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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

I'm not saying ADHD doesn't exist or that there are not people who need medication to assist them.

I just believe that its so overly diagnosed these days. It's similar to depression. It's very common to just throw drugs at the problem when some people don't need drugs, they need a lifestyle change, sometimes that means using drugs to begin with as a bridge to a lifestyle change.

But we are in this weird state where people go to a doctor and its like "oh you sneezed? here take these 15 drugs" "how do you feel, on can't focus, must be ADHD, take this" "oh you feel down, must be depression, take these 6 drugs"

Sometimes I feel like we treat a problem before we diagnose the problem.

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It's not that simple to get diagnosed and the drugs are not the first thing that will be tried. I'm sure there are some overprescribing doctors out there, but on the other hand it took me months to get a diagnosis+prescription and required changing who I'm seeing. And that's even before you go on the "let's figure out the correct dosage" ride that takes time, effort, and bad days. It's not your average vitamins.

On the other hand comments like that are among things that contributed to me not getting diagnosed for years, so consider what are the confirmed facts when talking about medical treatments, ok?

> But we are in this weird state where people go to a doctor and its like "oh you sneezed? here take these 15 drugs"

Many people say this, but where's the evidence? Probably the best quality article to date in support of overdiagnosis and overtreatment is [1], and that paper is incredibly weak. It does not give any concrete numbers as to the rate of overdiagnosis, only really claims that there are populations of less severe ADHD that have inferior reward/risk outcomes of pharmacotreatment, while also admitting ADHD is underdiagnosed and undertreated in subpopulations, especially girls and minorities.

In other words, it's likely all just misdiagnosis, due to limited sensitivity and specificity.

My hypothesis is that ADHD detection, like any medical test, has limits to its accuracy, and considering even quantitative tests with 90% accuracy have quite large false positive populations, we are seeing a similar situation with the far more qualitative ADHD test system.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8042533/#!po=9....

Since you were diagnosed as a child you may not be aware, but getting a diagnosis for ADHD is not nearly as simple as you describe and doctors are not just throwing meds at you. If anything, you'll first be labeled a drug-seeker.

It could be more frequently diagnosed, but also under-diagnosed at the same time. More diagnosis are due to more awareness, but there isn't data to prove it's been overly diagnosed in people who don't have it.

Less feelings, more data.

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