks illustrate the disproportionate load children are being burdened to carry. If our children were being pushed to actually learn and retain things, the childs comments at the base of the cartoon wouldnt be so bad; however they are merely learning how to take tests, which has scary implications for the future.
Originally introduced to classrooms in the 1920s , standardized tests assess the basic reading, writing, math and science skills of elementary through high school aged students. It wasnt until the mid 1980s that standardized testing became political and The National Governors Association came up with the concept of performance based accountability leading to the amendment of Title 1 in 1994 making performance-based accountability mandatory. Under President Bushs 2001 education reform law, The No Child Left Behind Act, schools must administer twice as many standardized tests and students must meet twice as many standards as before. The Elementary and Secondary Education Act was reauthorized in 2002, tremendously increasing school accountability along with rewards, aid and punishments. If standards are met, schools receive federal funding; if standards are not met, students are held back, teachers are sanctioned or let go, and schools lose funding and are forced to be converted to charter schools or to close.
The politicians claim that putting students, teachers and school administrators in a position of accountability will increase their incentive to strive for higher standards, but unfortunately, the measures with which they assess the standards are biased and inaccurate, and therefore invalid. In light of these facts, I argue that standardized tests are a legal weapon created by and for politicians as yet another way to hold down the masses of poor, which are more often than not minorities.
A current doctoral student, to whom English is a second language, grew up attending Los Angeles public schools where despite excelling in classes, she scored unbelievably low on standardized reading tests, up to and including the SAT, as did the majority of her bilingual classmates. Test questions include phrases such as, ball and chain and straight from the horses mouth reflecting the parlance of white, middle to upper class males.
Frustrated middle school teacher, Don Perl sarcastically proposed dumping the Colorado Student Assessment Program (CSAP, Colorados standardized test) and using the percentage of students eligible for free or reduced lunches to classify schools. What Perl is saying is that the results of standardized tests are predictable, and that it isnt hard to see the obvious socioeconomic disparity and its correlation to standardized test results. The title of The Daily Camera article, Incomes are Outcomes in the Classroom, sums it up well. The article reveals the following statistics: 76 percent of high-income fourth graders are reading at or above the proficient level; while only 43 percent of low-income fourth graders are reading at or above the proficient level. Harvard Magazine reports that schools performing high on standardized tests reflect the social capital (high socioeconomic status) of their students rather than the internal capacity of the schools, and asserts that test-based accountability widens the gap between schools serving the rich and the poor.
As a result of these biases, low income (often minority) children are more likely to be retained in a grade, or placed in a lower track or mesothelioma information education programs when not necessary, due to test results. Those children will be negatively labeled as failures and from that point on will likely receive a dumbed down curriculum, based on practicing test taking. Alternately, the children from the white, middle-upper class income backgrounds will be placed in gifted and talented or college preparatory programs where they are challenged to read, explore, investigate, think and progress rapidly.
Lets not measure a childs potential as it correlates with the financial success of their birth families. Our society was intended to be equal opportunity, not caste-based. Lets be fair to the youth of our nation and provide them with an education that they deserve, regardless socioeconomic class. Lets advocate to eliminate consequence based standardized testing.
Copyright 2006-Elle Housman is a freelance writer and graphic designer based in Colorado. Her publications can be found in Toward Freedom Magazine, The Colorado Daily's monthly Women's Magazine, Ujama News and on the website of The Black Biomedical Research Movement. Visit her website at PositiveScribesPositiveScribes
Web Based Application Development,Web Applications,Web Application Services,Web Development Resource
The World Wide Web (WWW) has changed how todays businesses communicate. WWW is not anymore only used to get and disseminate information but employed as a tool for performance. Todays websites are not just static pages but interactive tools that enhance your business capabilities in real time. These responsive sites are powered by the web-based applications that are capable of free quotes for car insurance and interacting with the user and allow skimming the information that is relevant and is up to date.
To be more precise, a web-based applications is the one that uses a website as a front end and you can access this website viz application from any computer connected to the internet. student loan consolidation comparison web applications is delivered to users from a web server. The most common web applications you must be using almost everyday is an e-mail like hotmail, yahoo etc. Other web-based applications that are used frequently to interact with clients, partners and other businesses are:
Custom Relationship Management End-to-end web based recruitmentOnline customer support softwareOnline data collection, analysis and reportingOnline quote softwareOnline product database developmentOnline ordering systemsPersonalization of web page contentSMS messaging integrationSecure client areas
Secure areas to allow collaboration with business partners
Web Content Management Systems
Web based applications are all about convenience and getting the combined power of desktop and server applications with the accessibility of 24 hrs, anywhere and anytime.
Lets see how they become the most strategic business tools: No installation and maintenance of the software: These web applications run on a web server, which you can access through internet. You dont have the hassles of installing and configuring a program. So, one does not need to worry about the maintenance and troubleshooting or on heavy backups on the disk space.
Cost effective: Since you are running the program from someone elses computer and no license and space management on your disk is required, so save heavily.
Latest updates available: Since someone else is hosting the program and maintaining it remotely for you, so whenever there are latest updates you just need to click on your web browser as usual and avail the latest features of a web application.
Readily available data: To access your data you just need to be connected to internet through your PC, which is no more a novelty. So, wherever you are, you can get connected to your data anytime. So the accessibility to your data is 24x7.
Multiple platforms: Almost all the web based applications are suitable for every web browser like Internet Explorer, Netscape etc or whichever operating system you have on your PC. The web application will always look and function uniformly.
Hope you guys will find the above article resourceful, For more info kindly visit our website rel="nofollow" bluent.co.inbluent.co.in
BluEnt eSolutions-your one stop destination for all your professional web related requirements catering to website design, web development, SEO, corporate training, web hosting, VoIP services, flash presentation and other web related applications.
Mental Hurry- It Kills The Passion
Mental hurry is a phenomenon that the majority of the world is a victim to.
But this only is the one that the world is the most careless about as well as quite ignorant of.
What, in fact, is mental hurry?
Whatever student loan consolidation services are doing, we want to finish it fast; and then relax.
That means, the work in hand is making as well as keeping us either tense or bored.
Or both!
Why? Why on earth?
Simply, we are not enjoying what we are doing!
But then why are we doing it in the first place?
May be, doing that is a compulsion unto us, either technically or psychologically.
When it is a technical compulsion, we may adopt one of the two approaches - first, finish it fast and do something of your choice then; and the second, just do it since you cannot avoid doing it, and so you keep doing it very slow.
In the first case you fall prey to mental hurry whereas in the second, to mental lethargy.
What decides which one will you fall to?
There are two things here - first, your personality; and the second, the urgency of the work.
There are people who adopt the first route of mental hurry often; and there are others who adopt the second route of mental lethargy more often.
But it also depends on the urgency of the work to meet the schedule. You may evade or do it slow in a half-hearted manner, if you can; but if you cannot, your mental disposition will turn to that of mental hurry and you will put all your efforts into it in order to do it as fast as you can (and may be as perfect as you can, turning yourself into a perfectionist too!).
It has happened so, since you did not like doing it.
But then, let us take the other case, i.e., that of psychological compulsion. Here you are doing a thing simply because you like doing it.
We still do it fast. I mean, with an attitude of mental hurry!
Why this time too?
Simply because line car insurance a thing does not let us enjoy doing it!
Sounds paradoxical. No?
But it is not.
Liking and enjoying are two opposite phenomena.
Liking comes from memory which is always past.
We want to repeat something, which we have a pleasant memory of.
Why do we want to repeat it?
Because we did not enjoy it then, in its totality!
What does totality mean?
Totality means being so focused while doing a thing that everything else is forgotten. Everything!
You will enjoy it in its totality.
And it will not leave a mark on your psychological memory.
In other words, you will neither like it nor dislike.
Enjoying is the anti-dote of liking and disliking.
If liking is the reason of doing, you are simply trying to complete an unfulfilled task of the past and hence, you are doomed to be in a mental hurry to complete it this time.
But we miserably fail since mental hurry, in itself, stops us from enjoying it this time too!
Mental hurry can only turn us greedy. It can never turn us joyful.
Or the other way round, greed (or liking! - by the same token disliking is fear!) will always push us toward mental hurry and stop us from enjoying what we are doing. What we feel as enjoyment, is just a thrill or excitement and nothing more.
In fact we, in general, do not know at all what real enjoyment is!
And the thing will again leave its mark on our psychological memory.
The repertoire of our psychological memory will go on getting bigger and bigger!
Our mental burden will go on increasing with every passing experience of either liking or disliking which, in turn, will go on aging us fast too! Old age does not come by the number of years we have passed, but by the number of experiences, which we either like or dislike, and hence do not enjoy them in their totality.
We will go on being more and more greedy and/or fearful.
It all turns into a vicious circle.
Since we do not enjoy - or are stopped from enjoying - doing what we are, we turn a victim to mental hurry; and since we are a victim to mental hurry, it does not let us enjoy whatever we are doing whether we like it or dislike.
And is it not liking and disliking that is the root of all emotion on earth?
And is it not total enjoyment that is the root of all passion in life?
The topic is not over yet. We have to go into the effects that this mental hurry has on our body system. We also have to go into the way to break this vicious circle somehow.
I will be doing these both in my next two (or more) articles on the topic, albeit, with the different titles those of.
By qualification, G B Singh is an electronics engineer, passionate to change the quality of life on earth.
He has decided to train people, free of charge, in the procedure of thirdeyehealthvision-correctioninstant vision correction through opening their third eye instantaneously.
He is also working on a techno-scientific project named Virtual Reality Machine envisaging to electronically mechanize the biological procedure of dissolving all the rigidities of body musculature so that almost all the lifestyle diseases could be gotten rid of in one single hour for good, for life; for which he needs volunteer-leaders from all over the world, and already has given lifesipchange-the-worlda call to that effect!
Contact him through LifeSipLifeSip and/or ThirdEyeHealthThirdEyeHealth to decide further program, together.