I've personally known someone who has taken Ritalin type meds for 20+ years and did extremely well on it. In addition, my research indicates that tolerance to ADHD meds is uncommon and typically a person can be kept on one dose for years.

See, I'm under long-term medication myself, for an incurable, but treatable condition. Long term medication is a last-ditch remedy and that's for a reason. It's generally speaking a PITA. Where ever you go, you need to take your medication with you. Depending on what you get, you might have to take it on schedule. Depending on what you get, the pharmacy round the corner needs to order it and the stuff needs a prescription. Most stuff has side-effects, mine is mildly liver-toxic which means that I need to go have blood tests about every 8 weeks. I need to go to the doctor every 4 weeks for the prescription. When I travel longer than 4 weeks I need to jump through several hoops to get a larger amount. It's much better than without treatment, so if a friend asks me how I'm doing with the medication, I'd say "extremely well", but mainly because without medication it's extremely bad.

Yes, medication helps and it's sometimes the last remedy when nothing else helps. But I think that not labeling all conditions that lead to ADHD-like symptoms as ADHD and rather try and find a more nuanced understanding of the problem is helpful, especially in a case where a condition is often diagnosed on children where parents read stuff on the internet and run from doctor to doctor to doctor trying to get a prescription for ritalin, since they're certain that the kid matches those 5 relatively generic symptoms.

I think medication for ADHD should be avoided unless it is necessary.

I also have read statistics on how ADHD is treated in children which very much trouble me - there it seems to be highly overdiagnosed and treated.