Follow up with peciatrician today

ME: My husband and I took Daughter back to the pediatrician today. We covered quite a bit of ground. Let me just break down into the major categories:

Medication
First of all, her weight is holding steady. We haven't had any negative side effects with the Concerta, but we told the doctor we don't really feel like it's helping either. He said that is likely because he has her on such a low dose--in fact he said the 18 milligrams she has been on are really about half what he thinks she ultimately needs. But because she reacted so poorly to the Daytrana, he had wanted to start her out very low on Concerta. The bottom line is that we're upping the Concerta to 27 milligrams. We'll start that tomorrow. It does make me really nervous to change her medication on a week day when I can't be with her to see for myself how she's reacting. But I know that her teacher will watch her closely and let me know how it goes.

Anxiety
We discussed our concern for her anxiety level over the last couple of months. Even her teacher says it seems that anxiety is a bigger factor than the ADHD right now in her behavior. She gets very upset if everything isn't just so ... just how she expected it to be. He basically just wants us to keep pursuing that issue with her counseler and he wants feedback from the counselor on what's going on. He indicated that we could use some medication if we needed to. But he would rather -- and so would we -- try to deal with it in counseling. We still need to get to the bottom of what is causing the anxiety.

Occupational Therapy
I showed him the report from the O.T. at the school, and he really wasn't concerned. Given her history with O.T. and P.T., he said the results weren't different than what he would expect and they didn't raise any red flags for him. He offered to refer us to an O.T. if we wanted, but at this time we're not going to bother with that. She's already missing enough school for counseling appointments, and I just don't want to put anything else on her. I really just needed to know that the doctor wasn't concerned about the results.

I guess for now I don't know much more than I did before going in, other than having a new medication dose to try. As the doctor explained (and I know from the research I've been doing), ADHD treatment is not an exact science. We just need to keep working it until we find the best balance for her.