Slashdot Mirror
The New School Nurse Is Nurse Ratched
theodp writes "In Ken Kesey's 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nurse Ratched maintained order in the mental institution by dispensing antipsychotic and anticonvulsant drugs to the patients. Fifty years later, the NY Times reports that some physicians are prescribing stimulants to struggling students in schools starved of extra money, not to treat ADHD, necessarily, but to boost their academic performance. 'We as a society have been unwilling to invest in very effective nonpharmaceutical interventions for these children and their families,' said Dr. Ramesh Raghavan, an expert in prescription drug use among low-income children. 'We are effectively forcing local community psychiatrists to use the only tool at their disposal, which is psychotropic medications.'"
I have mod points, but since you are well on your way to +5 insightful, I just want to add some data to this. I am interested in this topic, and I have noticed a series of articles in influential venues, like the Economist, the New York Times, etc. beginning a couple of years ago. They all have a common point: they are reporting some kind of controversial news, like here "doctors are prescribing drugs to poor kids to help them, is this good or bad", while the underlying message is unquestioned, that is, whether those drugs work at all. The underlying message is that they do and that would go without saying.
In the case of the Economist article, unfortunately for the drug companies and the PR firms probably doing this work for them, the reader comments were devastating for this underlying assumption. This article was asking whether it was fair that some students could have recourse to "brain enhancing drugs" bought illegally (like the one used in the treatment of ADHD). Dozens of people having taken drugs as students in the hope of helping at exam times reported their horror stories, and shredded every point of the article.
Big pharrna is financing PhD students in prestigious universities around the world, for work on the use of drugs, not for therapeutic purposes, but for enhancing the brain. This is something that I have myself confirmed meeting one of them.
Now it is the Slashdot crowd being targeted. According to the comments I am reading already, I would say this is another mistake of theirs...
Have you ever done Peace Corps?
The reason why Asian-Americans excel is because wealthy Asians emigrate to America. If you actually go to Asia, you'll find that it's just like the U.S.: rich kids go to good schools and poor kids go to bad schools. The only difference is that cheating's a-ok beacuse it lets the school, the administrators, and the students all gain face.