Over in the USA Robert F. Kennedy Jr. continues to scare the hell out of people in his role as head of the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department as he makes clear that his MAHA (Make America Healthy Again) movement is not mere window dressing:
Kennedy then joined Makary and NIH Director Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to reinforce the “Why” behind these actions. Kennedy echoed back to what he talked about after he was sworn in as HHS Secretary: the chronic disease epidemic and how it is especially impacting our children. Kennedy reinforced that 60 percent of American children have chronic disease versus three percent in the 1960s when his uncle, John F. Kennedy, was president. Kennedy presented the staggering amount we spend on chronic disease in our nation as “1.8 trillion dollars annually”.
However, there is one disease-drug epidemic in America’s kids that Kennedy and company have not addressed so far even though they have mentioned it:
As Jay pointed out, ADHD is associated with all these behavioral disorders. But those disorders are treated, not by changing our diet, but by providing medications to treat our kids.
Which brings me to this rather personal piece of analysis, “23 Percent of American 17-year-old boys have an ADHD diagnosis.”:
One of the greatest evils of my 90s childhood was the sedation and casual drugging of young boys for acting like boys in a school system built for little girls. And it’s only now that we’re finally allowed to ask questions. Decades too late.
My father (the last of the old-fashioned family docs) used to say if you want to remain healthy, stay as far away from the hospital as you possibly can. The same maxim could be said for children: you want healthy kids, keep them far away from grand medical experiments, especially when it relates to their developing minds.
Complete with a link to New York Times article, Has American Been Thinking About ADHD All Wrong?
When you see shit like that you begin to think that Kennedy is not off his rocker as much as his critics claim.
Thank God ADHD and Ritalin never became a thing here in New Zealand, although I was aware of this enough because of my stay in the USA in the 1990’s that had any “kindly” teacher or doctor suggested that my boys were being way too “boyish” I’d have pulled them from the school and the doctor’s practice.
No Minister 
Ugh! I get so sick of people writing about ADHD when they don’t know what they’re talking about. Not you, Tom, but the people you’ve quoted here.
ADHD is a genuine medical condition whereby the brain cannot regulate dopamine properly. That’s it. That’s what it is.
It may well be that diet and microplastics contribute to the condition, but currently, as far as we know, it’s not “curable” by a simple change of diet. It’s a neurodivergence that seems to be present at birth, and therefore needs to be managed as a chronic condition. This is why stimulants are prescribed – they encourage a dopamine hit that allows the mind to focus and be less prone to the distractions that ADHD encourages. How this silly woman thinks that is “sedation” I have no idea. It’s the opposite ffs! It’s a case of better living through chemistry, and it can remarkably improve the quality of life of people with the condition.
It’s true that ADHD is most easily identifiable by unruly male children, but most people with ADHD do not exhibit this sort of behaviour, and certainly females with the condition do not present this way. Conversely, it can be misdiagnosed when boys behave badly, but this does not mean that the current explosion of ADHD is the result of misdiagnoses.
I do hope we get to the bottom of why it’s so prevalent in our modern society, and how myself and three of my children ended up with it. In the meantime, people just need to stop saying stupid shit about it.