Posted by vin
on 11/5/2008, 9:36 am, in reply to "Re: Smoking and ADD"
66.28.247.132
i see, i misunderstood.
--Previous Message--
: No, my doctor is totally against her smoking.
: She just explained to me what she thinks is
: going on, and has offed to provide
: alternatives; I guess she can order some
: form of pharmacological nicotine in pill or
: powder form, but my daughter refused, as she
: has no intention of quitting. At least she
: is honest about it. Her smoking doesn't
: bother me too much, I smoked since I was her
: age.
:
: --Previous Message--
: an interesting story but i am not buying the
: idea that a doctor would approve of smoking
: by a 13 year old. if the nicotine has this
: positive affect then there are safer ways to
: get it than smoking cigarettes.
:
: --Previous Message--
: My boyfriend, Tom, is a closet smoker. It’s
: kind of cute but a tragedy, too. Anyhow, he
: reads your board, showed me your question,
: and I thought it might be helpful to
: respond.
:
: My daughter was diagnosed with attention
: deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADD or ADHD,
: as my doctor calls it) when she was five
: years old, and she has been on medications
: most of the time for the last eight years;
: she has also been treated for depression.
: My ex-husband, now serving the seventh of a
: twenty year sentence for cocain trafficking,
: has this disease, and I take medications for
: chronic major depression (with full
: remission, so I am not clinically depressed
: with treatment). Anyhow, I understand it to
: be a genetic thing. My daughter’s different
: medicines generally work for awhile but
: loose their effectiveness, then have to be
: changed. She has been a difficult child to
: raise, having many of the problems
: characteristic of ADHD, including defiance,
: learning disabilities, poor impulse control,
: and antisocial behaviors. Last year, at age
: thirteen, she was caught stealing cigarettes
: from my neighbor. It turned out that she
: had been taking my cigarettes for six months
: and already learned to inhale, showing many
: of the signs of addiction. So I started
: buying her cigarettes, with smoking seeming
: like a much lesser evil than criminal
: behavior. As soon as she started smoking
: regularly, her overall behavior improved,
: and it has remained that way. The doctor
: explains it as some type of interaction
: between her prescription medicine, nicotine,
: and a chemical imbalance in her brain, which
: is probably affected positively with the
: combination. She now smokes up to a pack of
: cigarettes a day (on weekends, half that on
: school days) and her addiction makes
: cigarettes a powerful reinforcer, and this
: has been incorporated successfully into her
: behavior modification program. Her use of
: medicines has been reduced and this has
: absorbed the extra cost of the cigarettes;
: and her medications have continued to work
: without needing to be changed. At first it
: was difficult giving her cigarettes and
: watching her smoke, but it doesn’t bother me
: at all anymore, given the outcome.
:
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