Adderall

Here is a very informative post on the stimulant Adderall, including how easy it is to get a prescription for the drug. MLB gave medical exemptions for stimulants to treat attention deficit to 106 players in 2017. That’s down a bit from a few years ago.

From the first article:

But “ability to concentrate” is a normally distributed trait, like IQ. We draw a line at some point on the far left of the bell curve and tell the people on the far side that they’ve “got” “the disease” of “ADHD”. This isn’t just me saying this. It’s the neurostructural literature, the the genetics literature, a bunch of other studies, and the the Consensus Conference On ADHD. This doesn’t mean ADHD is “just laziness” or “isn’t biological” – of course it’s biological! Height is biological! But that doesn’t mean the world is divided into two natural categories of “healthy people” and “people who have Height Deficiency Syndrome“. Attention is the same way. Some people really do have poor concentration, they suffer a lot from it, and it’s not their fault. They just don’t form a discrete population.

Meanwhile, Adderall works for people whether they “have” “ADHD” or not. It may work better for people with ADHD – a lot of them report an almost “magical” effect – but it works at least a little for most people. There is a vast literature trying to disprove this. Its main strategy is to show Adderall doesn’t enhance cognition in healthy people. Fine. But mostly it doesn’t enhance cognition in people with ADHD either. People aren’t using Adderall to get smart, they’re using it to focus.

The parts about diagnosis show how easy it is to obtain a prescription. I wonder if MLB, however, is using a stricter standard for the exemption, given all the publicity in the press over the last decade.

from baseballmusings.com http://ift.tt/2CaGBII