DocVikingo:
Some comments upon your posting:
1. "OK, I ain't a MD,..."
Yet, you go on from here talking like you have a very intimate knowledge of at least one area of medicine, psychiatry, including arguing diagnosis and commenting on the effects of drugs and their appropriate & inappropriate applications.
2. "First, understand one thing up front - what we now call "ADD/ADHD" used to, 20 years ago, be called "being a boy." At least for the 90th+ percentile of so-called "diagnosed" individuals."
I agree that this classificatory rubric has been to some degree subject to abuse of the type you suggest. I have as yet to see any consistent, solid figures on the extent of misdiagnosis, but would be very surpised if the problem was of this magnitude. From what scientific study(s) did you glean the 90th%tile+ figure?
Do you
really expect me (or anyone else) to believe that suddenly this "disease" called ADD/ADHD magically appeared in people 20 years ago?
Doc, the entire ADHD/ADD thing doesn't pass the sniff test. What it does pass is the big pharma marketing test, and the teacher union "I don't wanna actually have to work at my job" test.
Until and unless you have seen a kid that has been "diagnosed" and the
radical changes in behavior that show up when the magic ritalin is applied, you simply don't have the basis for comparison here. I've seen it in my family. The entire goal is to make these kids "complient" with what teachers want.
The problem is that an awfully large percentage of these kids simply aren't challenged by the environment they are in. So they get bored, and ultimately that feeds bad behavior. Get a few of them in the same place and you get a "feeding frenzy" going, and now you have what people call an "out of control" classroom.
What's really going on is that we've dumbed down the curriculum and are more interested in not offending anyone by giving their kid an "F" - so those who get it in the first 5 minutes get to sit through the rest of the hour and do NOTHING.
Now if you turn the overachievers into zombies, your "problem" as a teacher goes away.
Gee, you know what Doc? If you look at the
statistics, we do just fine in terms of student achievement vis-a-vis the rest of the world
until the fourth grade. The defecit by that point has begun to accumulate, and by the time the kids are out of high school its huge.
Of course regressing to the mean has the effect of calming down the classroom, but that's not (supposed to be) the point, is it? Or is it?
By any CURRENT definition I would have been subjected to this garbage when I was a kid. IMHO it is nothing more than ritualized child abuse and the people responsible should be in prison for felonious drug trafficking on top of it. Never mind that essentially ALL of these kids end up on these drugs at the "urging" of a teacher or other school administrator - in some cases, upon their
demand. I have yet to see a PhD in psychiatry on the wall of any of these teacher's back rooms, yet they seem to be effectively prescribing these drugs.
It has gotten SO bad that actual legislation is now either on the books or pending in many states to actually ban and criminalize this practice. IMHO no new law was needed - this stuff is, absent a pre-existing prescription, a Scheduled drug, and as such any teacher "pushing" such a drug on Johnny has already committed the offense of attempting to dose a kid with an illegal, scheduled mind-altering substance and should do his or her 20 in the hole for same.
3. "...the DSM's inclusion and exclusion lists recently tried to have pedophilia removed from the DSM as a "disorder"! No, I'm not kidding, they really did."
I don't believe that is an accurate characterization of what was done. In the DSM-III, merely acting upon one's sexual urges toward children was considered sufficient to generate a diagnosis of pedophilia. A few years later the text was revised, and in the DSM-IV persons who demonstrated sexual activities toward children could be considered to have a psychiatric disorder only if their actions "caused clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational or other important areas of functioning."
Nice tap-dance there Doc.
Now perhaps you can tell me exactly
what kind of "acting on sexual urges"
towards children one can practice without it being important to your functioning? Or, for that matter, how you can perform any of these acts without breaking the law? (and exactly how you can break the law and not have that result in "impairment" of important areas of functioning - like your freedom, for instance!)
The APA explicitly stated that pedophilic behavior appropriately remained illegal & immoral. However, it had some years prior decided that to the extent possible it should avoid medicalizing behavior that was simply illegal/immoral and without intrapsychic or functional impairment.
This is when the APA went from being a respected medical group to a bunch of cranks and quacks intent on feathering their own nests at the expense of society.
IMHO, of course.
Nor is the pedophilia flap the first time these folks have taken a stroll off the deep end.
3. "When it comes to the drugs, I, like Doc, have serious concerns. Ritalin and its "cousins" are all amphetamine derivitives, as he noted. These drugs are proven to cause permanent changes in brain chemistry, just as does the abuse of amphetamines."
Perhaps I have missed it, but I find nowhere in this thread where either Scubadoc or DocVikingo make any statement regarding "permanent changes in brain chemistry." I would add that the only research on this of which I am aware was conducted on rats. Of course, if you can provide references to human studies I'd be most interested.
Are you volunteering for the dosing and autopsy?
These drugs are new enough that animal studies are all we've got (its kinda hard to get permission to rip open kid's skulls and have a look around), but they've demonstrated significant and permanent brain chemical changes at human dose levels (mg/kg) in animals. After we have a few thousand more kids go off the deep end and we get permission to autopsy them once they whack themselves, we might be able to prove that the animal studies cross over.
Never mind that the brain chemistry changes that HAVE been documented in those studies are almost identical in form and substance to that observed when those very same animals are dosed with methamphetamine - and we KNOW what that does to people who abuse it, as evidenced by the splats below bridges and other fun events demonstrate from time to time.
4. "As such all of these substances appear to be able to potentiate abnormal EEG activity (read: increased OxTox risk.) As such I would not be diving in any environment where your PO2 would exceed a well-padded safe margin (the common recreational advise is 1.4; I would, if I was taking such a drug, stay WELL below that - say, 1.0 to 1.2 max).
You are using rather precise figures here for your recommendations on diving while on Ritalin-like drugs. What demonstrable science have you to support them?
None. I calibrated MY risk - I said that
IF I WAS TAKING SUCH A DRUG I would stay within a given range. I did not say
YOU should stay within such a range.
Indeed, I do not believe that ANYONE - you, I, or anyone else - can calibrate such a risk for
anyone else, as the science is not in. What we
do know is that drugs with similar chemical activity in the body
do potentiate O2 hits, because DAN HAS done those studies and there is some (albiet anecdotal) evidence that a
few actual field O2 hits have been caused by such substances. This is where DAN's tap-dance on pseudoephedrine comes from, among others.
5 "This is ultimately a matter of personal risk assessment and is not simple to evaluate.... I'd have a long, serious talk with your personal physician and make that decision based on an INFORMED understanding of the risks involved."
Finally something that we can agree on.
Best regards.
DocVikingo
Yep.
Unfortunately, there are way too many people out there who want to categorically stamp "DENIED!" on someone's desire and decision to dive.
In a few cases this can be medically defended. In
THIS case, however, such a categorical denial appears to be forthcoming without any science to back it up.
Just like the legions of zombies in our classrooms are.
Sorry for the heat here Doc, but this is a subject that I have done a LOT of work on. The doping of our kids, and the reasons behind it, is a serious impediment to our future competitiveness as a nation and their functioning as productive members of society.
