alt Hacker NewsThis is such a BS lie sold by pharmaceutical companies, "stimulants are safe for your child, amphetamines will actually calm them down". There's a thing called fast caffeine metabolizers, and 50% of people have this genetic variation and perfectly explains why some people can nap after having caffeine, also tolerance.
I digress, but you will never convince me otherwise, that the wide spread promotion of amphetamines in children/young adults is anything but an experiment of Empire. I attribute the somewhat significant economic edge US society has over the rest of the world is due to its addiction to amphetamines, and the ruling classes project to push them onto working class people to make them more effective workers.
Its no different than how the Nazi's used amphetamines to simulate their population or how imperialist Japan did the same. Lets stop spreading this BS lie that stimulants calm people with ADHD down.
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The well-documented scientific basis for the “calming” claim for ADHD medications is that by stimulating brain regions involved in attention, motivation, and regulation of behavior, it can reduce impulsivity and restlessness, giving the appearance of calming a person down if they have deficits in the latter areas.
This has been shown to help many people (a large majority) with ADHD, and it’s also been shown to not provide general neurocognitive benefits to people without ADHD.
IOW, the benefits come from improving attention and reducing impulsivity in people who have deficits in those areas.
See e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6165228/ and then e.g. the three references it cites here:
> “It is important to note that a robust body of literature exists that supports the positive effects of prescription stimulants on neurocognitive functioning in children and adults with ADHD (e.g., [14,54,55]), underscoring the importance of baseline impairments in performance relative to improved effects.”
Reconciling this with your opinions on the matter is left as an exercise, but there’s some pretty clear and unambiguous science here.
> I attribute the somewhat significant economic edge US society has over the rest of the world is due to its addiction to amphetamines
Over here in Europe getting prescription stimulants against ADHD is a fairly straightforward process. Or, at least, that's what I gathered from a conversation I recently had with a person taking them - they had no difficulties in this regard.
As an outsider I think one of the many reasons is the sheer amount of (often unreported) hours Americans put into work annually (and pay for that in their health).
For this same reason South Korea recently overtook Japan in terms of GDP per capita.
By this measure the mentioned countries (descending):
1. South Korea 2. USA 3. Japan