[wmgries]

My third grade teacher apparently had every boy in her class tested. As a boy, and frankly as a boy who was independent, mouthy and unlikely to do work in school unless I wanted to, I'm glad I had great parents and a great pediatrician. My pediatrician had my parents and teacher run an experiment: my mom would choose a pill with active ingredient or a pill with nothing in it, and my teacher, without knowing which I took that day, would record notes on my behavior. Turns out, no correlation between the two.

I don't doubt there are people in this world for who ADHD is a real thing. But I think we are too quick in the modern age to drug without thinking. Parents demand antibiotics for illnesses which are just small bugs... guess what, now we are having problems with drug resistant bacteria. Lawmakers, administrators, and teachers (in that order) want to turn classrooms in to machines which churn out educated people like clockwork. Turns out, humans are animals, not machines, so we load everybody with some stimulants to make children just sit still.

I'm not anti-medicine in any way. I have personally seen Ritalin work on a friend who actually had ADHD growing up. And I have also seen another friend buy Vyvanse illegally so he could study for 15 hours a day. I believe in prescription drugs. I just don't always believe in the prescription.

[prutschman]

I like the idea of the experiment! Is it generally accepted that one would see same-day behavior changes when switching between an ADHD drug and a placebo?

[wmgries]

That's a good point, I'm not sure. The friends I've seen use the drug as a study aid certainly respond to it quickly but the scientific rigor of the experiment didn't much matter: I think my parents were skeptical that I really had a problem anyway, and lo and behold, I'm an adult now and I never did actually have a problem. When you tell the parents of every boy in the class their kid has ADHD, the claim becomes pretty weak.