Las Vegas Guardian Express – November 25, 2013
By Michael Blain
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, more commonly referred to as ADHD, is on the rise in the United States according to reports. Diagnoses have increased by over two million people in 2011-2012, compared with a study conducted regarding data in 2003-2004. This is a tremendous increase in comparison with any scale and the other factors at play must be placed under serious scrutiny. A diagnosis of ADHD from an outsider’s point of view may appear to represent a more accurate clinical observation process, or that people (most often children in this case) are becoming more susceptible to disorders, but this is simply not the case.
This trend of diagnoses really started in the late eighties, long before ADHD was a common diagnoses and the hot clinical assessment at the time was Attention Deficit Disorder, or ADD. So before the ADHD party got started, apparently the hyperactivity portion was not required to convince millions of parents that they had a child with a serious disorder in need of treatment and medication. The catalyst for this was not a widespread outbreak of ADD, but rather the pharmaceutical drug Ritalin.
One of the absolute biggest problems with what is referred to as medicine and health treatments in this country is that the pharmaceutical drug is invented first and then the drug companies rely on physicians and physiologists to distribute it accordingly. It is not typically based on observation of someone that is sick desperately looking for a cure and drug company scientists frantically looking for a way to help them. The logic behind Ritalin does not even make sense because the drug functions within the human nervous system in a similar fashion to an amphetamine, and according to all studies on amphetamines they increase the speed of nervous system function thus making it more difficult to slow down and be patient. Attention Deficit Disorder is supposed to be a classification of someone who has difficulty paying attention in class and other scenarios where it is required for the mind to be attentive and focused. How giving someone, and in most cases a child, a drug similar to an amphetamine can accomplish that is completely illogical.
Ritalin, along with ADD, is seldom heard about anymore in today’s news reports. Possibly because people finally realized it was predominantly a scam by the pharmaceutical companies and that Ritalin has little, to zero, positive effect on those individuals being treated with it. But as quickly as the widespread diagnoses of ADD have went away, the diagnoses of ADHD have rapidly increased.
ADHD is most commonly treated with a drug called Adderall, which works with serotonin to allegedly regulate the disorder. Hyperactive children, and those seriously bored with school never seemed like a medical disorder for hundreds of years, and was intelligently attributed to the fact that children are typically hyperactive and school is usually boring. But pharmaceutical companies seem more than happy to invent excuses for parents and schools not to do their jobs, and now living in the generation of iPhones and the internet it should be pretty simple to get a diagnosis of ADHD from any doctor looking to make some extra money.
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