The ‘Can We?’ and the ‘Should We?’ of Science

 If you want to see another dismal story of scientists placing their genuine knowledge and expertise in the service of absurd or harmful ends, just consider how America's medical authorities got into the habit of putting about one in ten of their country's children on mind-altering drugs to treat conditions - mainly ADHD - that weren't considered diseases at all just a few decades ago.

Most of these stories are filled up with the usual boilerplate expressions of sympathy for the millions of children and adults struggling to get the drugs they've become dependent on, plus speculations on who is to blame - the manufacturers? The DEA? One particular factory on Long Island? One might think that, in a civilization that's been drugging some 5 to 10 percent of its children for ADHD for about 30 years by now, scientists would have a good physical model of what causes this disorder.

Hundreds of studies have been done on this topic, but even in the most recent meta-analysis, only 44 percent of the studies even bothered to distinguish between children who had already been exposed to drugs and those who hadn't.

Anyone with a drug-addled relative or close friend will have some idea of what it's like, and while most of us don't like to use the word "Addict" to describe a ten- or twelve-year-old who meekly takes the speed pills that his doctor gave him, the biological processes behind drug dependency are the same, whether the drug came from a licensed or an unlicensed pharmacist.

So why do we keep doing it? Why do Americans keep getting their children started on lifelong drug dependencies in order to treat elementary-school behavior issues that, two generations ago, were not considered medical problems at all? The answer? Because it works.

Perhaps not in the long run, since most of the studies show that the academic benefits of putting a schoolchild on ADHD drugs are strong for the first year or two, drop off after that, and might become negative in the end.

The truth isn't that simple, because the key fact here is that Mrs. Winslow's Soothing Syrup actually worked! The core scientific claim of the people who sold this drug was that giving a one- or two-year-old morphine will ease the pain of a new tooth coming in - and nobody disagrees with this! Our ancestors just decided that the syrup's benefits weren't as important as its harms. 

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2024/03/the_can_we_and_the_should_we_of_science.html