https://www.theblaze.com/news/scientists-who-suggested-adhd-has-biological-basis-recants-conclusionADHD is apparently an unclassifiable, unmeasurable disorder that requires costly amphetamines to remedy.
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."
'No one knew exactly how the medication worked.'
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're terrified of what will happen to the kids who can't get the meds.'
"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."
'It's infuriating.'
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."
