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ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

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Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#51

Post by lolwutf »

jt2190 wrote: post #45
X-Istence wrote: post #22

Each time a study comes out and people will link it to me (I've already had this linked to me three times) claiming that my ADHD medicine doesn't do anything and that it is worthless ... for me it isn't. Without my meds I wouldn't be able to concentrate, I wouldn't be able to get work done. At one point it got so bad at work that I was afraid I was going to get fired since I couldn't focus on any single task at hand…

> Each time a study comes out and people will link it > to me (I've already had this linked to me three times) > claiming that my ADHD medicine doesn't do anything and > that it is worthless... Unless any of those people is a licensed psychiatrist you should ignore them and move on.

Laypersons can and should read peer-reviewed medical journals and learn how to make their own, personal interpretations, within reason.

Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#52

Post by jt2190 »

benjamincburns wrote: post #9

So we're going to look at grades as an indicator of success here? Grades, which have been shown time and time again to have very weak, if any correlation with success? I've dealt with ADHD my entire life. As a kid people could see I was smart, but "if only he could apply himself!" One of the most pivotal decisions I ever made was to seek counseling, and ultimately medication, when I was flunking out of college. My gr…

  > So we're going to look at grades as an indicator of 
  > success here?
Yes, because children who suffer from poor grades are now frequently tested for ADHD, and since we can't very accurately diagnose ADHD, some children who don't need the medication will get it. It's called a "false positive." Those children's grades won't improve. The studies are really telling us that we're not very good at diagnosing this.

Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#53

Post by benjamincburns »

jt2190 wrote: post #52
benjamincburns wrote: post #9

So we're going to look at grades as an indicator of success here? Grades, which have been shown time and time again to have very weak, if any correlation with success? I've dealt with ADHD my entire life. As a kid people could see I was smart, but "if only he could apply himself!" One of the most pivotal decisions I ever made was to seek counseling, and ultimately medication, when I was flunking out of college. My gr…

> So we're going to look at grades as an indicator of > success here? Yes, because children who suffer from poor grades are now frequently tested for ADHD, and since we can't very accurately diagnose ADHD, some children who don't need the medication will get it. It's called a "false positive." Those children's grades won't improve. The studies are really telling us that we're not very good at diagnosing this.

That's a very valid statement, and I greatly appreciate/respect that truth. If that were the tack this article were taking, I'd have no qualms. This is the perfect kind of study to combat overprescription based on poor academic performance.

However there's an unwritten assumption in this article that grades are synonymous with success. See the caption to Dr. Farah's photo. That's a very poor inference. That's what I'm taking offense to.

Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#55

Post by danneu »

obituary_latte wrote: post #18
benjamincburns wrote: post #9

So we're going to look at grades as an indicator of success here? Grades, which have been shown time and time again to have very weak, if any correlation with success? I've dealt with ADHD my entire life. As a kid people could see I was smart, but "if only he could apply himself!" One of the most pivotal decisions I ever made was to seek counseling, and ultimately medication, when I was flunking out of college. My gr…

Honest question: could your success be at all attributed to placebo? IOW, is there any question at all as to whether or not you could have made a conscious decision to "buckle down" and have met the same result? I fear for myself that when facing similar hardship that acquiescing to meds could just be "dealing with the situation" and not properly processing what the actual hardship is, why it exists, and how else it…

Amphetamine isn't exactly a placebo and its effects aren't exactly unknown or disputed.

Asserting the possibility of placebo is like wondering if coffee is really just dark inert water but we're all just idiots with no self-awareness that buy into the oral tradition of what coffee is supposed to be.

    > I fear for myself that when facing similar hardship 
    > that acquiescing to meds could just be "dealing with 
    > the situation" and not properly processing what the 
    > actual hardship is, why it exists, and how else it 
    > could be dealt with.
But the hardship is simple. It's the forlorn inability to focus and do.

At the end of the day, we have finite lifespans and we have needs, desires, and ambitions right now. We know that flooding the brain with the amphetamine train works right now.

By the time I was in my 20s, I was pretty tired of listening to people suggest that I was lazy or that I just didn't want it enough. Then I started taking 50mg of Vyvanse and it makes me want it all.

I'll come brainstorm different coping strategies when I find out I'm immortal.

Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#56

Post by barry-cotter »

benjamincburns wrote: post #9

So we're going to look at grades as an indicator of success here? Grades, which have been shown time and time again to have very weak, if any correlation with success? I've dealt with ADHD my entire life. As a kid people could see I was smart, but "if only he could apply himself!" One of the most pivotal decisions I ever made was to seek counseling, and ultimately medication, when I was flunking out of college. My gr…

So we're going to look at grades as an indicator of success here? Grades, which have been shown time and time again to have very weak, if any correlation with success?

[Citation needed]

IIRC conditional upon acceptance to a job at Google grades don't predict performance at all well for anyone except fresh grads. That is the closest thing to grades having only a weak correlation with success I can remember. And that conditional upon is doing a lot of work.

Given that an IQ test is the best way of predicting work performance apart from a work sample test in hiring and IQ correlates around 0.7 with grades I find your claim implausible.

Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#58

Post by scotty79 »

> If its drugs demonstrably improve attention, focus and self-control, why wouldn't grades improve as well?

Because academic performance depends far more on luck than on skill. That's why the whole standardized testing is silly. It precisely measures pretty much random variable.

Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#59

Post by incongruity »

benjamincburns wrote: post #38
jessriedel wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I welcome people constructively criticizing the study, but this kind of anecdotal response is really not useful.

I had some trepidation over this when deciding whether or not to post my own anecdotes. In the end I decided that while it's not useful as a criticism of the study it's absolutely useful to curb the conclusion, that ADHD drugs are broadly ineffective, which this presentation of the study might suggest. Edit: As an example the caption of Dr. Farah's photo reads "Dr. Martha Farah and colleagues found no cognitive benef…

Okay, pick some other metric – the lack of grade improvement starts to cut away at the possible claims for cognitive improvement, on the whole, assuming the science is good.

On the other hand, if they were sloppy, it could potentially argue for a multimodal distribution that when forced into being viewed as an average (or with other tools that assume a unimodal distribution) then the effect gets washed out. One possible case for this is the idea that ADD/ADHD is wildly over diagnosed and, thus the incorrectly diagnosed children might show no improvement while masking the improvement of those who actually have it.

Re: ADHD Drugs Don't Boost Kids' Grades, Studies Find

#60

Post by jt2190 »

barry-cotter wrote: post #49
jt2190 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Each time a study comes out and people will link it > to me (I've already had this linked to me three times) > claiming that my ADHD medicine doesn't do anything and > that it is worthless... Unless any of those people is a licensed psychiatrist you should ignore them and move on.

Indeed because no one who isn't a licensed psychiatrist knows anything about neuroscience, drug mechanisms or interactions, coping strategies, physiology or mechanism. Neuroscientists, pharmacists, biochemists, none of these people could possibly have any relevant expertise. Only licensed psychiatrists are worth listening to.

As far as telling someone to stop their prescribed medication, then yes, the prescribing physician is the only one to listen to.

But perhaps you are expert enough and have enough knowledge about his medical history that he should listen to you instead?

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