EP #1136: ADHD Self-Care: Medication and Beyond with Walt Karniski, MD

Send us Fan MailLisa is joined by Walt Karniski, MD, a developmental pediatrician who joins Lisa to talk about ADHD and his book, ADHD Medication: Does it Work and Is it Safe.  Walt Karniski, MD trained at Boston Children’s Hospital. He was director of the Division of Developmental Pediatrics at the University of South Florida in Tampa, Florida, for fifteen years. He then opened a private practice and for twenty years, evaluated and treated children with ADHD, autism, anxiety, learning disabilities, and other developmental difficulties. During that time, he developed and operated three private schools for children with ADHD, anxiety, and learning disabilities. Over the forty years he has been practicing, he has evaluated and treated close to ten thousand children, conducted numerous studies of brain activity in children, and has been director of a child abuse program and a program for enhancing development in children born prematurely. Dr. Karniski approaches each child as a unique individual, with distinctive strengths and weaknesses, where the diagnosis does not matter as much as understanding the specific needs of that child. His new book is ADHD Medication: Does It Work and Is It Safe? (Roman & Littlefield, May 15, 2022). Learn more at: adhdmedicationbook.comADHD is one of the most common problems that pediatricians, pediatric neurologists, and pediatric psychiatrists manage. Most studies indicate that 6-8 percent of children have ADHD. Approximately seventy-four million children live in the United States, and these studies all support the finding that ADHD affects approximately five million of them. And that doesn’t include adults with ADHD.Because there are no medical tests to definitively “make a diagnosis” of ADHD, it is easy for critics to dismiss it as a disorder fabricated by doctors, teachers, and pharmaceutical companies. Some parents blame themselves and react with guilt, believing that they should have raised their child differently. So, when presented with the diagnosis is it any wonder that parents might react with confusion, guilt or denial? It doesn’t matter how often ADHD occurs in the overall population. What matters is what happens to your child. What matters is that a short attention span, distractibility, and impulsivity produce adverse consequences in childhood and as adults. But here is the good news: Treatment with medication significantly decreases the frequency of those undesirable outcomes. In ADHD Medication, Dr. Walt Karniski uses his 40 years of experience as a developmental pediatrician to address important concerns that parents have about the use of medication for the treatment of ADHD, explaining what medication can do for your child, what it cannot do, and how to use medication in a safe way.