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One of the greatest challenges that parents confront in raising children involves monitoring their health and managing to obtain the proper treatment when needed. Yet many parents are unable to evaluate the diagnostic procedures and treatment their children receive, particularly for certain types of problems as, for example, childhood Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Over the last decade, the increasing detection of ADHD has evoked considerable controversy. Analyzing what is known about the cause, effects, diagnosis and treatment of ADHD, this chapter brings to light the pitfalls of misdiagnosis, the need to recognize the bidirectional processes between parent and child that shape the developmental manifestation of ADHD, and the scientific and political deliberations surrounding medication and psychosocial treatment. Among the policies to advance effective care, the chapter suggests not only a more rigorous reporting of negative as well as positive data on ADHD medications from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), but the creation of a Federal Psychosocial and Psychotherapeutic Treatment Administration, which would monitor evidenced-based psychosocial interventions for children in the same way that the FDA evaluates pharmacologic treatment.

This chapter tells the story of a young woman named Caterina, who was considered mad and left by her family in an asylum in Southern Brazil, examining the “dictionary” she created, which was composed of words that had meaning for her and gave form to both her past and present being. It shows the complicated circuits where Caterina's abandonment and pathology took form, as well as the edges of human imagination that she keeps on expanding. The chapter also unravels her story, including the misdiagnosis, excessive medication, and complicity among health professionals and family in creating her status as a psychotic.

This introductory chapter presents the topic of the book, Alzheimer’s illness narratives, and outlines the remaining chapters. While AD is currently constructed as a problem of epidemic proportion, such perceptions were not always the case. Scientific debate about the qualitative difference between age-related memory loss and Alzheimer’s persists, as does skepticism regarding the efficacy of treatment alternatives. Yet the overwhelming majority of research efforts and monies remain narrowly focused on cause and cure. This focus on prevention erases the everyday lived experiences of AD for those currently diagnosed and their family members alike. Contemporary epidemiological projections engender a crisis rhetoric that may contribute to mis-/overdiagnoses of Alzheimer’s and mild cognitive impairment, and/or the conflation of memory loss and AD. In the 110-year quest to understand Alzheimer’s, and the rhetoric of global devastation and annihilation of selfhood which have accompanied it, we too often ignore the very experiences of the condition.

This chapter considers the misdiagnosis of some infectious diseases as malaria. Recent reports from multiple African sites have observed that clinical diagnosis of severe malaria is often imprecise. For instance, doctors in a teaching hospital in Kumasi, Ghana, found that clinical signs and symptoms were insufficient to distinguish patients with severe malaria from those with life-threatening bacteremia. Diseases that produce symptoms similar to malaria include septicemia, Lyme disease and a number of viral infections, such as influenza. In parts of Africa that are hyperendemic for malaria, such as Nigeria, typhoid and other bacterial infections are often suspected only when malaria medicines do not work. Typhoid fever is caused by the human-adapted Typhi variety of the bacterium Salmonella enteritidis. People become infected with the organism by ingesting contaminated food or water. Most non-Typhi Salmonella cause uncomplicated diarrhea, but typhoid fever, sometimes called enteric fever, is a systemic illness characterized by a fever that is clinically indistinguishable from malaria.

This chapter illustrates the connection between racialist thinking of the past and Black women’s contemporary medical encounters. It addresses the various ways in which medical racism is asserted when the care of Black women and their children is compromised due to racist concepts such as obstetric hardiness, hardy babies, and mothers’ being viewed as menacing or potential threats. While other stories are included, Yvette Santana’s birth story is the touchstone for exploring several ways that medical racism is experienced; her account is framed around histories and ideas about Black women, their bodies, and reproduction. The organizing concept of this chapter is diagnostic lapse. A diagnostic lapse is the consequence of racialist thinking and results in a misdiagnosis.

In the field of gifted education, it commonly thought that behaviors such as inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity are common in gifted children, and, therefore, due to these behaviors, they are often being misdiagnosed as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The overexcitabilities (OEs), particularly psychomotor OE, are one source of the issue. Gifted children, due to psychomotor OE, are seen as having a high level of ADHD-like behaviors that are mistaken for ADHD. This chapter explores the literature to determine the validity of these ideas. This chapter also describes the risk for gifted children of developing any mental disorder. Finally, best practices to be used in conducting comprehensive evaluations of gifted children to determine both strengths and weaknesses for academic, social, and emotional planning are delineated.

The assessment and diagnosis phase of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a very difficult time for the parent. You will likely feel completely bewildered. You will be filled with many mixed emotions such as love for your child and fear for your child’s future. You may feel like your heart is breaking. But I can tell you, you are going to make it through this—just like I have. You will likely have to overcome significant denial to even discuss the unusual signs or symptoms that you have noticed in your young child. You may be afraid to hear the term “autism” come from your pediatrician’s mouth. However, you are about to start a very important journey with your child. You have to be strong in order to obtain for your child vital treatments and therapies that can dramatically improve your child’s life and future. Theoretically, ASD is not difficult to recognize and diagnose. However, in practice, it can be challenging. The full spectrum of symptoms included in ASD is quite wide. One child may appear quite typical with only minor eccentricities while another has significant intellectual disability, social impairment, self-injurious behavior, and aggression. No two individuals with ASD are exactly alike. In fact, individuals with autism are often more different than similar. We cannot easily pigeonhole or stereotype our children. Further complicating diagnosis, professionals often have little training in ASD, even in fields that have autism within their scope of practice. Furthermore, children with more subtle ASD symptoms or those who are “high-functioning” (more verbal and with more capabilities in general) do not always have symptoms that are evident at a very young age. At times, autism symptoms may not be identifiable until social problems become more significant as the child grows older. Primary care physicians are not typically able to spend long enough with your child during visits to pick up on the sometimes subtle signs needed to alert them to a possible ASD diagnosis.

Procreation is confounded when clinical professionals misdiagnose, misrepresent, or switch reproductive cells or entities. These errors lead patients to initiate, continue, or terminate pregnancies in ways that thwart their efforts to have a child of one kind or another: How serious is that reproductive injury? Do its benefits outweigh its harms? What are the chances of it manifesting within certain windows of time and at varying levels of severity? How likely is it that misconduct is what caused procreation to be confounded? Is some other factor responsible in addition or instead? To what extent was genetic randomness or diagnostic uncertainty to blame? The seriousness of that harm depends on its foreseeable impact on people’s lives—injury severity is an objective inquiry that begins by asking what kind of child the plaintiffs wanted and why. The variable expression of medical conditions or other targeted traits ratchets up the guesswork to forecast how a defendant’s negligence that thwarted their prenatal selection can be expected to affect the plaintiff. But all this uncertainty needn’t keep courts from assessing how serious confounded procreation is in particular cases: Just because any such determination is bound to admit of some arbitrariness doesn’t mean injury severity can’t be worked out in a principled and systematic way. For health conditions, relevant factors include foreseeable implications for offspring lifespan, impairment, medical care, and treatment options. Courts should reduce dollar awards by however much confounded procreation can be expected to simultaneously benefit plaintiffs, depending on its associated reasons and repercussions.