What If Einstein Had Taken Ritalin?

"Bob Kaplow" wrote in message
...
In article , "Justin"
writes:
You can say that properly applied, it is a gift. But then you are only
using the good traits that appear in ADHD. The bad traits, and the main
trait can hardly be called gifts, and therefore are still a disorder if
it affects the persons life enough.
Put it this way: If you find a way to properly apply it, then you don't
really have an ADHD anymore, right?

A large percentage of the upper end of our society are ADD / ADHD. It's
common among trial lawyers, several medical specialties, inventors,
entrepreneurs, politicians, outside sales, entertainers, and many other
areas. Not among CPAs.

Can you please provide evidence that this is the case?

Jeff

In alt.support.attn-deficit george of the jungle wrote:
On 4 Feb 2005 17:43:04 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

In alt.support.attn-deficit Mark Probert Mark wrote:


wrote in message
oups.com...
Actually, Einstein got into the university teaching based on his first
paper on his theory of relativity. He was a patent clerk when he wrote
it.

One could do that sort of thing today, I believe, but I cannot think
of an example.

You cannot think of an example because one cannot do that sort of thing
today. The academic system is designed to prevent it.

Correct.

In the UK it certainly isn't. I'm led to believe that in the US
they're much fiercer about having exactly the right kind of CV and
much less willing to make exceptions based on merit such as having
published excellent research even though you didn't have the usual
qualifications.

Brilliant post docs have trouble finding academic jobs. I knew a few
professors with master's degrees but they are retired or dead now.

The fact is that there are now, today, far more academics without PhDs
in British Universities than in the US. They are a minority, and it
isn't easy, but it's still much more possible than in the US.

How many people with no higher education get significant papers
published?

You need a lot of training in how to collect and present the
information to get a paper published. It's hard to acquire that
outside tertiary education. It's also hard to publish as an unknown
without institutional support, usually in the form of a co-authorship,
from a place of known quality.

But not impossible.

The 10 year old girl got published for political reasons,
not the quality of her paper IMO.

Probably.

There's a lot of junk in medical
journals and much medical research (WHI) is poorly designed IMO.

Most published science is junk. It's hard to police quality more
fiercely without at the same time inadvertently throwing out some
important stuff. In many cases judgements about what is junk can only
reliably be made with the benefit of hindsight from a future vantage
point.

--
Chris Malcolm +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

On 5 Feb 2005 20:56:58 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

In alt.support.attn-deficit george of the jungle wrote:
On 4 Feb 2005 17:43:04 GMT, Chris Malcolm

But not impossible.

The 10 year old girl got published for political reasons,
not the quality of her paper IMO.

Probably.

There's a lot of junk in medical
journals and much medical research (WHI) is poorly designed IMO.

Most published science is junk. It's hard to police quality more
fiercely without at the same time inadvertently throwing out some
important stuff. In many cases judgements about what is junk can only
reliably be made with the benefit of hindsight from a future vantage
point.

That last sentence is welll said. It is better to publish
controversial ideas and let further research sort out the good ideas
than to not publish them.

What ****ses me off is when poorly designed studies get huge amounts
of press coverage and doctors start giving advice based on those
studies. The Women's Health Initiative, which treated with Prempro,
women who no longer had, for the most part, menopausal symptoms, was
such a study.

http://www.whi.org/

A fundamental reason for using double blind studies is to avoid sample
selection bias. They biased the sample by effectively knocking out,
through study design, women with significant menopausal symptoms. It
appears that they treated women who could no longer benefit from the
treatment - or at least that's one possibility.

Then there was the truly idiotic follow on where they determined that
there was no benefit of hormones on mood - based on a sample of
non-symptomatic women.

That study should not have been published. It was a mee tooo study
that misused available data. But it was politically correct at that
moment when there was a bandwagon against HRT.

_george

On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 07:01:00 +1300, "Justin"
wrote:


"MrPepper11" wrote in message
oups.com...
Wall Street Journal
February 3, 2005

What If Einstein Had Taken Ritalin?
ADHD's Impact on Creativity
By JEFF ZASLOW

[snip]

Einstein had ADHD? Hmmm... I spose this follows the same logic that
cause people to think that Mozart and about every other genius had it as
well.
Does writting over 600 compositions by the age of 35 sound like
something that someone with a chronic ability to procrastinate and be
distracted would do?

For every ADHD "genius", there is an ADHD "bum" sitting in the slammer.
There are also plenty of people that have many of the personaity traits
that people with ADHD oftern have. This, however, does not make them
ADHD.

Perhaps we all need to remember what ADHD stands for? And remember that
it is a disorder, not a gift? Perhaps some of the traits that are common
with ADHD can be considered gifts. But the key part of the disorder is
hardly a gift to most of the people with it. It's a dead weight.


Cheers, Justin.


I second Brunibus. Well said. My creativity and non-linear
connectional analysis is exceptional, I think, but so is my inability
to do the routine work to bring ideas to fruition. Einstein got his
work published which leads me to doubt that he had ADD.

_george

george of the jungle wrote -

"My creativity and non-linear
connectional analysis is exceptional, I think, but so is my inability
to do the routine work to bring ideas to fruition. "

So now we are getting down to the gory 'details' of it George!
It's about time.

Similarly, when Brunibus says " The "ADHD is a wonderful gift"
merchants have no idea how INCREDIBLY annoying they are. " ... I would
have to say "ditto", there, too.

I was beginning to despair that I was cracking heads with a bunch of
tepid church picnic socialites. ... and 'spare' me the "What's wrong
with a bunch of T.C.P.S" crap.

Now hold that THOUGHT, you two "****ers". Park it. Stand on it. Pin
that sucker down and don't move damn it! Let all the other twaddle
float away ......~~~~~~

Take that THOUGHT; flag it, bag it and tag it "Brunibus meets George"
(of the jungle). |||burn||| it into memory with a sizzle.

In alt.support.attn-deficit george of the jungle wrote:

On 5 Feb 2005 20:56:58 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

In alt.support.attn-deficit george of the jungle wrote:
On 4 Feb 2005 17:43:04 GMT, Chris Malcolm

But not impossible.

The 10 year old girl got published for political reasons,
not the quality of her paper IMO.

Probably.

There's a lot of junk in medical
journals and much medical research (WHI) is poorly designed IMO.

Most published science is junk. It's hard to police quality more
fiercely without at the same time inadvertently throwing out some
important stuff. In many cases judgements about what is junk can only
reliably be made with the benefit of hindsight from a future vantage
point.

That last sentence is welll said. It is better to publish
controversial ideas and let further research sort out the good ideas
than to not publish them.

What ****ses me off is when poorly designed studies get huge amounts
of press coverage and doctors start giving advice based on those
studies. The Women's Health Initiative, which treated with Prempro,
women who no longer had, for the most part, menopausal symptoms, was
such a study.

http://www.whi.org/

A fundamental reason for using double blind studies is to avoid sample
selection bias. They biased the sample by effectively knocking out,
through study design, women with significant menopausal symptoms. It
appears that they treated women who could no longer benefit from the
treatment - or at least that's one possibility.

Then there was the truly idiotic follow on where they determined that
there was no benefit of hormones on mood - based on a sample of
non-symptomatic women.

That study should not have been published. It was a mee tooo study
that misused available data. But it was politically correct at that
moment when there was a bandwagon against HRT.

That study is a good example of what I mean. You think it's junk. A
lot of intelligent well-educated medical researchers think it is an
excellent study. In fact you seem to be calling it junk and saying it
should not have been published because it was not designed to ask and
answer the questions you wanted answered. It *was* sufficiently
well-designed to answer very comprehensively the questions it *was*
designed to address, and to answer them in a way that was unexpected
and shocking to those who designed the study.

Your criticisms are based on the question whether the benefits of HRT
are worth its disadvantages when used to treat serious and temporary
problems of the transitional phase of menopause. But it wasn't
intended to answer that question. The manufacturers had been pushing
for a long time the idea that being post-menopausal was a state of
physiological malfunctioning deficiency which could be fixed by
lifelong post-menopausal use of HRT. It was considered that it stopped
or slowed down many of the symptoms of aging in women. It was
sometimes referred to as "the fountain of youth".

However a number of doctors were worried by the indications of a number
of small studies and some questionable studies, which suggested that
there were serious long-term disadvantages to HRT which ought ot
forbid its lifelong post-menopausal use as an "anti-aging" fix, and
that it should be restricted to the strictly temporary amelioration of
bad symptoms of the transition to the post-menopausal state.

The WHI study was intended by the manufacturers to knock these
criticisms of its long term disadvantages on the head once and for
all, and clear the way to promoting its beneficial (not to mention
highly profitable to the makers) use by many women for the rest of
their lives.

To their horror not only did it not do that, it turned up sufficient
adverse effects that one arm of the study had to be terminated because
it would have been unethical to continue giving women something that
was by then clearly on the way to killing some of them.

You can't really call a study junk and "should not have been
published" simply because it wasn't the particular study you would
have liked to have seen done. The fact that it produced unexpected
results firmly enough to have changed national prescribing guidelines,
to have raised a lot of controversy, and to have raised further
questions clearly enough that "more research is needed" are all good
indications that it certainly wasn't junk which shouldn't have been
published.

--
Chris Malcolm +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205 IPAB,
Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

In alt.support.attn-deficit george of the jungle wrote:
On Sat, 5 Feb 2005 07:01:00 +1300, "Justin"
wrote:

"MrPepper11" wrote in message
roups.com...
Wall Street Journal
February 3, 2005

What If Einstein Had Taken Ritalin?
ADHD's Impact on Creativity
By JEFF ZASLOW

Einstein had ADHD? Hmmm... I spose this follows the same logic that
cause people to think that Mozart and about every other genius had it as
well.
Does writting over 600 compositions by the age of 35 sound like
something that someone with a chronic ability to procrastinate and be
distracted would do?

For every ADHD "genius", there is an ADHD "bum" sitting in the slammer.
There are also plenty of people that have many of the personaity traits
that people with ADHD oftern have. This, however, does not make them
ADHD.

Perhaps we all need to remember what ADHD stands for? And remember that
it is a disorder, not a gift? Perhaps some of the traits that are common
with ADHD can be considered gifts. But the key part of the disorder is
hardly a gift to most of the people with it. It's a dead weight.

I second Brunibus. Well said. My creativity and non-linear
connectional analysis is exceptional, I think, but so is my inability
to do the routine work to bring ideas to fruition. Einstein got his
work published which leads me to doubt that he had ADD.

Look at the ADD researcher and ADDult Ratey. He publishes, but he
doesn't take medication because he hasn't found anything which works
well for him.

--
Chris Malcolm +44 (0)131 651 3445 DoD #205
IPAB, Informatics, JCMB, King's Buildings, Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ, UK
[http://www.dai.ed.ac.uk/homes/cam/]

How do you know?

"george of the jungle" wrote in message
...
On 5 Feb 2005 20:56:58 GMT, Chris Malcolm
wrote:

In alt.support.attn-deficit george of the jungle
wrote:
On 4 Feb 2005 17:43:04 GMT, Chris Malcolm

But not impossible.

The 10 year old girl got published for political reasons,
not the quality of her paper IMO.

Probably.

There's a lot of junk in medical
journals and much medical research (WHI) is poorly designed IMO.

Most published science is junk. It's hard to police quality more
fiercely without at the same time inadvertently throwing out some
important stuff. In many cases judgements about what is junk can only
reliably be made with the benefit of hindsight from a future vantage
point.

That last sentence is welll said. It is better to publish
controversial ideas and let further research sort out the good ideas
than to not publish them.

What ****ses me off is when poorly designed studies get huge amounts
of press coverage and doctors start giving advice based on those
studies. The Women's Health Initiative, which treated with Prempro,
women who no longer had, for the most part, menopausal symptoms, was
such a study.

http://www.whi.org/

A fundamental reason for using double blind studies is to avoid sample
selection bias. They biased the sample by effectively knocking out,
through study design, women with significant menopausal symptoms. It
appears that they treated women who could no longer benefit from the
treatment - or at least that's one possibility.

Then there was the truly idiotic follow on where they determined that
there was no benefit of hormones on mood - based on a sample of
non-symptomatic women.

That study should not have been published. It was a mee tooo study
that misused available data. But it was politically correct at that
moment when there was a bandwagon against HRT.

_george

Hi George,

My mom is in the Women's Health Initiative study -- it is still ongoing.
They're also studying calcium against placebo. The reason HRT was in the
study was because docs were prescribing HRT to nonsymptomatic women
routinely because they believed it was protective against heart disease,
bone loss, and dementia (I may have left something out here). It was
discovered through WHI early results that it wasn't protective, and there
was a small risk, so they ended the HRT study early and recommended docs to
only prescribe HRT to symptomatic women. The problem was that docs were
prescribing HRT essentially off-label to nonsymptomatic women with no
studies to back it up.

--Patti

george of the jungle wrote:

A fundamental reason for using double blind studies is to avoid sample
selection bias. They biased the sample by effectively knocking out,
through study design, women with significant menopausal symptoms.

Amen to the first sentence... The same thing is currently happening in
Dentistry with the HealOzone/CureOzone contraption... No independent,
double-blind studies have demonstrated that it works and does what it
purports to. The only real 'studies' have been done by the manufacturer
and their academic allies, who have vested interests.

Hopefully, this'll all be sorted out before it hits the USA (where I
assume alot of you are) in a few months' time.

Cheers
SP

--
Not a real Addy, yet