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ADHD: More Junk Science?
WorldTechToday [worldtechtoday.com] and a bunch of other news sites are reporting
A new study is coming to some conclusions about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that is likely to surprise a lot of parents out there.
Namely, there’s a good chance that your child who has been diagnosed with it doesn’t actually have it at all.
It appears that the dramatic increase over the last several years of ADHD [wikipedia.org] diagnosis may have been triggered by parents pushing children with birthdays close to the statutory cutoff dates for compulsory enrollment into school settings one year "early". Often parents do this because they believe their child is special [childrensmd.org], and more mature than other children.
The study found that ADHD has been vastly over-diagnosed, and children who are slightly younger than their peers and are thus disproportionately targeted for ADHD assessment when their maturity levels are actually fairly normal for their age, according to a Elsevier Health Services statement.
The clear indication is that ADHD socially determined syndrome, triggered by schools, and teacher complaints more than any medical diagnosis.
ADHD diagnoses change depending on what month they were born, with the number of diagnoses increasing as the school year goes on — indicating that teachers may be comparing their behavior to older, more mature children and concluding that ADHD is the culprit.
