Why might a doctor recommend medication to help children with ADHD/ADD?
It can be helpful to think of other kinds of medical conditions where there may be similar issues about prescribing medication. For instance, if your child had epilepsy they would be carefully assessed and you and their doctors would make a decision about whether they needed and would benefit from antiepileptic medication to control the fits. Such medication is quite sedative and has other side-effects and most parents understandably would have worries about this. If the child is only having one or maybe two fits a year and they are not really interfering with their life, then they wouldn’t necessarily be treated with medication. However, if a child is having a lot of fits, then the decision is likely to be that it would be best for them to be on medication even if there were some side effects. The important thing is that the decision whether to use medication is based on how much the illness or disorder is interfering with the child’s life and development. While ADHD/ADD and epilepsy
