You're a moron. Had I not been diagnosed back when I was in grade 8, I would not be anywhere near as successful as I am today. Over the past 20 years, I have gone off of my medication multiple times (at least once for well over a year) and you want to know what happened? In one case, I failed out of Engineering school, in another I was effectively unemployed for a year after graduation.

The only reason why I successfully completed high school, and then my Engineering degree, is because of the diagnosis and treatment. For me, the evidence is irrefutable; the medications are the difference between me being an unemployed geek bum living in my parents basement, and being a productive member of society.

For me, when I was on dex, the hardest thing wasn't going off of it, it was starting back up again. The first day I would take it, I would be awake all night with absolutely no sleep, and then spend the next few days seriously sleep deprived. I've now switched back to a Ritalin based medication (Concerta) and the problems have gone away. I can go on and off of it at will, especially important with my current job (I do intercontinental travel for work, and so there's no way to take this stuff on a regular schedule).

Define function. If you mean sitting on my ass mindlessly flipping through the channels while the day disappears, then yeah you're right. If you mean meeting deadlines, staying (reasonably) organized and actually getting something useful accomplished in a given day, you could not be more wrong.

I occasionally take medication vacations (usually when I'm on vacation) and I'll be blunt, I'm usually disappointed with myself afterwards for not meeting any of the goals I had set for myself during the time off. I wind up getting distracted by the latest shiny thing to enter my life, and never get that hike done, change the oil in my car, etc...

How well is that working out for Type 1 Diabetes?

Some things are chronic conditions. It is what it is, and the price of the medication is the price of being a functional member of society.

That's exactly the way it works. For those of us who have AD(H)D, the stimulants in correct dosage have the opposite effect as to what you would expect. For me personally, my productivity goes through the floor if I am off my meds. I pretty much lose any sense of organization and prioritization, and wind up working on whatever I see as shiniest in that instant. The whole "I suffer from Attention Defici... hey wanna go ride bikes?" is truer than you'd think.

I myself am on Concerta, which is an ultra-slow release version of Ritalin (Adderal did weird nasty shit to my personality and sleep patterns) which works a treat. It really does feel like a good, strong cup of coffee in the morning and not much else. I can actually partially self medicate by using significant quantities of coffee, but then my sleep patterns are really destroyed.

Did they perform a similar study on the cancers of people downwind from coal power plants? There are far too many variables in cancer risks to narrow it down to just the nuclear power plant. I recall a similar study that showed elevated cancer risk allegedly from high voltage power lines and substations. In the end, it turned out that A) the data was cherry picked to support the conclusion and B) the affected areas had old, leaking transformers which were releasing PCBs into the environment.

Translation: "Are there no prisons? Are there no poor houses?"

Mine does. I jailbroke it and installed XBMC for accessing my media library. It will happily play .mkv with subtitles and all the other stuff, then when I want the oficial stuff, I just exit out and go back to the AppleTV interface. It works a treat.

The trick here is that they don't actually care what your answer is, it's about *how* you answer. If you're a guy and go "hell if I know" that's fine. If you do that and start getting all panicky, then that tweaks them to probe further. My sister used to work the Canadian side of the Canada-US border. They would employ the same technique. Ask a series of random questions, and if they got a funny feeling about the way someone was answering, they'd wave you over for secondary inspection.