Just a Vitamin?
You have to read this article in the NY Times about how high achieving students abuse ADD drugs. I knew it was out there and I know that I was worked for an Rx before by a student demanding it but I never knew it was this bad. It turns out that Adderall , Vyvance and other similar meds are PEDs for the pressured high schoolers trying to make their parents happy. Here are just some of the quotes by students in the article”
- “It wasn’t that hard of a decision. Do I want only four hours of sleep and be a mess, and then underperform on the test and then in field hockey? Or make the teachers happy and the coach happy and get good grades, get into a good college and make my parents happy?”
- “Isn’t it just like a vitamin?”
- “Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does”.
- “It’s like it does your work for you”.
- “Once you break the seal on using pills, or any of that stuff, it’s not scary anymore — especially when you’re getting A’s”.
Our society created this pressure and we doctors became drug dealers in the process. How sad.
IMHO,
Adderall seems to help with comprehension & linking large amounts of material from working memory & efficiently deposit it into medium to long-term memory so that the flow between bits of information and stages of memory function is smoother & faster. It helps with attention & focus as well. It is possible to come off the drug & still perform well, but it takes discipline & self-confidence, but Adderall offers a good temporary boost. It is not sustainable long term without some dependence being created, physically, but intellectually as well. It is best to taper off the drug and begin being proficient under your own mental powers.
~Dr Talks Alot
It is a performance enhancing drug and also unethical……and cheating.
Indeed, doctors need to stop being sheep to big pharma
Abusing study drugs was pretty pervasive amongst my med school classmates too! A lot of people did it the old fashioned way (sitting behind a smart kid, looking up answers during the test on a bathroom break, etc) but there were definitely some drugs involved.
Do I do any of that? Nah…my genius is so staggering that I already have enough advantage 🙂