Hello Bloom Kids ad: Amanda Thompson

"You better get a handle on that son of yours." That's what the doctor's office said to a mother who had called more than ten times. She was calling to tell them her son was in a psychiatric hold, and to please stop sending the pills. It's on page 5052 of the trial transcript. They kept sending them until his credit card maxed out. I read that at my kitchen table on a Tuesday night with my own son's school evaluation letter under my coffee cup and a video appointment for Thursday open in the other tab. I closed the tab. Here's the rest of what I read, and what I did about it. He's seven. By four o'clock he's a different kid than the one I dropped off. Dinner takes an hour because he's up eleven times. I counted once. The homework sheet is four problems, so I sit down expecting ten minutes. Forty minutes later he's crying that he's stupid. He isn't. But I'm in the hallway with the door shut so he doesn't see my face. He's also the funniest person in this house. That's the whole problem. I want the four o'clock kid to stop crying without losing the funny one. In April his teacher sent a letter home, the kind, careful one, asking us to have him evaluated for attention. I'm not going to pretend the letter was wrong. She sees the four o'clock kid at ten in the morning. The pediatrician's first in person opening was March. Five months out. My husband found a site that would do the whole thing over video, a hundred and seventy nine dollars, about thirty five with our insurance, fifteen minutes, slot on Thursday. We didn't decide. The tab just stayed open all summer like a light left on. I've read every comment under every one of those videos. The word the moms use is zombie. I don't want to use it, because the other half of the comments say that just means the dose was wrong, and I believe them too. So here's mine. "I miss his spark" is the sentence I'm afraid of typing in two years. I'm not against the medicine. I'm against losing him. Then on the seventh of July the founder of the biggest of those apps got six years in federal prison and it was on every station for a day. Done. Ruthia He. Thirty seven million pills. Then the news moved on to weather. A mom in our district's Facebook group, the one who posts the school board minutes nobody reads, posted the link to the court file two days later. The government's sentencing memo. Fifty one pages. Free. She wrote one line under it: read page seven. I read all fifty one. Three of them are why my Thursday tab is closed. Page seven first. Page seven. Why the founder hired a doctor at all, in her own messages: "Healthcare is such a profitable space. Telehealth service. Easily 60%+ margin . . . Now I can have more control of the providers." The doctor she hired wrote out his dreams for the job, in order. The first one is in capital letters. "Dealing with clinical psychiatric issues WITHOUT EVER HAVING TO SEE OR TALK TO THE PATIENT." She wrote back: "you don't even need to see patient at all just click buttons." That's the same woman who, on page one, called the company her "drug biz" and wrote "Right now I just want to be a billionaire." Page nine. In October 2020 she stopped paying the doctors for follow up visits, because, in her business plan, follow ups meant "80% revenue lost." Then she put in an auto refill button. Opt in on your phone and a prescription for a Schedule II amphetamine requests itself every month. The government's sentence about what that produced is one line. "Prescribers issued controlled substances to patients months after the patients had died because the patient accounts were on 'auto-refill.'" Page twenty two. The doctor's refills. The staff sent him a spreadsheet of names and pharmacies, no chart, no reason, and he'd, in one employee's words, "just go through and send, send, send, send, send." Someone timed it from the logs. Thirty two seconds a prescription. Seventy five in forty minutes. Eighteen of them between 1:09 and 1:18 in the morning. His own message: "it only takes me 30 seconds per refill since as you know I do not check the EHR." Almost four hundred thousand pills to people he never spoke to. And the mother from page 5052. Her son was thirty one and doing fine, retail, his own place, until late 2021, when he started talking in thirty minute loops and stopped sleeping. In January the police picked him up screaming at a stranger near a church that she was his wife, so he went into a psychiatric hold. The hospital sent him home with no stimulants, and a psychiatrist he saw in person refused to prescribe any. But the pills kept showing up, so she went looking, and found the app on the joint credit card and the bottles in his room. So she called. More than ten times. She got through once, on the third of March 2022, and the prescriber wanted to know how she'd gotten her phone number, and then said the line I opened with. He told his mother, "I can get those prescriptions filled in five minutes." A month later he was picked up walking on the shoulder of the freeway with no shoes. Second hold, six days. The pills kept coming until, in her words on the record, "his credit card was maxed out and they were no longer able to charge on the card." The judge, from the bench: "It's a sham, essentially." I agreed with him. I still couldn't close the file, because he was talking about the company and I was looking at the pill. Now the part I have to say plainly, because I'm not going to do to you what that company did to that mother. That company was adults only. Eighteen and up. Her son was thirty one. My son is seven and nobody was ever going to put him on a one minute assessment. So why was I still reading at midnight. Because it's the only time they had to say it out loud. Under oath. In their own texts. What they think the pill is. A sixty percent margin. Something you click buttons for. Something whose refill takes thirty seconds because you don't check the chart. And every one of them had a diploma on the wall that would have made me feel fine on a fifteen minute video call. And what the pill is doesn't change when the patient is seven. Only the label does. So I read the label. I'll give you the two sentences I couldn't get past. The label says the drug "may produce physical dependence," and then it lists what stopping looks like, and the list is a kid who's sad, flat, wiped out, has nightmares, and either can't sleep or can't wake up. And in 2023 the FDA put this on every stimulant: "Even when prescription stimulants are taken as prescribed by a health care professional, they can lead to misuse and abuse." Even when taken as prescribed. Not a documentary. The agency that approved it. For kids, the label has a number. About an inch shorter and six pounds lighter after three years, and it says they don't catch it back up. Twenty two percent of the kids on it lost their appetite. On the sugar pill, two percent. And I want to be fair, because the label is. It works. In the short run it works well, better than therapy, and the biggest study ever run on it proved that first. Then that same study kept following those kids. At three years the groups looked the same. At eight years the kids who took it and the kids who didn't looked the same. Same grades. Same trouble. Same hospital visits. The authors' own line: the data "fail to provide support for long-term advantage of medication treatment beyond two years for the majority of children." And one more thing I didn't know until that week. The pill has been on the federal shortage list since October 2022 and never came off. Seventy one percent of adults on it said there was a month last year they couldn't fill it. A mother in Georgia called every pharmacy within fifty miles for her eight year old's refill and found nothing. The heads of the FDA and the DEA wrote a letter to the public that says, in one sentence, "This is not a problem that the FDA and DEA can solve on our own." So put the three documents next to each other. The label says what stopping looks like for a child. The shortage list says one morning the pharmacy just doesn't have it. And the sentencing memo says the fastest door to the pill was built by people who thought it was a sixty percent margin. The pediatricians' own guideline for little kids puts behavior training first and the pill second. A room. A person who has to look at him. Ninety minutes. A plan. That's the slow door, and I booked it. March 3rd. Then I had five months and a four o'clock kid, and I was done reading. I had read enough for one year. Except one number wouldn't leave me alone, the eating one, because the kid who eats four foods is my kid, and I couldn't work out why that would matter, and I didn't have anyone to ask. The mom who posted the link was at pickup the next week. I asked her why page seven. She said her daughter's teacher had asked her, in month three of second grade, whether they'd started her on medication. They hadn't. That's when she went and read the whole thing, so she'd know what she was saying no to. Her daughter is in fourth grade now. There hasn't been a second letter. I asked her what she did instead. Not the reading. The kid. She said, can I ask you something first. What does he eat. I laughed, because I knew where it was going. Four things. Plain pasta, chicken nuggets, one brand of yogurt, apples if I cut them. She said, so here's the thing nobody said to me in seven years either, and I'm going to say it the way the nutritionist said it to me, because it's the only version that stuck. There's an engine and there's a brake. The engine is the big feelings, the running, the jokes at dinner. That part's fine. That's the funny one. The brake is the pause. The half second between wanting to shout and shouting. The half second between the pencil being annoying and the pencil being on the floor. And here's the part. The brake isn't a personality. It's chemistry. His brain has to build it, every single day, out of raw material, and the raw material comes off the plate. Magnesium. Zinc. Choline. Things with boring names. A kid who eats four foods isn't getting much of any of them, so he builds a little brake in the morning, and it's gone by two o'clock. I said, that's the four o'clock kid. She said, that's the four o'clock kid. It looks like behavior. It's a supply problem. I said, so why does the pill work then. She said, the pill doesn't build anything. It pushes. It's the reason the label has the eating number, because pushing costs you your appetite, and now the kid who was already short on raw material eats even less. Read it again with that in mind. She was right. I had. I said, and the no-dye diet. She said, the diet took things out. It didn't put anything in. You can't fix a supply problem by removing supply. I said, okay. So what puts it in. She said, this is where you make the face. Then she took a small container out of her bag, berry colored, the kind of thing that lives in a diaper bag, and set it on the hood of her car between us. Saffron. The spice. I made the face. She said, I know. Here's why it's not stupid. The reason anyone tested it at all is in the study itself. The researchers wrote, in the first paragraph, that about a third of kids don't do well on the stimulant, so they went looking for something else, and they put saffron up against Ritalin in fifty four kids for six weeks. Nobody knew who got which. At the end the parents couldn't tell the two groups apart and neither could the teachers. Same sheets your son's teacher filled out. I've read it four times. I can send it to you. I said, but why saffron. Why would a spice do anything. She said, the thing that makes it red is the thing they studied. There are four compounds in it with names I can't pronounce, and they're what make rice yellow and what make it taste bitter, and they're what the researchers think does the work on the pause. It's not magic. It's a plant the brain happens to be able to use. And the rest of what's in there is the boring stuff. The magnesium, the zinc, the choline. The raw material. That's why it's a bottle and not a jar of threads. I said, so I couldn't just buy saffron at the store. She said, you could. I did, first. I bought the little glass jar and put a pinch in her rice like an idiot. You need thirty milligrams a day, measured, every day, in a seven year old who won't eat rice. Are you going to weigh threads on the kitchen scale at seven in the morning. And most of what's in that jar isn't the part that works anyway. I lasted nine days. This is four melts, two with breakfast and two at pickup. She takes them like candy. That's the whole trick. The trick is she takes them. I said, how long. She said, give it a month and write it down. Not what you feel. What happened. The homework time. The table. Whether you went in the hallway. If nothing's on the page in thirty days, send it back. They give you sixty. Then she said the thing I keep coming back to. My daughter's teacher asked me in month three. She never asked me again. She just said, in May, at the door, whatever you're doing at home, keep doing it. I never told her what it was. I took the container. I didn't say I would. I looked it up that night, because I'd just spent a week finding out what happens when nobody looks anything up. It's one study, and it says what she said it says. Fifty four kids, six weeks, nobody knew who got which, and the teachers couldn't tell them apart. The authors want a bigger one. There's a second one, in ninety eight boys, where they put a wrist monitor on the kids instead of asking the parents, and one of the ingredients in that bottle improved how much of the night they actually slept, and the parents' questionnaires didn't match the watch. The parents couldn't tell how badly their own kids were sleeping. I sat with that one, because I would have told you he sleeps fine. Then I read the reviews, because I read everything now. The one I screenshotted said, "I tried saffron supplements first over a month for my son and didn't see a difference. I saw a difference with these in a week." Same thing she'd said about the jar. A stranger who'd had that fight already. I'm going to tell you I was done reading, and I had five months and a four o'clock kid, and there's nothing in that bottle with a refill button on it. Nobody's getting sentenced over a spice. Nobody's driving fifty miles to find it. Nobody's calling ten times to make it stop. I did what the mother on page 5052 did when nobody would listen to her. I wrote it down. Every night, one line in a notebook next to the salt, because a notebook is the one thing I can walk into that March appointment with that a video call can't. Week one, nothing. I wrote "nothing" five nights in a row and told myself I knew it. Day 12 the homework sheet got done in fifteen minutes and I didn't say anything because I didn't want to jinx it. Day 19 we went to my mother's for the long weekend and I forgot the bottle. By Wednesday the four o'clock kid was back. Up from the table, the crying, the hallway. I wrote that down too, because it was the only thing that told me it wasn't just a good month. Day 22, three days back on, the table was quiet. Day 26 his teacher emailed about the reading group. Not about behavior. About the reading group. Day 29 I was at pickup and she came out to the car line, which she never does, and leaned in the window and said, I don't know what changed at home, but whatever it is, keep doing it. He finished the whole packet today. I said okay. I didn't tell her either. I drove around the block once before I went home. Day 30 was two days ago. I stopped going to the hallway somewhere around day 23. I didn't notice until my husband said it. We still have March. We're still going, with thirty days written down. I told the pediatrician's office what he's taking and they wrote it in his chart, which is a sentence I now know is not nothing. Nobody in this house took a child off a prescription and nobody's telling you to. He was never on one. That's the whole thing I was protecting. And it was never his character and it was never my parenting. He was running out of something, and nobody had told me the brakes are built out of food. The people with the fifteen minute video call were never going to, because a kid who's fine at four o'clock is eighty percent revenue lost. Two things you're thinking, because I thought them. Does a spice actually do anything. The brake is built out of what he eats, and this is the one thing anyone has put head to head with Ritalin on exactly that, in fifty four kids, and the teachers couldn't tell the saffron kids from the Ritalin kids. That's the whole answer and it's one page. The other page is 5052. Is seventy six dollars worth it. It's sixty days money back on a sealed box, one claim a household, and it's less than one month of the button. That app was a hundred ninety nine the first month and seventy nine after, and its website still says so. The two kid box was $75.98 when I ordered, half off the first order, free shipping that day. Nothing renews unless you tell it to. If your kid's already on the pill, keep the pill. This isn't that post. Here's the only deadline I have, and it's not the website's. It's the appointment. Mine is March 3rd. Yours is whatever date is on your counter. Thirty days of notebook takes thirty days, and there's no button that makes it faster. If you start tonight you walk into that room with a month written down and a kid who finished the packet. If you don't, you walk in with the letter and the tab, and the person across the desk has fifteen minutes and one thing to offer, and you'll say yes, because I would have. That's the sentence I was afraid of. Not the pill. Saying yes to it with nothing in my hands. Get the two kid box before your appointment date and start the notebook tonight. One line a night. The mother on page 5052 called ten times and nobody wrote anything down. 👉 https://hellobloomkids.com EDITED: I did not expect this many messages. The first question, every time, is where the document is. It's the government's sentencing memorandum in United States v. He, Northern District of California, case 24-cr-00329, filed 31 March 2026. Search the case name on CourtListener; it's document 600. The mother's testimony is in the trial transcript for 7 November 2025, pages 5030 to 5065. The judgment is document 666: seventy two months, one million dollar fine, signed by Judge Breyer on the twentieth of July. Read page seven first. You'll know why. EDITED AGAIN: The second question, from three moms in my own group, was whether they'd have to take their kid off anything. No. Nobody in my house took anybody off anything. What I did was close a tab, book a room, and put something in the drawer that has no button. The third question was whether the jar from the grocery store would do. Read the review I quoted. She tried that first too. P.S. My husband pointed out something I hadn't thought about. The woman who invested a million dollars in that company did it, according to the government, because she has a son with ADHD and believed the founder had nothing to do with the clinical side. She was told what we're all told. She had a diploma on the wall to look at too. Read page seven anyway. P.P.S. A lot of you asked what's actually in it, so here it is once. Four melts is thirty milligrams of saffron extract a day, the same amount the study used, not ground spice from the grocery aisle and not a pinch in the rice. Sugar free. Magnesium, zinc and theanine are in it too. That's the raw material part. Made for kids four and up. The study is 2019, six weeks, double blind, saffron against methylphenidate: same result on the parent scales and the teacher scales, and the authors say bigger and longer studies are needed. Side effects showed up about as often in both groups, so it isn't gentler. It's just not the other thing. Sixty day money back on a sealed box, one claim a household. Half off the first order and free shipping the day I bought. P.P.P.S. The mom from the parking lot texted me on Day 30, because I'd told her I'd tell her. I sent her a photo of the notebook. She sent back one line. "Now you have something to say no with." That's what the reading was for. Both halves, every document, before anything goes in my son. It cost me a week and it's the best week I've spent as his mother. 👉 https://hellobloomkids.com