Brahmi

Children frequently complain, 'I'm allergic to school!' Parents smile at this whimsy; they know the 'allergy' for what it is. Yet, in a very real sense, children can be allergic to school. For if a child begins the school day with a breakfast of foods to which he or she is allergic . . . and then is exposed to airborne allergens such as classroom dust, the odour of floor wax and industrial cleaners . . . and then eats lunches and snacks laden with addi­tives and colorings . . . well, schoolwork is bound to be affected.
The child may read below grade level, spell poorly and lag in math’s skills. He or she may not understand verbal instructions. Handwriting could deteriorate to chicken-scratch. He or she may have trouble copying from the board. So he develops school phobia - headaches, stomachaches - anything to avoid the situation. All of which prevents an allergic child from realizing his full potential. Teachers are likely to say, 'He'd do better if he'd just try.'
Allan Lieberman, a South Carolina pediatrician, says, 'I'm totally convinced that a lot of learning disabilities are caused by kids' adverse reactions to multiple ecological factors - allergies - and if you reduce or neutralize their total allergic load by altering their diet and environment, most of them can be helped.'
A growing number of doctors like Dr Leiberman are finding that non-reading and other learning problems are due to some­thing in the diet or environment, not laziness or stubbornness.
'Allergies affect different areas of the brain in different chil­dren,' says Doris J. Rapp, a pediatrician and allergist in Buffalo, N.Y. 'For example, we've seen reading ability plummet from eighth- to fifth-grade level because of an allergic challenge. And in one particularly graphic study, we noticed handwriting changes. The children's writing became large, irregular, upside-down - there was letter reversal, even mirror-image writing.'
Learning disabilities can be caused by factors other than allergy, of course: visual or hearing problems; lead exposure; nervous system damage during birth or childhood illness; hereditary problems. But Jerome Vogel, medical director of the New York Institute for Child Development, says that over 75 per cent of the learning-disabled children seen at the Institute have allergies or food sensitivities that interfere with their behavior and learning processes.
Besides affecting perception directly, allergies can interfere with children's learning ability by making them hyperactive. Overactive children are too busy to learn. They can't concen­trate long enough to listen to the teacher's instructions, let alone carry them out. Or they simply can't sit still long enough to finish an assignment.
Since hyperactivity so often coexists with learning disabilities, the stock treatment for either is often a prescription for Ritalin, an amphetamine-like drug. But while Ritalin appears to lengthen attention span and enhance concentration in children, it does absolutely nothing for actual learning ability. What Ritalin does is turn the child into a robot: he may be able to do a few simple tasks over and over, but he can't respond to novel situations and learn new tasks. Such children soon develop a poor self-image and become convinced that they are, in fact, stupid.

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ALLERGIES