Provided By The ICPA
The Tipping Point
What Chiropractors Have Said All Along
It’s not often that the New York Times acknowledges that it may have been complicit in decades of medical misdirection. But Paul Tough’s April 13, 2025, feature in the Times Magazine—“Have We Been Thinking About A.D.H.D. All Wrong?”—marks a cultural and scientific inflection point. What Tough describes is nothing less than a collapse of the biomedical model of A.D.H.D. as we’ve known it—a model that has dominated research, practice, and parenting since the 1990s. Diagnoses have exploded. Medications like Ritalin and Adderall are handed out like candy. Yet, after 30 years of follow-up research, even the scientists who once built the case for pharmaceutical treatment now admit that the long-term benefits are fleeting, the biological evidence is weak, and the entire model of the disorder may be fundamentally flawed. “There literally is no natural cutting point where you could say, ‘This person has got A.D.H.D., and this person hasn’t got it.’” – Dr. Edmund Sonuga-Barke, King’s College London.
Chiropractic and the Marginalized Truth
For chiropractors and alternative providers, this moment brings both relief and justified frustration. For decades, they have championed a contextual, holistic, and multifactorial understanding of A.D.H.D.—emphasizing neurological function, subluxation, nutrition, trauma, and environment as core influences on a child’s behavior and development. They were dismissed. Vilified. Labeled as pseudoscientific and unqualified. They were mocked for saying a child’s inability to sit still might be related to their nervous system, their diet, or their home life. Now, it’s page one of the New York Times. Chiropractors have long argued that interference in the nervous system, especially in the upper cervical spine, could disrupt a child’s capacity for focus, calm, and emotional regulation. While mainstream medicine defaulted to stimulant drugs, chiropractors focused on restoring function and adaptability—without the side effects or the shrinking growth charts.