Collideoscope

Posted by: David Bunch

The New York Times has an article on the disturbing trend of overly medicated kids. The proof? The huge amount of medicine dispensed at summer camps.

The medication lines like the one at Camp Echo were unheard of a generation ago but have become fixtures at residential camps across the country. Between a quarter and half of the youngsters at any given summer camp take daily prescription medications, experts say.

With campers far from home, family and pediatricians, the job of safely and efficiently dispensing medications falls to infirmaries and nurses whose stock in trade used to be calamine lotion and cough syrup. Three times a day, at mealtimes, is the norm,with some campers also requiring a sleep aid at bedtime to counteract the effect of their daytime medications.

This is sad, and scary...what are we doing to our kids? No doubt there are legitimate cases in which a child needs his or her medicines, but it seems to me we have overly stimulated kids' dependence on pharmaceuticals.

This phenomenon is so prevalent that companies are being formed to provide medicinal services to summer camps.

Increasingly popular is a service offered by a private company called CampMeds, which provides a summer’s worth of prepackaged pills to 6,000 children at 100 camps. Its founder, Dana Godel, said 40 percent of the children regularly took one or more prescription medications, compared with 30 percent four years ago. Eight percent used attention deficit medications last year; 5 percent took psychiatric drugs.