G'day angie! Wonderful to see you again. I think you southerners got our scorching Summer weather this year. Heck, it's been too comfortable here this year in the sunshine state, it's too weird.

Bear with me, I slept in for the first time in years and might tend to ramble lol

First thing that I think of when reading your post mentioning symptoms like attention difficulties, oppositional behaviour, and tics is whether your grandson has had an evaluation for the autism spectrum. The reason I ask that is because our experience with doctors here was that they didn't really have much of an idea about autism spectrum and all they wanted to do was to treat the actual physical symptoms like the tics.

They basically couldn't see the tree for the forest and it took us until my son was almost 14 years of age to finally get the correct diagnosis of Asperger's Syndrome. It wasn't that he didn't have TS or attentional problems or anything else, it's just that some of the behaviours were directly related to his autism qualities and could have been helped in other ways if we'd known when he was little. Meanwhile he'd needed help in school and had not been afforded that because back then, the only diagnosis that would have allowed him that here was the Austism Spectrum Diagnosis.

I personally don't believe in what they call ODD. I see it as a symptom of something else and an unnecessary type of lable. But that's just my own personal opinion. I reckon if there's oppositional behaviour going on to the degree that a doctor wants to call it ODD... a disorder, then try to find a pattern or triggers to the type of behaviour. Is there any type of apparent communication problem, for example.

Does the child have any sensory issues that affect daily life... like at the dinner table, or the bathroom or anything else. If the child is refusing to eat certain foods or to have a bath or flush the toilet etc., do bear in mind that these things can be part of problems with taste, touch, smell etc... the senses can become overloaded. Plus, with overload or too much sensory stimulation, the child can start to feel out of control and that's often when things like anger or oppositional behaviour will surface...

Anyway, that's all beside the point I suppose, 'cause we don't know too much about what's happening for your grandson. I just wanted to throw a few of those ideas out there to you so that at least you can all think about them or see if they fit.

A diagnosis of Tourette Syndrome wouldn't normally be made until about 12 months after the initial onset of tics. However, in recent times as more doctors have become educated and more knowledgeable about tic disorders, they don't always need to wait 12 months if they're sure it's TS. TS is not just one tic though. Down below I'll post the actual diagnostic criteria and that will explain a little more. Bear in mind though, that a quite high percentage of young children (especially boys) will have a transient tic that will go away all on its own. As far as other testing is concerned, I don't really understand why they want to wait until your grandson is 6 ???

What sort of tests has he had so far? Any medical procedures like EEG or MRI or any type of behavioural screening tests at all?

Anyway, this pericyazine is a really heavy duty medication. Angie, this really worries me! I would be concerned about using it at his age to treat one tic or anything else, until I had figured out exactly what was going on. Here's some info. about it from an Australian gov. site. I don't understand in a million years why a doctor would use one of the phenothiazines as a first line medication. If there is a real need for medications there are other medications that have much safer side effect profiles and can help with tics and other things all with much less risk. This has been going on in Australia for so long now and it scares me that we've still not moved forward enough in the knowledge department.

NEULACTIL - Pericyazine
http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcmed.nsf/pages/swcneula/$File/swcneula.pdf

School! OK, well this is what I think about what's going on at school. I think that needing to medicate a child for having one tic in class because these other brats are calling him bad things, is totally out of balance. The school needs to do several things. The school needs to be educated about what tics are. The school needs to implement a no-bullying policy. If necessary, the teachers need to do some type of education with the children about tolerance and differences. How some people wear glasses and some people have diabetes and some children need to wear hearing devices and some children have a tic or tics. No child should need to feel as if they is something *wrong* with them just because they have a tic.

I'll come back in a second and post some links in a new post.