Your doctor might be wrong
And why I'm very annoyed at mine
⏱️ Today’s newsletter is 615 words, a 3-minute read
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This morning, my wife Kayleigh took our autistic son to the paediatrician for a check-up about his melatonin prescription.
Before she went, I told her I thought the dose he’d been prescribed was too high. Not by just a little bit, but perhaps even 10x too high.
Kayleigh told the doctor this, and her response was — “it’s a minuscule dose.”
She said it’s “unbelievably unlikely” to be causing any issues. And if he’s having issues it’s likely environmental. A bad day at nursery or something like that.
But I wasn’t guessing when I told Kayleigh I thought the dose was too high. I’d looked into the research. Not random blogs or opinion pieces. Proper meta-analyses and systematic reviews.
And they’re clear. The effective dose of melatonin for children is somewhere between 0.3 and 0.5 milligrams, and generally not more than 1 milligram.
Ronnie’s been prescribed 2 milligrams minimum, going up to 6 milligrams. That’s not a small discrepancy. That’s a huge one.
🧪 This happens all the time
It’s a big feckin’ problem.
Something I see often, especially with the NHS. Doctors are wedded to the training they received years (sometimes decades) ago.
At one point, yes, it was considered normal to give children a higher dose of melatonin. And, as is often the case, when stopped working the thinking was to increase the dose.
But recent research, proper large-scale studies, says something different — melatonin is being prescribed at too high a dose.
So what’s going on?
This paediatrician, and I have no doubt she means well, is probably working off information she read years ago. Maybe something she learned at medical school twenty years back.
And that’s the issue. It happens all the time. And unless you go looking yourself, you might not even realise it.
😤 Then it got worse
But then something else happened, and it pushed me over the edge.
She suggested that Ronnie, who is four years old, should begin the process of an ADHD diagnosis, with the idea that he could be put on medication when he turns five.
I wasn’t there, thankfully, because I would have exploded. But my wife stood her ground and told the paediatrician, clearly and calmly, that we will never, under any circumstances, put our son on ADHD medication.
🙅♂️ This is not about focus
The doctor’s justification was that it would help him focus on his studies.
But Ronnie will never be in a mainstream classroom. He goes to a specialist school for autistic children, where academic targets aren’t a consideration. Instead the school helps him learn how to be in the world. And discover his strengths and supports him on how to use them.
This is a school where kids run around. Where they stim. Where they don’t have to sit still in rows. The staff are used to that. They expect it.
They don’t need the children to be medicated. That is the whole point of the place.
🚫 Who is this really for?
Another one of the paediatrician’s reasons was that Ronnie often stands up between mouthfuls at dinner and runs into the living room, then back to the table.
Apparently, if he were medicated, he wouldn’t do that anymore.
But why would we want to stop that?
That’s just what he does. That’s him. That’s how he moves through the world right now. There’s nothing wrong with it.
Let him be who he is.
Stop trying to squash kids into tiny boxes to make life easier for the adults around them. They’re kids. Kids. Let them flourish. Naturally.
🔥 I’m frustrated, and not just for us
This is the first time we’ve personally experienced what I know many parents go through. People in positions of authority, whether doctors or teachers, pushing medication. Not because the child needs it, but because it makes life easier for the adults.
And honestly, it’s a joke.
So no. That’s not happening. Not for Ronnie.
🧠 The bigger point
The point of today’s newsletter is this: Your doctor might be wrong.
Ted Gioia wrote an essay this week about the death of the expert, and I think he’s right.
The idea that we should blindly defer to professionals is falling apart. And that’s not a bad thing.
I don’t listen to mainstream medical advice on ADHD anymore. Most doctors have a limited understanding of it, especially around medication. Everything I know, everything I teach, I had to find and figure out myself.
And I think that’s where more of us are heading. Not because we want to fight the system, but because we want to take responsibility.
📌 So here’s the takeaway
Do your own research
Don’t blindly trust credentials
And speak up, especially when it’s your child
Because your doctor might be wrong. And it’s okay to say so.
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