A Walk around the Park Makes the Treatment of ADHD a Walk in the Park
The kind of news reports you see around, you have to wonder how it is that we hear words like autism or ADHD bandied about so much these days. Where were these disorders when we were growing up 20 years ago? There was a report in the Journal of Attention Disorders a short time ago about a research study. According to it, there is now strong suspicion, that it is chemical pollution in our water and atmosphere that is responsible for autism. A child's young and developing brain is easily susceptible to the effects of industrial chemicals. And now, here's a new study, this time about ADHD. It should be right up your street, if you're one of those anxious parents trying hard to find that one magic option that will completely turn around treatment of ADHD for your child. The study finds something that might seem obvious, but still needs stressing - time spent out in nature, helps a child or rein in the anxious fretting, fidgeting and daydreaming characteristic of ADHD.
Of course, you're thinking,"Who could've guessed? A child driven to distraction endlessly sitting inside the concrete bunker that passes for a school building, in artificial lighting all day, worrying about chemistry tests and math quizzes lightens up right away with a little time spent in the woods; who could've guessed?" In fact, the trend these days with unrealistic study goals and work pressures is that children and adults with no disorder, often take drugs meant for the treatment of ADHD, Adderol or Ritalin to cope with the kind of pressures they need to put themselves under to cover a everything they need for an exam or an upcoming meeting. If regular people need drugs to cope, where's the point calling a child "abnormal" if she's a little distracted?
But getting back to the study, it was a pretty small one - less than 20 kids. They took these children with ADHD out on walks. One of the walks was in the woods, one down a regular neighborhood street, and a third, down to a strip mall. Batches of children went on these walks, in different orders. And after each one, they were given a test that all ADHD children usually take - it's called the Digit Span Backwards test. The tester says a few numbers out loud to the child, and if the child has the concentration to follow what is said, she should be able to recite those numbers backwards. According to the test, the children who had been on a walk to the park, found there Digit Span Backwards particularly easy. And if you're thinking that maybe the tester just wanted to see things this way, you'll need to know that they adjusted for this. The tester had no idea what walk each child had just come back from. What a grand way now to go about the treatment of ADHD in your child.
Actually, this study isn't all that revolutionary. They had something like this about five years ago, that was done on nearly 500 children. They found that any kind of activity done around a lot of greenery, usually calms the mind's ADHD symptoms. The research actually says that traditional treatment of ADHD with drugs, is actually less effective than treatment with greenery. Even if it's just a half hour of it. And now when parents hear of it, they often remark on how they've noticed this in their children all the time.