Posted on 04/15/2025 7:52:00 AM PDT by Twotone
The medical establishment has a troubling track record of confidently stating things that just aren't so — as became clear to Americans who suffered injuries from supposedly safe and effective vaccines during the pandemic.
There was a damning admission in New York Times Magazine over the weekend that may inspire new doubts about the credibility of the so-called experts advising the masses on matters of health, namely that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder may not have a basis in biology after all.
That admission was not volunteered from some activist or critic but rather by the Dutch neuroscientist who apparently misled the world into thinking "A.D.H.D. is a disorder of the brain."
In a piece titled "Have we been thinking about A.D.H.D. all wrong?" Paul Tough discussed the correlated explosion of ADHD diagnoses and Ritalin prescriptions in the 1990s — a trend, he noted, that was accompanied by criticism from parents and others concerned about the apparent campaign to load kids with methylphenidate and amphetamines.
"You didn't have to be a Scientologist to acknowledge that there were some legitimate questions about A.D.H.D.," wrote Tough. "Despite Ritalin's rapid growth, no one knew exactly how the medication worked or whether it really was the best way to treat children's attention issues."
Parents were right to be concerned.
Ritalin, Adderall, and the other highly addictive stimulants foisted upon hard-to-control American youths have a variety of undesirable side effects, both immediate and long-term.
In the short term, they can cause side effects such as bladder pain, bloody urine, an irregular heartbeat and palpitations, diarrhea, headaches, joint pain, trouble sleeping, confusion, agitation, seizures, and vomiting. In the long term, these drugs can apparently impact growth, dopamine regulation, and memory formation and retention and cause elevated blood pressure, psychosis, and mood disorders.
Over the past decade, prescriptions for stimulants to remedy imagined ADHD have skyrocketed — by 58% between 2012 and 2022. Most of the drugs dished out have been amphetamines, according to a 2023 document prepared for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an estimated 7.1 million American children (approximately 1 in 9) aged 3-17 had ADHD diagnoses as of 2022. That's up from two million in the mid-1990s. Over half of the children currently diagnosed with ADHD receive at least one ADHD medication.
Tough noted that the medical establishment, already bullish on the ADHD craze, seized upon the initial results of the Multimodal Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder Study. The study, published in 1999, suggested that Ritalin was effective.
After the Ritalin train left the station at full speed, James Swanson — who subsequently went to consult for drug companies, including the manufacturer of Adderall — and his colleagues realized that their study championing stimulant use had aged poorly.
While the children in their MTA study reported improvements after 14 months of choking down stimulants, after 36 months, their advantage had effectively disappeared such that they were expressing the same supposed symptoms as the comparison group. Years later, the same test subjects turned out to be an inch shorter than their peers.
In other words, the medical establishment was hyping and pushing addictive drugs largely on the basis of perceived short-term gains that, unlike drug dependency, faded in under two years.
"There are things about the way we do this work," Swanson, now in his 80s, told Tough, "that just are definitely wrong."
"I don't agree with people who say that stimulant treatment is good," Swanson said, after spending three decades studying the drugs. "It's not good."
Swanson is apparently not the only supposed ADHD expert now having significant doubts.
Edmund Sonuga-Barke, a researcher in psychiatry and neuroscience at King's College London, told Tough, "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."
"We have a clinical definition of A.D.H.D. that is increasingly unanchored from what we're finding in our science," added Sonuga-Barke.
Sonuga-Barke suggested further that ADHD is not a static, easily definable, or objectively measurable condition.
That's not what Martine Hoogman, the chair of the Enigma ADHD working group, and her team suggested in a 2017 paper funded by the National Institutes of Health and published in the Lancet Psychiatry, a peer-reviewed Elsevier journal.
After years of academic chatter about potential physical differences in the brains of people with ADHD diagnoses, Hoogman and her team compared the cortical volumes of ADHD-diagnosed subjects with those of a control group.
While Tough indicated their data showed the opposite to be true, Hoogman and her team originally stated:
We confirm, with high powered analysis, that ADHD patients truly have altered brains, i.e. that ADHD is a disorder of the brain. This is a clear message for clinicians to convey to parents and patients, which can help to reduce the stigma of ADHD and get a better understanding of ADHD. This way, it will become just as apparent as for major depressive disorder, for example, that we label ADHD as a brain disorder. Also, finding the most pronounced effects in childhood provides a relevant model of ADHD as a disorder of brain maturation delay.
Hoogman did a complete about-face when recently pressed about her statement, telling Tough, "Back then, we emphasized the differences that we found (although small), but you can also conclude that the subcortical and cortical volumes of people with A.D.H.D. and those without A.D.H.D. are almost identical."
"The A.D.H.D. neurobiology is so much more complex than that," added Hoogman.
Sonuga-Barke indicated that there is a desperation among some scientists to find evidence pointing to the biological nature of ADHD.
"In the field, we're so frightened that people will say it doesn't exist," said Sonuga-Barke. "That this is just bad parenting, from the right, or this is just a product of our postindustrial society, from the left. We have to double down because we're terrified of what will happen to the kids who can't get the meds. We've seen the impact they can have on people's lives."
The well-documented overdiagnosis and overtreatment of ADHD in children and adults is troubling on its face but far worse when considered in light of Sonuga-Barke's understanding that ADHD diagnoses are purely subjective and effectively unfalsifiable; Swanson's admission that ADHD treatment doesn't help in the long-run; and Hoogman's admission that there is not a biological signature for the supposed disorder.
Blaze News previously noted that the Trump administration's plan to assess the prevalence and impact of pharmaceuticals on children has some childhood psychiatrists and other prongs of the pharmaceutical industry panicking. After all, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. might cost them a source of revenue by taking a closer look at ADHD.
Kennedy noted during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Finance Committee that "15% of American youth are now on Adderall or some other [attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder] medication."
"We are not just overmedicating our children, we are overmedicating our entire population," said Kennedy. "Half the pharmaceutical drugs on earth are now sold here."
Conservative commentator Matt Walsh noted in response to the New York Times Magazine article, "ADHD is one of the greatest scams in modern history. Millions of kids have been given mind-altering drugs on the basis of a lie. Now after decades — and after shouting down and defaming those of us who knew better — they're finally starting to admit it. It's infuriating."
Author and journalist Alex Berenson tweeted, "It's unbelievable that drug companies and shrinks ('telehealth' in particular) have pushed this junk for so long."
“The experts” strike again.
Trust the science.
speaking of ADHD, the article was TLDR.
I’ve been saying for decades that ADHD is not a disorder.
The problem is society. In particular, how are schools operate.
Children need stimulus.
Herding them together to sit quietly and still for hours at desks while a single, slow and boring ‘teaches’ is not a natural state.
I would have been diagnosed with ADHD if I was born later.
They called me restless, until one day a very brilliant teacher recognized that the material was going much to slow for me and was boring me to death and let me study at my own pace (to which I finished the year-long course in 2 weeks and aced it).
A.I. could make people a lot dumber if it becomes a crutch.
However, if AI is ever leveraged as a method of immersive and intensive stimulus (’teaching’), people might actually be better off.
My suspicion is that screen time is the primary cause. I kept my kids away from the TV for their first two years. I wanted them to see what is interesting about dull things. I even pulled labels off nested cans and plastic bottles I'd put in the crib. I'd drop by, make a noise, stack or stand things, look through them... and let them be to discover.
It sets in a lot earlier, but we don't notice. Have you ever watched a commercial on "children's television" and counted the number of scene changes in 30 seconds? After all that, can they sit and watch a worm on the ground, or notice what's in a book?
It’s really not that difficult. If the pharma-med establishment pushes a treatment which is permanent...then everything about that whole charade should be questioned.
No studies needed. Drugs were substituted for
discipline.
When I was in school, in the 1950’s and 1960’s, kids who would now would be called ADHD, were called class clowns.
“Brain chemical imbalance” and all that rot is pure pseudoscience.
The Alpha School in Austin (and a few other locations) does precisely what you said: uses AI teaching agents to allow kids to work at their own pace.
The result is that their students work approximately 2 hours a day to accomplish what typically would be a four to five hour day. This is similar to what is seen with homeschoolers, but probably has much better outcomes.
ADD/ADHD is almost certainly overdiagnosed. But it’s not nonexistent. I was diagnosed almost 40 years ago with it, long before device screens existed. I started taking Ritalin as a junior in HS, and suddenly was able to focus in school, and my grades went from the D range to all A’s within a single year, and next year I was on the honor roll. I never had any of the side effects this article ascribes to Ritalin.
And/or were sent on errands by the teacher like cleaning the blackboard erasers, taking messages to the admin office, etc.
Having a son and granddaughter with ADHD I tell you it is a disorder. Now is every child that teachers can’t cope with ADHD? Hell No, but that doesn’t negate those who truly are ADHD…..if you lived with it you would know.
They used the insidious “if the kid focuses better on speed, that shows he has ADHD” argument without people realizing that that’s how the drug works for everyone.
And here I thought that was my reward for being "good".
We didn't have iPads in the '90s.
Years later, the same test subjects turned out to be an inch shorter than their peers.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There is very little in this article that is at odds with my experience. I watched the school system and doctors want to get our children on Ritalin and we even tried it on our oldest for what ended up being a one day experiment. It totally killed our child’s appetite and I swore I’d never get talked into something that stupid again. After that ‘experiment’, I decided to test the drug on myself to personally test the effect. It did have a serious calming effect (if you equate being somewhat dazed with being ‘calm’)... and it killed my appetite too. With that, the experiment was over and for the record, our oldest thrived just fine and years later, graduated from university with an engineering degree and was third in his class.
Sometime ago, I was talking to a fellow who I’d estimate to be say 30 years old and he told me that he came from a family of 5 boys. He was the only one of the brothers who was given Ritalin and he was on it for a long time (as they said at the time, it was a lifelong drug). He was about 5’8” tall and he said that his four brothers were all about 6’-1” or a bit taller. He blamed Ritalin for the fact he was about 5 or 6 inches shorter than his brothers.
Fluoridation and a CDC schedule of 65 childhood vaccines isn’t helping ADHD. Plus as many as 3-6 vaccines given the same day, same doctor/nurses session, are going to overload the poor child’s system.
Same day vaccines, I assume this is done for the parents convenience and because they are all harmless according to.....
I ran into a higher up in my towns waterworks. He said if fluoridation is going to do harm, it is in children. They are more vulnerable.
My little brother was definitely hyperactive, and had the attention span of a fly on crack. He was put on Ritalin in the mid 1970s, not too long after it came out, and while it definitely did him some good, it was not a cure. Now in his late 50s, he still microdoses with Ritalin on occasions when he feels like he is not concentrating well.
It is my opinion, as a layperson who has observed how the medical establishment and the pharmaceutical industry works, that two things are at play here: First, almost every single person diagnosed with ADHD is a young male child. They need to have an outlet for their energy, and they need to be given something to focus their minds upon. When we observe young animals, what are they doing? They are playing with each other, mimicking what the adults do. All the documentaries you see on this say that they are learning this way. Well, that’s true, but they are also expending a lot of energy, and learning how to concentrate on something important. We humans are really no different; our youngsters, especially males, need to have very physical playtime in order to fully and properly develop. That is missing these days, especially as competitive physical activities are discouraged and eliminated in school, and as we have taken away the “thrill of victory” via participation trophies, and similar such leftist nonsense. The second factor, in my opinion, is nutritional deficiencies. We eat so much in the way of empty processed foods that our children simply do not get proper nutrition. Of particular importance for a developing brain is adequate intake of omega-3 fatty acids. They should eat more cold water fish, or take some kind of a supplement if they simply don’t like the taste or smell of fish itself. Most of the brain is composed of these fatty assets, in particular DHA, and the average young person doesn’t get enough. For that matter, when mothers are pregnant, they don’t get enough either, and this leads to the baby not getting enough to develop the brain as much as possible before birth. So the kid starts out at a deficit. Also important is magnesium, which is much less available in an absorbable form in our diet that it was several decades ago. This is all about soil, depletion, which implicates Big Agriculture and its desire to make as much money in the short term as possible, at the expense of depleting the soil of essential nutrients. Vitamin D and zinc are also of great importance to a developing brain. All of these things can be supplemented at a very low cost, certainly far more cheaply than visiting psychiatrists and stuffing our kids full of drugs that have questionable, if any, benefits. The best thing about such supplementation is that we will make sure that our children have every chance to be the best that they can be without being condemned for bad behavior or being drugged because a female teacher can’t deal with active young males.
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