In a World of Overdiagnosed Attention Deficit, Finding a Real Test That Will Pro ve It People often have a hard time

believing that they have a disorder. It takes cert ain scientific proof to convince them that something might be amiss. Consider th is simple little video game-like test for attention deficit disorder. It's a mac hine that is shaped like a little desk with a curved plastic surround. There is a computer monitor in the console, and on it is a little tracking device that ju dges when you move as you sit before it. The test goes something like this - the screen shows you pictures of stars. Sometimes they are four pointed stars, and sometimes they are stars with five or eight points. When you see a star with th e five or eight points, you're supposed to click on a button. A three-year-old c ould get it right; and in my head, I know I can. But the proof is in the actual doing. And I always got it wrong. Somehow I would keep clicking on the button wh en I saw a four pointed star (not a five- or eight-pointed one as I was told). M y performance disappointed me so much I would keep fidgeting and squirming, and the motion tracking device on the monitor, and other ones that sensed how my fee t moved, kept recording a great deal of nervous and unnecessary movement. Now wh y on earth can't I, a 40-year-old college lecturer just a simple task right? It was simple - I had attention deficit disorder, albeit, a mild case of it. I f idgeted too much, my thoughts jumped here and there and I clicked when I shouldn 't, and didn't when I should have. There aren't that many tests out there to pro ve conclusively that a patient has ADHD. This one might be one of the first. The reason that researchers are rushing to find real objective tests that will prov e ADHD is not that there are that many patients out there that need proof. It's just that attention deficit is such a slippery problem that doctors go and diagn ose it in so many who don't have it. There are even people who suggest that the doctors who do so, are hand-in-glove with the drug companies that try to push me dications like Ritalin and Adderall on the market. It's a shame that they do, be cause these drugs have some punishing side effects that the children who take th em have to put up with. You should look at the questionnaire that doctors have used so far to diagnose a child with attention deficit. Talk about a self-serving process. The questionna ire asks if the child often makes careless mistakes, doesn't seem to pay attenti on when spoken to, and so on. Now who doesn't have these problems? A parent with a particular case of impatience with a child could easily answer to these leadi ng questions as suggested. And parents don't even have to agree on what the answ ers might be. And that would mean that a doctor would have to pick sides, over w hom to believe. When children are taken to psychologists for all kinds of unexplained difficulti es learning in school, most of them come up with a computerized test called Cont inuous Performance Test. It tries to measure how easily a test taking child is d istracted from the task at hand. And then there is the high-tech MRI like test c alled SPECT that some people believe can prove attention deficit beyond doubt. The device with the stars above is called the Quotient System. A child who comes in for the test, tries it once first, and then tries it again after having take n attention deficit disorder medication. If the child seems to improve well, the doctors know that he will make a good candidate for medication. A test like thi s allows doctors to spare children a drug regimen if he happens to be one of the many who don't respond properly. If a child seems to move and squirm far above what the system accepts as normal on a boring task, they will know to suspect at tention deficit. It's alongside this an MRI can successfully prove that there is too much blood flowing to parts of the brain that are unnecessarily active, the y'll have a diagnosis that could be pretty much incontrovertible.