patrick.net

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

he attributes to....

did he mention PhRMA promotion at all, e.g. direct payments and other inducements to prescribers?

Ah yes, the DTC advertising of Rx drugs. (Linked with commentary on ADHD from KevinMD.)

Advertising Rx drugs DTC is very lucrative but it makes no sense in any other way. The Rx requirement presumes that consumers are too stupid to decide for themselves what they need, which may in fact be true in some cases. The DTC advertisement tells the same consumer audience to "ask your doctor" for a particular drug. The drug companies pay (and otherwise induce) the doctors to say yes, and studies show most doctors tend to do what the drug companies induce them to do and patients ask them to do. So, DTC advertising of Rx drugs defeats the purported purpose of the Rx requirement, and instead results simply in more spending (aka revenue, aka power), which is the real purpose.

People talk about payment mechanisms, e.g. lemon socialist "market" insurance vs single payer or NHS, but a more basic problem is the artificial demand created by DTC advertising, which collides with the artificial limit on supply created by the Rx requirement. The subsidized Rx confers a perception of value (including an official endorsement) upon what might otherwise be perceived, more accurately, as a dangerous and probably worthless product.

Meanwhile, REAL PROBLEMS like leaded gasoline, which seems to have made more criminal and violent kids than PCP, marijuana, video games, rap lyrics, or being black, was said to be harmless by shitbag oil company and government fucks.

APOCALYPSEFUCKisShostikovitch says

Had a bunch of Brits approach me after an event I pulled together in Pennsylvania asking about all the wiggly leg drug ads.

wiggly leg... is that some kind of code for this?

This is the age of glorified, politically correct euphemisms.

If you can't say something nice about somebody, say something politically correct so the lib zoms can nod in knowing herd approval.

Either that or have your face ripped off for speaking relative truths.

ADHD was a condition invented so that Big Pharma would have an excuse to drug nuke the brats.

There is an episode of South Park about ADHD:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/RsGkk1GGw3w

1 in 9 US children diagnosed with ADHD

Key takeaways:

In the United States, 11.4% of children have ever received a diagnosis of ADHD.

Among them, 77.9% had a co-occurring disorder such as anxiety or depression.

Approximately one in nine children in the United States had ever received an ADHD diagnosis as of 2022, according to research published in the Journal of Clinical Child & Adolescent Psychology.

ADHD is among the most common pediatric neurodevelopmental disorders, and evidence indicates that prescriptions for ADHD medications jumped during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Data derived from Danielson ML, et al. J Clin Child Adolesc Psychol. 2024;doi:10.1080/15374416.2024.2335625.
“Approximately 7.1 million U.S. children have been diagnosed with ADHD as of 2022 and could benefit from referrals, service delivery and evidence-based treatment,” Melissa L. Danielson, MSPH, a statistician at the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities, told Healio.

“Our group at CDC has been using the National Survey of Children’s Health to track the prevalence of ADHD diagnosis and treatment among children and adolescents for several decades in order to ensure that the needs of children with ADHD are met by health care providers and other partners,” Danielson said.

Danielson and colleagues studied data from the 2022 National Survey of Children’s Health, a survey of parents about their children, aged 3 to 17 years, conducted by online and mail methodology in which survey responses are weighted to produce nationally representative estimates, “in this case of ADHD diagnosis, ADHD severity, co-occurring mental, behavioral and developmental conditions, and receipt of ADHD treatment,” Danielson said.

In 45,169 surveys reviewed by the authors, 11.4% of all children included in the survey had ever received an ADHD diagnosis, and 10.5% had current ADHD. Among those with a current ADHD diagnosis, 58.1% had moderate or severe ADHD, 53.6% received ADHD medication, 44.1% received behavioral treatment, 30.1% received no treatment and 77.9% had at least one co-occurring disorder such as anxiety, depression, developmental delay and autism spectrum disorder.

The researchers also noticed demographic changes in their results. Sex difference for an ADHD diagnosis, for example, narrowed from a boy-to-girl ratio of 2:1 in 2016 to 1.8:1 in 2022. Further, between 2020 and 2021, there was an increase in stimulant prescriptions among girls aged 10 to 19 years that was not reflected in boys or younger girls.

“Given that awareness of ADHD in children and adolescents has increased somewhat steadily over the past few decades and that the COVID-19 pandemic was associated with an increase in pediatric mental health symptoms, a change in the ADHD diagnosis and treatment during 2022 was not unexpected,” Danielson said.

https://www.healio.com/news/pediatrics/20240523/1-in-9-us-children-diagnosed-with-adhd

Neurotic Nation.