How to Avoid Becoming the Victim of the ADHD Industry

We have in this country a sickness-based health-care industry, rather than a wellness-based one…

Image by un-perfekt from Pixabay

“The business of America is business."
— Calvin Coolidge, 1872-1933

During the Christmas holidays I visited a friend who’s a physician and healer of some note. He’s worked with all manner of serious diseases, particularly cancer.

“We’re getting better and better at screening for cancer,” Don told me. “Expect to see more and more things like the PSA (Prostatic Specific Antigen) blood test in the future, techniques that will indicate cancer in the body before there’s a detectable tumor.”

“Sounds like good news,” I said.

“It’s certainly good business,” he said.

“Good business?”

“Yep. A cancer diagnosis is worth about $250,000 to the medical establishment.”

“That sounds like a pretty cynical thing to say,” 1 said. “You don’t mean to say that doctors are looking for cancer because it makes them money?”

“Not individually,” Don said, “although there are probably a few cynical exceptions. But what you have to understand is that we’re part of a sickness industry, not a wellness industry. If people were well, there would be a heck of a lot of people out of work.”

“You don’t think that those people would be glad to be out of work if it meant fewer people dying?” I said.

Don shrugged. “If a jumbo jet with 300 people on it crashed once a week for six months, 26 jets going down in cities all over America, over seven thousand people dead, what do you think would happen?”

“I’d sure not get on another plane,” I said, laughing.

Don wasn’t smiling. “Seriously.”

“Well, there would be calls for congressional investigations, the FAA would be in a fit and if something wasn’t done the commissioner of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) would be fired, the airlines would be working frantically to try to find out why all those planes were falling out of the sky, and nobody would fly.”

“Be a pretty damn scary thing, right? Major national scandal?”

“Yeah.”

“Ok,” Don said, “let’s imagine that every single day of the year four or five big jets went down. Yesterday there were crashes in New York, Chicago, San Diego, Denver, and Las Vegas. The day before that planes went down in Detroit, Cleveland, Miami, and Honolulu. The day before that planes had crashed in Portland, Seattle, Dallas, Phoenix, and Boston. And so on. Every day four or five planes full of people, and everybody died. Can you imagine the uproar?”

“The country would be hysterical,” I said.

“That’s the number of people who died today, yesterday, the day before, and every day this year just from smoking. Now, what’s wrong with this picture?”

“There’s no national hysteria.”

“Right. Only one guy in all of Congress, Henry Waxman, even talked about this, and he’s now out of Congress. And while the AMA has given lip service to the issue, they only did that very late in the game. The medical establishment is one of the three most powerful lobbies in the world. Doctors are viewed as priests of the high religion of medicine: if we really started speaking out, loudly and strongly, we could outlaw tobacco in six months. But it’s not going to happen, because nearly every one of those 450,000 people who die from cigarettes each year generate about a quarter-million dollars apiece for the medical establishment. That’s $112,500,000,000 for the medical industry: we make more off smoking than the tobacco companies.”

As I was driving to the airport from Don’s house, his words ringing in my ears, I thought about the TV special that had tried to make ADHD support groups look bad because some had accepted contributions or grants from CIBA, the manufacturer of Ritalin.

I know many people in these support groups, including their founders and some of their board members. There is no doubt in my mind they’re well-intentioned good people who are working hard to help children and adults with ADHD. Most are the parents of ADHD children themselves. And none, to the best of my knowledge, are profiting from ADHD.

But such organizations have also sponsored national conferences where some members of the medical establishment— people who do make money from diagnosing and treating ADHD, principally through prescribing drugs—have strongly advocated the use of drugs and ridiculed all theories and treatments without drugs at their core.

I attended several speeches at one conference where sarcasm and ridicule were so strong and pointed, so cutting and accusatory, that I sat in slack-jawed amazement. Had I been the researcher who’d presented the work on ADHD and EEG Neurofeedback and who was the target of these attacks at the conference, I would have felt devastated.

Nonetheless, I don’t believe that the physicians and psychologists who assert that ADHD is an “illness” are doing so just to make money any more than I believe that the average general practitioner or oncologist wants people to start smoking. Yet all are part of an industry that profits from “illness.”

Which comes back around to my friend Don’s point — we have in this country a sickness-based health-care industry, rather than a wellness-based one. This is in contrast to ancient China, where you paid the doctor every month while you were well; when you became sick, you paid nothing until you were well again. Doctors of those days were proactive practitioners of preventative medicine.

So long as we define ADHD as a sickness, it falls into the arena of a huge industry which earns hundreds of millions of dollars a year from the diagnosis and treatment of this condition. This which will always encourage more diagnoses and more treatments, even in those cases where it may not be ADHD at all, or only in the most marginal sense.

The best strategy to avoid becoming the victim of an industry seeking its own self-interest rather than yours is education. Don’t just listen to one theory or party line, but get as much information, and as many dissenting views, as possible. Examine each one critically, and ask if there are hidden agendas at play which may have skewed the information to the benefit of the information provider.

This is good advice whether we’re buying a new car, a house, a computer, a toy, or psychiatric/psychological/medical services. Be an informed consumer, and take nothing for granted. Including ADHD.