Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12035

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

McClure I.
A deficit of attention to impartiality?
BMJ 2007 Nov 17; 335:(7628):1047
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/short/335/7628/1047?etoc

Abstract:

Media coverage of drug treatments that fails to allow the manufacturers a voice does no favours to drug sceptics, says Iain McClure

Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)-the subject of this week’s Panorama, the BBC’s flagship investigative journalism programme-has become a totem of many modern concerns. A condition that encompasses impulsivity, overactivity, and difficulty in maintaining attention-and with an alleged prevalence of between 5% and 10%1-it has repeatedly hit the headlines as being not just a product of developing psychiatric knowledge but also a symptom of increasing malaise in capitalist societies. Its unique position among child and adolescent psychiatric disorders as a condition that is widely believed to necessitate at least a trial of a stimulant drug (in most cases) has led to concern about psychiatry’s simplistic reduction of the brain and that ADHD in particular is “a pharmacological response . . . crudely searching for a disorder.“2

Whatever the truth regarding such issues, the facts are that the number of diagnoses of ADHD is on the increase and that prescriptions . . .

imcclure@nhs.net