[slowmovintarget]

Deep breath in... Many people who suffer from ADHD actually have undiagnosed allergies.

My father was told he had ADHD late in life... he had allergies. I had problems with focus and being scatterbrained... on days the tree pollen was up. Kiddo was starting to get easily distracted and unable to focus on schoolwork... It was an allergy to the hard wheat used in U.S. bread making and preservatives.

You [edit: most people] don't just "have ADHD." That's like diagnosing someone with a headache disorder. There's an underlying cause that requires more work to dig out.

[Jommi]

No that's not true. ADHD is a real thing that exists. You shominimize that.

Now are there other disorders/illnesses/allergies that affect concentration definition.

A lot of people have deviated septum or allergies that make nasal bresthing incredibly hard without effort. Of course this has a major effect on concentration.

Other examples surely exist. But please don't minimize real debilitating ADHD.

[_yb2s]

I don't think they are in any way minimizing ADHD. ADHD is diagnosed by symptoms, and has a large number of different possible underlying causes, most of which are not well understood. When ADHD is caused or worsened by an allergy, that in no way makes it not real ADHD, but can make it easier to treat, if the allergy is identified!

It's known that ADHD is highly heritable and has some specific genetic mutations weakly associated with it, but it can also be caused by traumatic brain injury, toxin exposure, some food dyes and preservatives, and allergies. It's very likely that many of the heritable genetic factors themselves have interactions with external environmental factors, and can therefore be treated with environmental manipulation, if we can understand it better.

[T_MacThrowFace]

If you ever get diagnosed as having ADHD though, then every doctor will forever pretend that they know for a 100% fact that your ADHD is caused by mutated dopamine receptors, while having done no testing of course; why would they when you have already been diagnosed

[_yb2s]

That is pretty silly, and a misunderstanding of the research. All of the mutations in dopamine transport associated with ADHD are pretty weakly associated, and still very common in the non-ADHD population.

[adadadadadad]

You are actually making the case that ADHD doesn't exist or is pretty meaningless.

There is no scientific basis for it, it was a bunch of criteria that were arbitrarily chosen to create a term called "ADHD" so that they can prescribe meds.

You just have to ask the question as to why we can't give meds to everyone when 25% of college students report using them. Why can't we give meds to someone addicted to social media as a fix?

Everything is premised on it being a neurodevelopmental brain defect from birth...so that meds can be effective. But there is no basis for this.

You might as well just give anyone who doesn't get good marks at school or doesn't perform at work meds. In fact people want to do this.

Good read: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.81476...

[_yb2s]

Most medical conditions are diagnosed entirely on symptoms, and then those symptoms are treated. Especially in psychiatry, where we understand so little about the brain- all conditions in the DSM are symptom based, not mechanistic.

We cannot have a scientific understanding of the underlying mechanisms behind a disease, when our biological understanding is way too primitive to allow that.

Medicine has been helping people effectively for thousands of years, long before science even existed, by treating symptoms. It is "scientific" in the sense that the symptoms for a specific disease are clearly defined, and the safety and effectiveness of a treatment is determined experimentally, for the group of people fitting those symptoms.

The concept of a neurodevelopmental disorder is also symptom based- there is a measured progression of certain abilities in the "average" person, and there is a measurable delay in those abilities with a neurodevelopmental disorder. Again, that is a symptom, and has nothing to do with understanding the mechanism.

Using a lack of mechanistic understanding to say a condition doesn't exist, or is meaningless is nonsense. It's a clearly defined set of symptoms that can make normal life extremely difficult for the people affected, and can be effectively treated. It has known causes- both environmental, and genetic, as well as known physical phenotypic traits that can be measured experimentally. All hints towards eventually increasing our understanding of the underlying biology.

I would argue we actually understand virtually nothing about essentially all medical conditions, even the most deadly and most treatable ones. By your same logic, you could say diabetes "does not exist" because we don't understand exactly why people stop producing or become resistant to insulin. Yet people without treatment die, and people with treatment can thrive, which is sufficient reason for having a disease category despite lack of mechanistic understanding.

It would be great if we understood the human body a lot better, but that will take a long time, and a lot more research. We shouldn't stop making peoples lives better in the short term.

As a researcher in the biomedical field for a long time, I have come to see mechanisms come and go for diseases over the years, yet the diseases themselves remain constant. Most of our historically popular mechanisms like "depression is low serotonin" turned out to be either misunderstandings, or gross oversimplifications. Yet that doesn't change the fact that certain treatments work for certain clusters of symptoms we define as a disease.

I think "scientism" in medicine has been very harmful, and is mostly a delusion, and often a type of fraud aimed at creating an illusion of credibility. Pretending that things have a deep mechanistic explanation or understanding when they do not, and then dismissing safe and effective treatments when the mechanism isn't understood, or dismissing traditional medicine from other cultures and time periods because it's "not scientific."

Indeed, defining medical conditions always involves a cultural context, and is therefore "arbitrary" in a sense. I could imagine, for example, that having an ADHD brain could actually be a huge benefit to a hunter gatherer, but harmful to a modern office worker. Many other cultures and time periods have concepts of disease conditions that are basically incomprehensible to us, because they represent human differences which are now mainstream and culturally acceptable, so, despite representing a real difference, they do not cause a problem for people affected in the context of our modern society, and are therefore not a disease to us.

[slowmovintarget]

I'm not talking about difficulty breathing. I'm talking about a systemic inflammatory response from allergies that includes neurological symptoms like an inability to focus, problems with reading comprehension, and uncontrolled daydreaming or "tuning out." Every time I got my allergy shots, my concentration was shot for the day, and it had zero to do with my nasal passages.

I'm not minimizing the problems of those who suffer from ADHD. I'm hoping that they work with their doctors to see if there's more going on.