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Comment by nerfhammer | Hacker News Reader

You may have been more sensitive to the side effects than most.

I didn't personally experience all of those side effects, they just seem to be the most common based on dozens of other users of those medications I spoke with after beginning them myself. There are some other very common side effects I didn't mention as well, such as headaches/bouts of anger/crashing when the medication is wearing off each day, dehydration/drymouth, and heart palpitations or racing heartbeat.

The side effect that most annoyed me was actually loss of appetite, which is basically accepted as 'normal' when taking stimulants. Anxiety was probably a bigger issue with Adderall, though. I don't recall ever talking to someone who felt zero side effects from any these medications.

You know that anecdotal interviews are a fairly bad way to collection information, right? This is why humanity developed double-blind studies, statistics etc. We can actually quantify the probabilities of these side effects.

You know that you can't do double blind studies of stuff with such obvious effects, right? Anyone taking it instead of a sugar pill knows which pill they got.

If you read some self-blinding studies for things like modafinil et al. you'll see this isn't always the case. (They get surprised when they find out at the end of the experiment cycle that a particular pill on a particular day was just a sugar pill.) Placebo effects are weird. In any case while the plural of anecdotes is not "data" I still think anecdotes are valuable.

Let's discard all statistical approaches to research then

Gut reactions and vague impressions will get us by, just like they always have

Let's find applicable ones that work for our research, instead of always saying "double blind" without thinking about it.

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