Why Are Allergies/Disorders More Common Nowadays Then When We Were Kids?

[bluestarultor]

They practically hand out ADHD diagnoses with the Sunday paper these days. Or I should say student IDs. In many cases, given an overworked mental health care system (at least in America), teachers will notice a kid fidgeting, label him disruptive (and it's often boys), suggest a diagnosis of ADHD, shunt him off to a child psychiatrist who's too busy to actually check, and the kid ends up scarfing pills for the rest of his career when it's less that there's a real problem with him and more that the drugs shut him up to compensate for a fundamentally backwards educational system that takes all the fun out of learning, when kids are programmed to find learning fun.

On the allergies front, we keep things way too clean. Kids with fuzzy animals around tend not to develop allergies because they're exposed to allergens and build a natural resistance, as mentioned before.

There's also pollution, though, which can end up in kids getting sick. Unfortunately, things like autism aren't really well-understood, so trying to label any one cause is just likely going to trash stuff that probably isn't totally at fault. Really, though, in our efforts to keep stuff clean, we're coating our surfaces in toxins with possible neurological effects, which kids then ingest, which can cause everything from brain damage to kidney failure. We're so terrified of germs, most of which are fairly harmless, that we forget just how nasty our chemicals can be.