alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
Replies
Not everything can be understood through p values and studies with 13 PARTICIPANTS undergoing a ONLY TWO EXPERIMENTS each, nor should the observed effects on 13 PEOPLE (half placebo) be extrapolated out to justifying safety for hundreds of millions of people. Next time you want to prove a point, take the time to research good sources, and not just ask an llm use your brain for once.
Please go put your kid on amphetamines for 15 years and let me know how that works out for them..
Do you care how much incidents of psychosis it causes on a yearly basis?
I said that the Ruling class (aka these professors) are pushing an agenda, and then you choose to provide evidence published by the ruling class to support that agenda.
Your parent literally said that nobody will ever convince them otherwise. It’s probably not worth trying.