The NYTimes released an article that finally recognizes the enormous disconnect between the science on ADHD and the daily practice of treating it with stimulants:
I’ve spent the last year speaking with some of the leading A.D.H.D. researchers in the United States and abroad, and many of them, like Swanson, express concern over what they see as a disconnect between the emerging scientific understanding of A.D.H.D. and the way the condition is being treated in clinics and doctors’ offices. Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King’s College London, described the situation in personal terms. “I’ve invested 35 years of my life trying to identify the causes of A.D.H.D., and somehow we seem to be farther away from our goal than we were when we started,” he told me. “We have a clinical definition of A.D.H.D. that is increasingly unanchored from what we’re finding in our science.”
One more quote from the article because it’s paywalled and I want to share at least the most crucial parts:
That ever-expanding mountain of pills rests on certain assumptions: that A.D.H.D. is a medical disorder that demands a medical solution; that it is caused by inherent deficits in children’s brains; and that the medications we give them repair those deficits. Scientists who study A.D.H.D. are now challenging each one of those assumptions — and uncovering new evidence for the role of a child’s environment in the progression of his symptoms.
And just one more:
Some scientists have begun to argue that the traditional conception of A.D.H.D. as an unchanging, essential fact about you — something you simply have or don’t have, something wired deep in your brain — is both inaccurate and unhelpful. According to Sonuga-Barke, the British researcher, the traditional notion that there is a natural category of “people with A.D.H.D.” that clinicians can objectively measure and define “just doesn’t seem to be the case.”
The facts on ADHD come out in the exact pattern as facts about COVID. People who contradict the propaganda narrative are screamed down, vilified, and accused of wanting to murder grandma. Then, after a while, everything such people said gets recognized as true but no amends are made and no recognition of mistakes made is offered.
There is a large number of absolutely deranged beliefs held by the American public on matters of health. One example is the belief that the extraordinary rates of obesity in the US are “genetic” and utterly unconnected to food quality and eating habits. Another one that I encountered only last week is that people eat sugary breakfast cereals after being diagnosed with diabetes because doctors tell them to eat a high-carb diet with this disease.
Other such beliefs I will not name because I honestly don’t need the drama that will inevitably ensue. All that the NYTimes article says I’ve known for a long time because it’s very easy to find. It’s as easy to find as “don’t eat sugar by the spoonful if you have diabetes” but people will still be shocked when these facts are revealed.
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