Comment by christalwang
2 years ago
We definitely are not trying to pass as a medical service. However, we do our due diligence to make sure we have medical staff on board to advise us on our protocols, services, train our staff, supervise our staff, and to stand in if there is any escalation needed. We hope it's clear Dr. Anil himself is not coaching and very happy to make things more clear by adding his title to the front of the card.
It's absurd to claim that you're not trying to pass as a medical service when you're offering coaching for a neurological condition.
You can argue medical vs healthcare or whatever semantics you want but if it quacks like a duck it's a duck.
It's a totally coherent position to hold that the name 'ADHD' gestures at a real thing, but also reject the medicalization of that thing (or, more weakly, that that thing can/should be addressed solely medically). The predominance of the 'medical lens' in addressing cognitive differences is reflected in the language available for naming and describing those things, whether you actually agree with it or not.
The notion that ADHD 'really is' a neurological disorder and 'really isn't' anything else misunderstands the purpose of psychiatric diagnostic categories like ADHD in the first place. Psychiatrists and psychologists aren't in the business of ontology, and clinicians especially aren't.
Take it from someone who has it: this is a stupidly narrow way to think about ADHD.
You honestly could have fooled me. The amount of preaching, unfalsifiable theories and casuistry that goes on in the ADHD space is beyond the pale.
Executive function theory, delayed rewards theory, everywhere you go, when the axioms of the presenter changes, so does the "root cause" of ADHD change.
Granted it's common for these problems to pop up every where in online media the past five years or so...
... but when Law and Order SVU episodes from the 90s have more empirical cause-and-effect rigor to their detective stories than half the opinions-masquerading-as-theories in the ADHD space, then I find his skepticism understandable and I empathize with it.
I wish it were not true. I deeply, deeply crave a scientist in a lab coat to point to a chain of chemicals that describe the problem in concrete unarguable terms. The smoking gun, if you will. Something Feynman and Einstein (so to speak) could analyze, criticize and come up sucessfully defeated in attempting to prove the theory wrong, admitting the shown evidence and resulting theory is true.
We see instead research universities pouring money and big minds into Diffusion Tensor Imaging, doing hundreds/thousands of high resolution scans on kids' brains who obviously have ADHD and not only being unable to find the root cause of the problem, but they cannot even show a difference in the data that relates to ADHD at all.
Wtf is going on...
It is probably deeply impolite for me to say this, because I'm directly challenging your livelihood and it's 'more good' if I just ignore your website and move on.
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Is my golf coach a physical therapist or a physical movement coach? He's been helping me improve my swing around an injury I had dirt biking.
If your golf coach is helping you with your golf swing, I'd say that he's a golf coach.
My grandma once helped me with my math homework, was she a mathematician?
You might get lucky with your golf coach. There are people that went to medical school for that though. Your choice.
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A good school would provide this. Does that make them a medical service? Or is this actually educational?
> We definitely are not trying to pass as a medical service.
> HSA/FSA-eligible.
Try harder?
I don't think that's a particularly fair point - HSA/FSA eligibility is a billing related question. There are plenty of counseling services that aren't run by formally accredited folks that can achieve HSA/FSA eligibility. The billing arrangement isn't particularly relevant - I do agree that it'd be good to be more forward about the fact that you'll be talking to someone without formal accreditation.
Thank you for this comment, we've changed the language to reflect this last point on formal medical accreditation, and clarified that even if they do have medical credentials, in Shimmer's capacity they will be practicing ADHD coaching
healthcare and medicine aren't synonymous
psychologists, mental health therapists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, pharmacists, and so on, do not practice medicine - but the services they provide can be paid for with HSA and FSA money
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_health_professions
Technicalities don't matter, explicitly calling it out creates a false connection in readers brains. Like how some snake oil treatments say "FDA cleared" because they know consumers don't know what it means.
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