When analyzing people what is not a spectrum? Every human attribute can be placed on a spectrum. Even other diseases, disorders, etc.. A broken bone can be a hairline crack or shattered into pieces.
In reality, it means
"But doctor, how can you attach this very serious and stigmatizing diagnosis to my child while skipping half the tests in the official criteria and fudging the numbers to reach some threshold number?"
"Oh don't worry, it's a spectrum, you see"
...
"But doctor, what you just entered into my medical records is not what I told you at all, how can you be sure you're making the correct diagnosis if you're not really listening to what I'm saying, and when you're completely misrepresenting my situation?"
"Well, it's a spectrum you see"
For example, ADHD controls my life and I was never diagnosed with it until I figured out the symptoms myself, because nobody could ever see me struggling with it - there is no fighting it for me. However for some others, their ADHD is trivially controllable via medicine or habit-forming.
What spectrum means as I used it is that ADHD is not always severe enough to cause outright disability, but the underlying problems may still be present to a low degree in people who don't qualify for an ADHD diagnosis but still suffer from some elements of executive dysfunction.
There are other possible root causes too, such as depression or forgetfulness or what have you, but "non-severe ADHD" is also a possibility.
While, sure, everyone does have different specialties, they could also have some traces of ADHD that aren't severe enough to give them all the symptoms but still manage to hurt their performance in certain areas.
Also, I said nothing of autism. Please don't extrapolate
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...
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.
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.
yeah, okay. I didn't mean to assume that, but in anyone who has ADHD there must be some root cause or set of root causes that result in the disorder. I'm not saying all cases of ADHD are the same, in fact the entire point of my comment chain is to say the opposite.