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“These days, the medicine cabinet is truly a family affair. More than a quarter of U.S. kids and teens are taking a medication on a chronic basis, according to Medco Health Solutions Inc., the biggest U.S. pharmacy-benefit manager with around 65 million members. Nearly 7% are on two or more such drugs, based on the company’s database figures for 2009.”

So reported the Wall Street Journal today in an article titled “So Young and So Many Pills“.

But the most alarming thing?  ”‘Most medications that could be prescribed to children on a chronic basis haven’t been tested specifically in kids,’ says Danny Benjamin, a Duke University pediatrics professor,” Anna Matthews reports.

I see this all the time, unfortunately.  Young women come to my facility swallowing every imaginable cocktail of psychotropic drugs.

There’s a drug to help them manage their mood – and then a drug to help them sleep to cope with the side effects of the drug designed to manage their mood.  And let’s not forget the drug designed to lower their craving to eat themselves into a carbohydrate coma – also a side effect of the drug designed to manage their mood.

By the time our nurses are done dispensing the meds, some kids could make a breakfast of it.  In fact, some kids’ morning medication regiment involves pills of all sizes and colors – reminiscent of Lucky Charms cereal’s wacky marshmallow shapes.

Now before those of you who have children who need drugs get offended, let me say that there is a place for medication.  Some bodies and brains don’t work the way nature intended.  I’m a believer that God gave us plants from which to make medicines to help us help ourselves.

All I’m saying is this:  Apply a portion of the Hippocratic Oath.  ”First, do no harm.”  Let’s use some common sense and apply some wisdom.  If a kid NEEDS a medication, so be it. My nephew absolutely suffers without his ADHD meds.  My friend’s son absolutely suffers without his OCD medication.  I know a girl who has terrible nightmares – without her meds she’d remember every one of them.

So, I’m far away from my wife’s friends’ perspective on meds.  They won’t take aspirin if their lives depended on it.

But – and it’s a BIG but – we need to stop overmedicating kids!  We have no idea of the fragility of a developing teen brain.  We have not tested adult medicines on young children nearly thoroughly enough.  When the number of pills in the pillbox designed to treat side effects outnumber the pills designed to treat the main problem, someone has to say STOP.

What can be done?  We can apply talk therapies, experiential therapies, relational therapies, cognitive behavioral therapies.  We can apply patience and wisdom.  We can marshal the combined knowledge of therapists, doctors, herbalists, occupational therapists, parents, and priests.

Let’s not buy into the ease of a biological answer for every ill that besets today’s children.

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