By Professor Doom
It’s the end of summer
as I write this, so things are pretty quiet on campus. A recent study touched
on a few things I’ve wanted to mention about today’s campus which never seem to
make the news much:
Drug use is pretty
heavy on campus, particularly marijuana. I’m not passing judgement here, though
I certainly advise against it (my personal experience is minimal), and hate
when students stumble into class surrounded by a foul-smelling cloud of stale
smoke. Everyone knows about this drug being used by college students, however.
There’s another drug very popular on campus I want to get to.
While marijuana
and other recreational chemicals (hi alcohol!) are very popular on campus, many
students also desire drugs for treatment of ADHD. Students with Attention Deficit
Hyperactivity Disorder take these drugs, usually Adderall, presumably, to help
them focus, in other words to help them study.
So, quite
naturally, “normal” students who intend to study take these drugs in the belief
that it will help them. Now, ADHD is a “spectrum” disease, which means,
technically, everyone has a little ADHD, some just have it worse than others,
so I can understand the thinking that, indeed, these drugs might be helpful for
everyone.
Apparently, most
every student on campus agrees with me, as the prices for (illegal) doses of
these drugs go up during mid-terms and exams, as the demand spikes (curiously,
even students who directly observe this basic economic principle still will
adhere to the communist/Keynesian economic doctrine, but I digress…). The
pharmacies also tend to run out of Adderall this time of year, but as yet
nobody in power has been able to connect the dots between this and the
increased demand on the black market.
But the study
says “healthy” students don’t benefit from the drugs, at least no more than a
placebo. I know, any reasonable person at this point in civilization
understands there’s little reason to accept the results of any study, but I
feel the need to address why this particular study might well make some sense.
When I first
started teaching in higher education nigh 30 years ago, I didn’t get students
with ADHD in my class. Now, every semester I get a half dozen or more; once
when I was teaching a low level course 30% of the class was so diagnosed.
Direct observation
on my part shows that, yes, ADHD students generally don’t do as well as
“healthy” students but…I’m not convinced this is a confirmation of ADHD. I’ve
tutored many, many, students on a 1 on 1 basis, and the bulk of them had this
sort of diagnosis—they get the tutoring because of the diagnosis, you see.
I know, I’m not a
medical professional, but of perhaps 100 such students I’ve worked with on a
close basis? One legitimately struck me having a true cognitive issue. The rest?
Well, a few had bad teachers, many were suffering from poor course design (I
suspect Common Core will succeed in making this a more common problem, hence
the name for it), and the majority simply had poor study skills or otherwise
were not good students. I helped the bulk of my 1 on 1 students, but I concede
I could do little for that one kid: he needed professional help and proper
career guidance, and I advised his mother as such after a month of trying and
failing a number of techniques with a kid who I honestly believed was not
stupid, but could not think straight long enough for a high school level math
problem.
The point of my
verbose anecdote is I’m quite confident that ADHD is heavily over-diagnosed,
although I can’t say for sure if my personal observation of a factor of 100 is
true (much bias in how I get kids to be tutored, after all). It’s really worth
noting that unlike “real” diseases, ADHD
seems to move along state and school district lines—schools
that offer more benefits to ADHD students get markedly more such students.
(Yet another
digression: it’s quite possible that the skyrocketing rates of autism are
likewise due to the increasing government benefits of an autism diagnosis, and
not entirely due to vaccinations.)
In the double-blind study, in which neither
researchers nor participants know who is receiving the placebo and who is
receiving the study medication, each student received Adderall in one session
and the placebo in the other. This allowed the researchers to see the effects
of the medication vs. placebo in individuals and across the group.
The “double blind”
study really is the gold standard for this sort of thing. I reiterate that the results of
many published studies can’t seem to be replicated, to the
point that trusting any study claiming to have a result more interesting than
the above “no result” is foolish.
So, yes, the study
shows no benefits for “healthy” students these ADHD drugs. I strongly suspect
there are few, if any, benefits to the ADHD-diagnosed students for using these
drugs either, but good luck getting funding for such a study.
This is just how
insidious our “health care” system is today. Not only do we have wide swaths of
our children being given drugs of probable no benefit, we have the “healthy”
kids paying black market prices to get those drugs, because they supposedly
might “help” them, too.
Meanwhile, the
only thing you ever hear about on the news is how much Russia is a threat to
everyone. Russia might not be our buddy, but I doubt it rates in the top 10 of
serious problems this country, or even the world, really needs to address.
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