Experiments with Medication

Yesterday morning, my daughter pulled off half her clothes and ran around the backyard drenching herself with the hose. By evening, she had peed on the bathroom floor without telling anyone about it, thrown a screaming fit over her punishment for the morning’s antics—not going swimming, and jumped fully clothed into the baby pool when we went to pick her sister up from the pool. You could say that all of the above behavior resulted from a lack of supervision on my part, but is that the behavior of a typical six-year-old?
Yes, my daughter has severe ADHD, which means that she has a devil of a time sitting still, paying attention, and thinking before acting. For the past couple of years, we have controlled her behavior with nutrition, eliminating artificial colors and flavors, preservatives, and salicylates from her diet. This strict nutritional regimen, known as the Feingold Program, has worked wonders. Ana is not nearly as hyperactive and impulsive as she had been before we started the program, but she still has such difficulty paying attention that it affected her schoolwork. So we decided to try medication.
The first medication we tried had none of the offending ingredients we work so hard to avoid, but it caused alarming side effects. Now we’re trying another med that is only manufactured with artificial colors in pill form and artificial flavors in liquid form. We’re trying it anyway.
Why? Why would we give our child something we know is not good for her? Perhaps the medication will be strong enough to counteract the effects of the dye, or perhaps not. We’ll never know unless we try, and with her academic and social success at stake, we feel obligated to try. Such is the adventure of raising a child with ADHD.