I don't disagree with your point, but you are misusing the term and misunderstanding what it means when it is applied to neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD.
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.