USA Today appropriately points out that maybe parents, doctors, and especially, teachers, shouldn’t be rushing to medicate kids who space out in class when they don’t fully appreciate the potential side effects, and when they, well, basically stop working after a couple of years.

The frought conflicts of interest of CHADD have been pointed out in the book Selling Sickness by Ray Moynihan and his co-author, and I recommend it to add to your pile of recent books documenting how the pharmaceutical industry has corrupted academic medicine (willingly on their part! Come on in guys the waters fine!) and the American medical system.

Ross writes:

It would be a mistake for parents to use the latest data from the MTA study as a reason to retreat from using proven treatments, including medication and structured behavioral interventions, for the disorder.

I mean come on, buddy. The MTA study was not designed to show that all treatments work well. It was designed to compare medication to behavioral treatment and treatment as usual. The study findings were that after three years medications were not better than either of the other two approaches.

I am psychiatrist with a son who was diagnosed with ADD and treated with ritalin. I never heard that there were useful behavioral treatments until… last week. If I got nothing but meds meds meds I am sure that most other people got the same.

Also, some of Mr. Ross’ arguments are at best lame and at worse false. He states that the follow was “after the end of the study.” What he means is that it was after the double blind phase of the study was over. However as far as we can tell the three year followup was also “part of the study”, not just some afterthought like he implies.

He also makes the argument that “lack of access to health care” might explain the lack of a difference between groups. However they measured how many kids were taking stimulants at three years, and 3/4 of the group originally treated with stimulants were still on them, while less than half of the psychotherapy treated group were, so this argument doesn’t wash.

Recently Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has asked another patient advocacy group, the National Association of the Mentally Ill (NAMI) to disclose payments from pharmaceutical companies. I used to be on the Scientific Advisory Board of a patient advocacy group in the area of anxiety disorders, and I asked them how much of their funding came from drugs companies. I never got a clear answer, so I sort of faded away from that group.

Patient advocacy groups and organizations like the American Heart Association (AHA) and the Osteoporosis Foundation of America are heavily funded by drug companies, and their “screen and identify” programs fit in with the drug companies agenda to expand their markets to the worried well, as well as providing a convenient front. It is time to take a careful look at these organizations and determine if they are doing more harm than good.