Vol. 12, No. 3, 2006 Page 8
"Neurologists and neuropsychologists who have been practicing for a few decades or more often comment on the changing character of their caseloads. More than a few of my colleagues (myself included) have dealt with four-year-olds who pull knives on their mothers, something that would have been astonishingly rare twenty years ago. Overall, more children are presenting with diffuse difficulties—not discrete learning disabilities where everything else is more or less intact, but difficulties spread across multiple cognitive, sensorimotor, social, and emotional domains. And the scale of this is enormous: 17% of children in the United States have some kind of attentional or learning problem, and a significant number of them are on medications of one kind or another."
Pediatric neurologist Martha Herbert, M.D.,
in the Wild Duck Review, 2000