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> ADHD the diagnosis is a set of symptoms.

ADHD is the set of symptoms. The only reason people care about the term is because you can access drugs.

> “The child often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities because she has ADHD and she has ADHD because she does not sustain her attention in tasks or play activities.” As Pérez-Álvarez (2017, p. 2) notes “the symptoms are the guarantee of the diagnostic category, which in turn is invoked to explain the symptoms in an endless loop.”

> https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsoc.2022.81476...

[LoganDark]

> ADHD is the set of symptoms.

The formal diagnosis of ADHD, which is what I was referring to, is based on the presence of a certain set of symptoms defined by the DSM-V or ICD-11.

ADHD itself, which the diagnosis aims to identify, is not the set of symptoms itself but rather the root cause of the symptoms. The symptoms point to the presence of some root cause which is ADHD.

[UniverseHacker]

I don't think it's logical to assume that there is one singular root cause for the symptoms of ADHD (or any other symptom based diagnosis). There are likely a number of very different distal causes, although, because they present with the same symptoms, they may involve some common mechanisms. ADHD itself is defined as its cluster of symptoms, and doesn't imply or assume any singular underlying mechanism.

For example, streptococcus infection seems to be one (relatively rare) cause of ADHD.

As our medical understanding evolves, I think a lot of conditions currently based on symptoms will be found to be a cluster of different underlying mechanisms, and may eventually be divided into different conditions with different treatment approaches.

In reality, virtually all medical conditions are symptom based. Our knowledge of biology is very primitive and incomplete, so even where we think we understand parts of the mechanism of a condition, we are probably still missing much of it, and our perspectives on these change. In that sense, it's more clinically useful to stick with symptoms which we can observe directly, and not focus on ever-changing and incomplete theories about what might cause them.

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If you have the symptoms, you have the disorder...a disorder which is only identified by the symptoms. Do you get it?