Mike Duvos writes:
Perry Writes:
Most people would have no particular urge to stop a child with diabetes from taking her insulin. Your friend seems to have the sick idea that they know better than the child's parents whether the child should be taking their meds or not, simply because the medication is for a "mental" problem. This isn't your friend's child. Its someone else's child. They have no right to make such decisions.
Since diabetes has an organic cause, this analogy with syndromes and disorders defined solely by behavioral percentages fails.
'fraid not. ADD has an organic cause, and can be detected with reproduceable biological tests. Admittedly, ADD is nonfatal, and I will agree that the analogy breaks down there. I will also agree that it may be overdiagnosed -- that is, misdiagnosed by sloppy practitioners. That does not mean it isn't real.
A better model might be height, which follows a basically continuous distribution once outliers due to functional endocrine problems are eliminated.
We could, of course, define a "vertical deficit disorder" (VDD) which 10% of the population have by definition, and for which the treatment would be synthetic human growth hormone given regularly during the growing years.
Why eliminate the people with endocrine problems? You need not invent a new syndrome. The folks with severe deficits of growth hormone are an actual group, and are a perfectly fine group to give growth hormones to. Now, you are correct that some people might abuse those hormones, and some lazy doctors might diagnose a statistical outlier as someone suffering from dwarfism. However, that doesn't mean that growth hormone isn't needed for the people whom you choose to dismiss in your first paragraph as though they were not a valid place to draw the analogy.
Of course, no amount of reason will disuade the True Believers from embracing yet another disease model, and we shouldn't expect that it would. But I think it is clear to many people that the forced medication of children for the convenience of those who take care of them is getting a bit out of control.
Has it occurred to you that many of the children in question are happy being medicated, as are many adults? In any case, who are you to tell other people what's good for them? Perry