[Harry01 (OP)]

Probably clearly expresses my bias against Psychiatric diagnosing but what is the actual evidence base for this condition beyond vague "I get distracted and forget things" and is another thing that only the magic wizard psychiatrists can test for.

[paul cotter]

As a retired engineer and not a medic I cannot give you a definitive answer. I do feel the move to medicalise every aspect of human nature is not a good idea and the mass dosing of kids with drugs like methylphenidate will likely have unintended downstream effects. I believe to be human is to be neurodiverse and I have some personality characteristics that would match some of the more all-encompassing definitions of adhd/Asbergers/autism but none of this has been a problem to me.

[alancalverd]

ADHD, or "the dog ate my homework"? Which seems the more plausible?

(Clue - I really did turn up at an ethics committee meeting with the latter excuse, and a soggy heap of evidence!) 

Anyway, it is now a published "fact" (i.e. a paper in a learned journal) that many professional athletes have ADHD. And you thought it was all down to loads of muscle, years of training, and a love of the game.

[Bored chemist]

Probably clearly expresses my bias against Psychiatric diagnosing but what is the actual evidence base for this condition beyond vague "I get distracted and forget things" and is another thing that only the magic wizard psychiatrists can test for.

Do you also write off clinical depression as "well, of course people sometimes get sad" and dementia as "well, old folks sometimes get a bit muddled"?

[alancalverd]

Statistics suggest that either the UK population is collectively losing its marbles, on what, in evolutionary terms, is a remarkably short timescale, or that there has been an element of "diagnosis creep" every time someone produces a new pharmaceutical.

[Bored chemist]

The possible existence of overdiagnosis is not the same as proof that a condition does not exist.

On a related note, are you saying that asthma is not really getting more common than it was (say over the last 50 or 100 years?
Have you ruled out the idea that people may have changed the environment ?
Oh, I forgot... you actually don't believe in anthropogenic global warming, do you?...

[alancalverd]

I don't believe in anything - that would be unscientific.

Climate change is obvious and has been cyclic for millions of years. The fact that the current rise in global temperature coincides with a rapid increase in human population and activity is not proof of anthropogenic causation since it also coincides in time, rate and magnitude with the natural periodicity. 'Nuff said on that one.

In my youth, asthma was pretty rare. Certainly none of my school cohort suffered from it and I recall only one teacher (who had, frankly, had a "bad war")  being dependent on an inhaler. But then I grew up in London, where sulphurous fog persisted throughout every winter until the late 1950s, when the first Clean Air Act removed most of the soot, you could actually see more than five yards ahead, and fatal bronchitis became an insignificant statistic. By the time my kids were in school, chemical fog was eliminated, every car had a catalytic converter , every third child in their classes had an inhaler, and every tenth kid was allergic to peanuts.  CO2 levels had risen since the 1940s but I haven't seen anyone claiming it is the cause of asthma.

The urban environment has indeed changed radically since 1945, and the absence of war, Spam, herring, coal smoke, tuberculosis, rationing, diphtheria, poliomyelitis and smallpox seems to have had a depressing effect on everyone's mental and physical health. But pharmaceutical shares are at an all-time high and I'm now designing facilities for measuring  osteoporosis and visceral fat at the rate of two new clinics a week.

[Petrochemicals]

Everyone's autistic,
Everyone's ass burgers.

As a psychologist once remarked to me "we are all fallable fucked up human beings". A bundle of biological cells trying to survive.

[Bored chemist]

I don't believe in anything - that would be unscientific.

Climate change is obvious and has been cyclic for millions of years. The fact that the current rise in global temperature coincides with a rapid increase in human population and activity is not proof of anthropogenic causation since it also coincides in time, rate and magnitude with the natural periodicity. 'Nuff said on that one.

In my youth, asthma was pretty rare. Certainly none of my school cohort suffered from it and I recall only one teacher (who had, frankly, had a "bad war")  being dependent on an inhaler. But then I grew up in London, where sulphurous fog persisted throughout every winter until the late 1950s, when the first Clean Air Act removed most of the soot, you could actually see more than five yards ahead, and fatal bronchitis became an insignificant statistic. By the time my kids were in school, chemical fog was eliminated, every car had a catalytic converter , every third child in their classes had an inhaler, and every tenth kid was allergic to peanuts.  CO2 levels had risen since the 1940s but I haven't seen anyone claiming it is the cause of asthma.

The urban environment has indeed changed radically since 1945, and the absence of war, Spam, herring, coal smoke, tuberculosis, rationing, diphtheria, poliomyelitis and smallpox seems to have had a depressing effect on everyone's mental and physical health. But pharmaceutical shares are at an all-time high and I'm now designing facilities for measuring  osteoporosis and visceral fat at the rate of two new clinics a week.

You really should be able to do better than that.
"Climate change is obvious and has been cyclic for millions of years."
Not in dispute.

" The fact that the current rise in global temperature coincides with a rapid increase in human population and activity is not proof of anthropogenic causation "
Nobody said it was. But the increasing CO2 is a plausible reason for the steepest change in temperature ever  recorded.and there aren't any other obvious candidates.

"Nuff said on that one."
Not when what you said was largely nonsense.


"CO2 levels had risen since the 1940s but I haven't seen anyone claiming it is the cause of asthma."

Nobody had got close to suggesting that it was, had they?

I had said that man-made environmental factors may be responsible for asthma.
I made the observation that you don't believe in the importance of man made factors (see above).


" pharmaceutical shares are at an all-time high "

Most shares are. So are the prices of fish and paper cups. So what?

[alancalverd]

I had said that man-made environmental factors may be responsible for asthma.

I am at a loss to think what man-made environmental factors (with the possible exception of deodorants) have increased in my lifetime and can be held to be the cause of increased incidence of asthma.

I'd be interested in your suggestions.

[paul cotter]

Not wishing to get involved in the argument between the Titans, BC and AC, but I want to make a comment about asthma. Growing up in Ireland at a time when the country was poor, priest-ridden with zero facilities for young people all one could do was "hang out" with friends basically doing nothing. I ended up with a particularly large group of friends and acquaintances and I never heard of asthma, heard anyone wheezing or seen an inhaler. My eldest daughter now has to carry both an inhaler and an epipen(kiwi allergy). Here in Ireland we followed the example of the clean air act nearly 30 years later but we never had the severe pollution that Britain suffered due largely to a lower population and being more exposed to the westerlies. Obviously something has changed in the environment but what is it?

[vhfpmr]

Obviously something has changed in the environment but what is it?

The same question that people are asking in relation to the steady rise in incidence of a variety of cancers, and one supposition is that it might be the huge number of synthetic chemicals we've been filling our environment with for decades or ultra-processed foods. It seems that the vast majority are presumed safe until proven otherwise, but what happens when the proof takes decades to become observable, and even then only by meticulous and painstaking statistical analysis? How long did it take to discover asbestos, or the effects of smoking? AFAIK Britain's biggest industrial accident to date is the Armley asbestos disaster, nobody knew for decades, and by the time they did know, nobody wanted the huge expense of cleaning it up and compensating the victims. How would you ever set up a controlled experiment when there are hundreds of thousands of variables to control for, and the test takes half a century to run? What if the harm lies in the combined effect of more than one substance?

On the subject of diagnosis in general, science has provided us with a wonderful range of diagnostic tests, and we'd be lost without them, but it seems to have led to an attitude among the medical profession that if there isn't a positive test result there's nothing wrong, which is just bizarre. If you were to take that to its logical conclusion you'd be forced to the view that illness and disease didn't exist at all prior to the invention of the tests. If it were simply that humorous it wouldn't matter, but it leads to the systematic gaslighting of people like CFS/ME patients, just because the condition isn't currently understood. (Apparently they've just discovered a genetic link to that, as there also is with autistic spectrum disorders.)

Many people are reluctant to acknowledge ADHD/ASDs are anything other than character flaws because they think to do so would just excuse bad behaviour, well it may do, but that's a what's-bad-is-false argument. Proof that nuclear war could lead to the destruction of the planet doesn't constitute proof that fission isn't possible.

What's bad isn't necessarily false.

[alancalverd]

The steady rise of cancer diagnosis is, I think, correlated with the steady decline in other causes of death apart from heart disease and possibly suicide. Per capita, the probability of traumatic death (e.g. road accidents, accidents at work....) has decreased and infectious diseases (other than COVID) are rarely fatal except when acquired in hospital following some other reason for admission (eg surgery).

Fact is that the population is getting healthier and thus older, so we are more likely to die from old people's diseases. 

[Bored chemist]

I had said that man-made environmental factors may be responsible for asthma.

I am at a loss to think what man-made environmental factors (with the possible exception of deodorants) have increased in my lifetime and can be held to be the cause of increased incidence of asthma.

I'd be interested in your suggestions.

You really didn't know about this sort of thing?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

[paul cotter]

Yep, I mentioned this to Harry01 in the adjacent thread- I don't think he buys the concept.

[alancalverd]

I am aware of the hygiene hypothesis, which seems at least plausible. When people talk about "environmental factors" they are usually thinking of novel toxins and pollutants, not the absence of microorganisms. Mea culpa.

[chris]

Personally, I am concerned that we are increasingly pathologising extremes of normal with labels.

I don't dispute that there are some people who really struggle and are extremely extreme cases, but the majority are not "abnormal" and we are making people believe that they are.

The traits that we are labelling as pathologies have almost certainly always existed in society, but mass media, social media and rigid societal frameworks now demand that everyone fits into a box; the lifestyle, and work, home and educational environments we have created force some of these latent behaviours out into the open. Let's face it, until someone invented reading and writing, or maths, dyslexia or dyscalculia could not exist!

Societal systems that require relentless box-ticking, pointless form-filling, rigid brain-dead rule compliance, speech monitoring and self-censoring make people with a short fuse for this sort of thing act up. I'm one of them!

Previously, I suspect that the world was more accommodating of some of these differences (but admittedly not all) and people found it easier to "fit in" and find their niche.

I am deeply uncomfortable about the way we're heading. When you reach a point where more than a fifth of the population is labelled with something, like being "neurodivergent", you've got to start wondering where we draw the line. Every single one of us is "neurodivergent"; no two brains are the same.

Can't we just accept that we're all different? Yes, some people are a bit more different, but they're not "special": they're part of the "normal" distribution of the population, just at one end of it. The traits we have are manifest because our evolution makes their existence possible, almost certainly for a reason.

Imagine how boring life would be if we all thought and behaved the same way? And without people with ADHD tendencies we would probably never have had the nous to get out of Africa 60,000 years ago...

[Bored chemist]

It is interesting that, as a society, we are accepting that gender isn't just M/F, but there's a spectrum.
At  the same  time, as a society, we are accepting that brain structure isn't just "Autistic" / "normal", but there's a spectrum.

[evan_au]

This doctor who specialises in diagnosing and treating ADHD certainly thinks ADHD is a real thing.
...and seems sure that Donald Trump has it.
https://www.drjohnkruse.com/reflexive-not-reflective-what-donald-trump-can-teach-us-about-adult-adhd/

[evan_au]

I am at a loss to think what man-made environmental factors (with the possible exception of deodorants) have increased in my lifetime

- There is much more microplastics in the environment than at the end of WW2. They are being found in all parts of the human body. Some of the components of plastic are thought to interfere with hormone levels.
- Since the 1960s, PFAS and similar fluorinated carbon molecules have also increased in the environment, and are being found in all habitats, and in the human body. Some of them are endocrine (hormone) disruptors. People who are exposed to high levels (eg firefighters and the military) have complained of medical problems.

Some people complain that it is the Measles vaccine which has caused an increase in ASD - but this specific complaint has been researched thoroughly and debunked.
- Recent results suggest that ASD changes are visible in utero, which means that it may be triggered by exposure of the mother (in addition to the genetic contribution).