QUOTABLE:
MARTHA HERBERT

"Neurologists and neuropsychologists who have been practicing for a few decades or more often comment on the changing character of their caseloads. More than a few of my colleagues (myself included) have dealt with four-year-olds who pull knives on their mothers, something that would have been astonishingly rare twenty years ago. Overall, more children are presenting with diffuse difficulties-not discrete learning disabilities where everything else is more or less intact, but difficulties spread across multiple cognitive, sensorimotor, social, and emotional domains. And the scale of this is enormous: 17% of children in the United States have some kind of attentional or learning problem, and a significant number of them are on medications of one kind or another."

Pediatric neurologist Martha Herbert, M.D.,
in the Wild Duck Review, 2000