I have a friend at work who has an eight-year-old daughter (now a third grader). Since she started school, her behavior has steadily declined. It had gotten to the point that she had a violent outburst almost every week. Screaming, kicking, throwing, biting, hitting, etc...
He teacher last year (with her vast medical expertise
) decided that this little girl was ADHD and contacted the parents (my friend) and told them to take their daughter to the doctor.
Their peditrician essentially says: "Sure, I'll buy that." I'm unclear on what happens next, but the kid ends up on meds.
The outbursts get worse. They both became more intense and more frequent--averaging once every other day, but sometime happening three or four days in a row.
The parents are at their wits end. They go back to the pediatrician, and he recomends they go to a neurologist. Upon arriving at the neurologist, he starts by doing a basic physical. He finds something interesting. This poor little girl has severly oversized tonsils. He believes this is affecting her sleep adversely.
My friend has to take his daughter for a "sleep test". From what I gather, they hook her up to machines and observe her sleep. Apparently she is waking up something like 16 times in the average night, and only spends 3% of her sleep time in phase 4 deep sleep. She suffers from sleep apnia and they are able to attribute this directly to her oversized tonsils.
Finally, they get the little girl's tonsils removed. The day after her surgery, she is a different little girl. She is tolerant, thoughtful, and the violent outbursts have completely ceased (6 months later now and still none).
This story was relayed to me today at lunch. We openly speculated that the decline of childhood tonsilectomies seems to coincide nicely with the rise of diagnoses of childhood ADHD. (Both seem to have happened in the late 70s early 80s.) While I don't think that all cases of childhood ADHD are probably really tonsil problems, I'm open to the idea that some are. I also think that childhood ADHD has become a catchall for any behavior problem.
This story came up because the same people's 5 year old son has developed some severe behavior problems. Mom looked down his throat with a flashlight last night and saw what she believes is oversized tonsils. Their neurologist moved his practice across the country last month...