ADHD: Stimulants cut injury rate by almost half

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A massive cohort study of more than 700,000 children in Denmark has shown that ADHD kids who take stimulants are much less less likely to get injured:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26249301

This is really important and shows the seriousness of ADHD and the effectiveness of the treatments we have for it. I hope this starts to override the concerns a lot of people have about prescribing stimulants.

Hmmm. My first impression is that I would be less likely to use stimulants because of this study. Childhood is meant to involve injury. It's a good sign that your child is testing his/her environment and learning about managing risk. Kids who never get injured don't learn these vital lessons and they go into adulthood lacking vital skills. You would never keep a child from learning how to feed himself, or send a child off to college without learning how to read or use dyslexic-adaption tools. But somehow we do send them out into the world without the vital skill of risk management.

No, turning our ADHD kids into passive children who don't risk take is not appealing to me. Better in the short term, to be sure, but I tend to think more about the long term with kids.

i find it highly unlikely that kids regularly taking stimulants wouldn't suffer long-term neurological effects from it (and highly likely that those long-term effects are understudied). and odds are that those effects are negative ones, because stimulants are short-acting drugs, and any positive long-term neurological footprint would be somewhere in between a happy accident and a miracle

the long-term side effects might not be that bad, but it's a gamble either way. so i would be extremely cautious regardless of what positive short-term effects it might have. they would have to be really dramatic to be worth it, and even then it should only be a last resort, in my opinion

after all, a lobotomy actually will calm you down too, and even cure some of the most severe psychiatric disorders. which turns out not to be a good metric on its own