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Company Claims EEG Scans Can Help Identify ADHD
Al writes "Technology Review has an article about a company hoping to expand the clinical use of electroencephalography. Thanks to better sensor technologies, data-processing techniques, and more detailed knowledge of the brain, EEG is expanding into completely new areas. A startup called ElMindA, is developing an EEG system to help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Scientists have also used ElMindA's system to characterize brain-activity patterns in patients with ADHD, identifying statistical parameters that differ between normal people and those with ADHD." If "normal people" can sit through high-school classes without being distracted and grumpy, count me out.
As someone who's been 'diagnosed' with ADHD, I can confidently say that the solution to this 'problem' isn't putting kids on amphetamines, it's to fire the horrible teachers that make learning a horrible, horrible chore.
If enough people are diagnosed with ADHD, when does it become "normal"?
...And the parents will say that they are clearly ADHD! Because they don't like eating vegetables, they would rather play outside then sit through church, they would rather play video games than read and they don't particularly like school. CLEARLY the answer is that its ADHD and not just the fact that most kids observe most of the ADHD symptoms. And of course the answer is never to improve the education system or just let kids behave as kids but its obviously to drug them up!
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
Humans did not evolve to sit at a desk, day after day, for most of their lives. Children being active and energetic is natural and healthy; it is not a disorder.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Many people here are (correctly) deriding ADHD as being an ill-defined "disorder" vaguely attributed to recalcitrant students. That seems to be exactly the issue the EEG scans are trying to address.
From TFA: "...hopes will help doctors diagnose attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) more objectively..."
To use a polemical and simple example, imagine a time before trisomy 21 (aka Down's Syndrome) was understood. Then instead of understanding a cause (trisomy 21), we had to rely on symptoms (mental retardation). You can't take a symptom and pretend it's a cause. Mental retardation is ill-defined and has many potential causes, and lumping all "mentally retarded" people together is disingenuous. If mental retardation were treated like ADHD is today, then anyone who did poorly in school would be labeled mentally retarded and given a prescription, some pills, a stigma, and a glass ceiling.
We should welcome even small steps towards objectivity and causation for ill-defined diagnoses like ADHD.
Haven't people realized by now that the fact that some people are misdiagnosed with ADHD doesn't mean that the condition isn't real?
The problem is that there is a gap between the fairly extensive diagnostic procedures that should be used and what sometimes happens in practice (5-minute office visit where general practitioner hands out prescriptions on the school's or parent's sayso). I don't blame people for being skeptical, but that doesn't mean there aren't real kids (or adults) with a real disorder.
Well, here's the real problem. You don't know what point anything has in the real world. Never. Particularly, not at the age of 17. But even at the age of 47, or 77. Because the real world changes, and the most interesting changes take directions you can't even fantasize about, let alone accurately predict.
So, to write off any knowledge as irrelevant is short-sighted and foolish. When you ultimately need to know it, you may not have time to learn it.
Learn everything. There's no good excuse not to.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
It's all part of the pussification and nanny-statification of America. Leveling the playing field only stifles the desires of those who are better and sets up the weaker individuals for huge disappointment later on in life (or it would if the rest of us didn't have to keep propping them up).
Lame? Crippled? Handicapped? Handicapable? Disabled?
DIFFERENTLY ABLED.
Stupid? Moron? Idiot? Simpleton? Retard? Slow? Dunce? Challenged? Developmentally Disabled?
SPECIAL NEEDS.
Problem child? Acting up? Bad parenting? Acting Out? Attention Seeking Behavior?
ADD/ADHD.
Bastard? Child of a broken home? Single mother?
SINGLE MOTHER BY CHOICE.
F? Red ink? Sad face?
EVERYONE GETS A GOLD STAR FOR TRYING.
Math? Science? Girls not testing as well as boys?
TALK IN GROUPS ABOUT HOW MATH MAKES YOU FEEL.
Reading? Spelling? Grammar? Kids don't speak English?
LANGUAGE IS ALWAYS EVOLVING, WHY TEACH IT?
Hard? Difficult? Unfair?
CULTURE AND GENDER BIAS IN TESTING.
Seriously. Kids are all different. People are all different. ADHD roughly translates to "Teacher doesn't understand this kid and can't get through to him/her so we're going to use this made-up diagnosis to put him/her in a box and then pump him/her full of drugs to make the problem appear to have gone away." Administering neurotoxins to healthy children is child abuse and should be treated as such. The funny thing is, so many people say "oh yes, you're right, 99% of ADHD diagnoses are really just misunderstood children" but then their "ADHD" child always seems to be part of that last 1 percent. Nope, sorry, doesn't work that way, no exceptions. If you label a child "ADHD" you are an incompetent parent or teacher. Period.
You have no idea what you're talking about. You also don't know what "neurotoxin" means.
Please research the issue and report back to the class.
Sadly, I have to disagree from simple practical experience. However, where I would agree with you is the enthusiastic administration of drugs, especially because they don't SOLVE the issue, they just convict the child to being a lifelong provider of profit.
For what it's worth, my son (you could call him a "light" case) was helped by neurofeedback. Not for everyone, sure, but in his case it worked. Ritalin is really about the last thing I'd do to him, so I'm immensely grateful it worked. ADHD is - as far as we learned (I'm no expert) - a weakness in the ability of the brain to switch regions on and off according to need. However, it's no snake oil - you can actually SEE the issue when you look at brain maps (quanititive EEG or qEEG). Rather horrible to see it confirmed, but nice that it IS confirmed so you can try to address it.
Neurofeedback is a bit like a gym and education for the switching mechanism, and for the region that doesn't work too well. It learns to switch correctly (or at least, the "mean" as sampled from many others) and the weakened region gets some exercise, like a muscle. Neurofeedback is cool in that it very quickly shows if it's working or not (no year long therapy), after which more of the same "embeds" it.
The problem with Ritalin et al is that you end up with an overall "on" or "off" state, which means if you need to switch from "doing" to "sitting in the car for an hour" you need to plan this and change medication. If you can avoid that in any way, shape or form, please do. It's really only a last ditch measure.
All IMHO, of course. I can't speak for others, only what I learned myself with my son.
Try to read up on the condition, but do it with a critical eye. I'm the first to agree that a Godawful amount of rubbish has been written about it, but it does exist. And brutally ignorant prescribing of drugs exists too.
But ADHD is no myth. On behalf of many parents with children, I wish to God it was.
Insert
I'm an adult with AD(no H)D.
It would've been great if I'd been eating sugar or food coloring (had a healthy diet), or not exercising (always did), or watching too much TV (didn't as a kid, didn't have time to as an adult because I was always behind). It would've been great if my teachers were boring, or if my college classes were terrible, or my first jobs out of college were drone-work.
But they weren't, because ADHD is real. ADHD is what's left after all the denial and blame of external factors (which 99% of your peers can handle just fine, funny that) are removed. ADHD isn't some side-effect of soul-sucking corporate life: it's what might get you fired from the most energizing and exciting job you've found because you can't concentrate no matter how hard you try.
That's the problem with ADD: you can't concentrate on things you love, even when you're doing everything right. I'd be eating good foods (straight from the farmer's market) and exercising and taking tai chi and have half the concentration of people who lived off of ramen and jelly beans.
If you're an adult who might have ADD (or parents of a child with it), I encourage you to talk with adults who have ADD and are dealing with it effectively. Yes, I dislike having to take ritalin, but uncontrolled ADD was far, far worse.
The anti-meds (often scientology) crowd talks about kids being zombies on ritalin. You know what makes a person a zombie? Not having a life because it takes you 3-4 hours to do what fellow students can do in an hour. Putting in 12 hour days to get 8 hours worth of work done. Not being able to sleep for fear of when the axe is going to fall because you're permanently behind on everything.
Once I started on ritalin, I found what it was like to get a day's work done in a day, to have time to jump on new projects because I could accurately predict I had the time to work on them, to be able to contribute to meetings--to brainstorm not brainfog--rather than feel permanently 10 minutes behind.
Once I started on ritalin, I actually knew what it felt like to concentrate-- to look at a project and quickly set up planning to get it done efficiently (rather than start off the afternoon looking for a stamp and end the afternoon repainting the table, sans stamp, because everything was distracting and every project has "Priority 1"). Heck, if I forget my ritalin I can get by--not my best but much better than my pre-ritalin days--because I know what concentration and focus is.
Some ADD kids can get by in high-school or even community college without medications because their anti-meds parents follow them around to keep discipline, or because they're really smart and high-school never asks that much of you. But what happens when you're at college and everyone else is just as smart, and doesn't have (untreated) ADD? What happens when you've got a dream-job and your parents can't be whispering encouragement every half hour?
At some point everything external is what it should be, and you're still not able to focus. And it'll be time to deal with the reality of ADD. It's a brain thing, and modern medicine can help. Talk to your doctor, but before that talk to people who've been through this.
Yet sitting at a desk day after day is what most humans need to be able to do. If they can't do that then they can either fail at life or they can take steps (including medication) to modify the evolved behaviors to fit the way the real world requires.
Education is sometimes fun, but not everything can be made to be fun. Sometime you just have to learn lists of facts. Sometimes you have to work through the pain and learn something that you would rather not have to learn. Sometimes you need to work on a project at work which is not at all an enjoyable experience even if your job is enjoyable most of the time.
Some people have a ridiculous fear of all medications (as if caffeine wasn't an extremely common medication that vast numbers of people consume in order to address their natural ADHD).
Newsflash: Red Bull, coffee, and Coca Cola are medications for ADHD. If you need one of those to get through the day then you are self medicating. If that's enough then great, you don't need to take any prescription pills. If it's not enough then see a psychologist and get what you need to live your life properly.
Cow Cube
I'm an adult. I have ADD. For years and years I denied it because I thought people like you knew what the fuck they were talking about. I'm almost 30 now and I have nothing to show for it, because instead of treating something I just berated myself for being "lazy."
I'm sick of you armchair quarterbacks. Stick to what you know, don't pontificate about what you don't.
I'm sorry to hear about your son. One day he will be old enough to realize everything. What he has, what the signs of his focus drifting look like, what he can do to compensate for it, and how you did everything you could to help him when he wasn't old enough to help himself. Don't let these guys get to you.