TV, ADHD and Doing Useful Things

WebGangsta writes "USAToday (and others) are reporting that too much TV, at an early age, can cause ADHD in children. They say that there should be no TV watching for children under 2. Every added hour of watching TV increased a child's odds of having attention problems by about 10%. Kids watching about three hours a day were 30% more likely to have attention trouble than those viewing no TV. The researchers accounted for many factors beside television that might predict problems concentrating, but the TV-attention link remained. I imagine that in 10 years we'll be seeing studies about how too much Internet/computer/video game use will also result in ADHD. See PEDIATRICS magazine for more information."

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The Malaise of the Middle Classes

[rqqrtnb]

America's middle classes have never had it so good. Two decades of economic success have brought wealth and happiness to anybody who was prepared to work hard. Americans are now better off in real terms than at any previous time in our history. Indeed, President Clinton himself went as far as to say that we are living in an "era of unprecedented prosperity". But scratch the surface of this glittering facade, and you will find not everything in the garden is rosy.
A certain minority of Americans are inventing new illnesses in order to avoid work.

The economic miracle that was started off by Ronald Reagan in the 80s, and continued through the George Bush Sr and Clinton administrations is one the wonders of the modern world. The solid economic base of Amreica, coupled with the explosion of the American designed world-wide-web and Internet have created opportunities for all regardless of education, race, sex or class. Anyone in America who wants a job will be able to take their pick from a selection of attractive and highly paid positions due to the strength of the American economy.

So why is it then that the middle classes have taken to faking diseases and why are otherwise respectable physicians joining in this collective fraud ?

Dyslexia, M.E., Attention Deficit Disorder, Repetitive Strain Injury, Anorexia. You have probably heard of these diseases before. At least one of your co-workers has probably taken time off work for one of these 'illnesses' in the last month. And yet, up until now no evidence has been produced to support the existence of any these afflictions as actual medical conditions. Let's analyse these 'sicknesses' one by one.

• Dyslexia. This is the 'diagnosis' given to a middle class child who cannot read owing to low intelligence. It is an attempt to medicalize a problem which in reality is a social one: All men are not created equal. When God gave out the brains, some of us were fortunate enough to be given a shiny new BMW 7-Series sedan, some of us got '97 5.0 Mustang, and some of us (the unfortunate few) got nothing more than an old skateboard.

  Dyslexia does not exist. Stupid children who cannot read do exist.

• M.E. (also known as the 'yuppie flu'). Again the middle classes cannot stomach the fact that they are not superhuman beings. Consequently when one of them needs to take a day off work, due to being what normal people would call "tired" they medicalize the problem (by giving it a long medical-sounding name) and hey-presto you can get all the time off work you want. Not bad for simply being tired. I wonder what our forefathers who built America by the sweat of their brows would say to a modern yuppie suffering from M.E. ?

  M.E. does not exist. People who need to go to bed a bit earlier do exist.

• Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD). This one is quite sinister. For thousands of years, children were allowed to be carefree spirits, wandering wherever the mood took them. Investigating a world which is new and fresh to them, getting distracted when something more interesting came along. This was called 'a childhood'. In the modern hell that is middle-class America, a child is not allowed to have a healthy curiosity. No. The moment a child behaves like children have done for thousands of years, the middle class parent reaches for the Ritalin, to dope the poor kid up to better fit with his middle-class golf-playing lifestyle.

  ADD does not exist. Healthy childhood curiosity does exist.

• RSI. (repetitive strain injury). Another medicalization of a non-medical problem. For centuries it was well known that if you did something repetative for a long time, it could have consequences. Cowboys doing their bit to tame the wild frontier often became 'saddle sore'. Railwaymen laying the tracks across our great continent suffered 'sleeper driver's ear' where the noise from banging in the sleepers to the ground would become too much. In both these cases the 'cure' was si

Steve Jobs

[hummassa]

Parent post brought to you courtesy of the SJ Reality Distortion Field (TM)
Laugh. it's funny.

Maybe that's why some don't like Bush

[rqqrtnb]

Too many people are watching TV, losing their ability to think. Thus, these same people are the ones who don't like Bush. Technically, you can say they are still babies who haven't grown up, yet.