DIAGNOSED AND REFERRED FOR ADHD BY HIS PRE-K - by Fred A. Baughman, Jr., MD, 9/16/00

L S wrote (e-mail):

The Pre-K that my son just started last week feels that he has
ADD/ADHD or perhaps some Emotional Disturbance.

[Dr. Baughman:
I assume he is 4 or 5 years of age.]

 They say he over-reacts to certain requests and situations, cannot
remain seated, is unable to follow the rules, does not listen and
handles transitions poorly.  This is his first experience with any type
of formal structured setting - his previous child care/day care
experience was with a private sitter. Also many of the children in his
class have come from a structured school setting the previous year and
they are using them as the "yardstick" to measure my son's behavior. 
They……………..

[Dr. Baughman:
the Pre-K personnel
]

 ………..are urging me to start the evaluation process with my
pediatrician and L.I.J. Hospital but I am concerned that he will be
labelled/medicated unnecessarily.

[Dr. Baughman:
It is all unnecessary. This is a very real concern in
regard to any child entering a U.S., K-12, public school, but that isn’t
the extent of it. K-12, private and parochial school teachers and, as
you have discovered, government, private, and parochial preschool
teachers, as well, have been deceived into believing that ADHD, all of
the disruptive behavior disorders—DBDs (including conduct disorder—CD
and oppositional-defiant disorder—ODD), and learning disabilities—LDs,
are psychiatric ‘biologically-based brain disorders’ and that it is
their duty to diagnose them and to assure their appropriate medical
management. They have been swept up in the ecstasy of ‘brain diagnosis’
even though there is no validity to it.]

  Do you have any practitioners in the New York area you can recommend
to me that will do an unbiased evaluation.  My e-mail is ….@…online.net
or you can reach me at the phone number above after 7pm on week nights
and all weekend long.

[Dr. Baughman:
Alleging that your child has ADD/ADHD—a medical diagnosis,
if, for no other reason than that it almost invariably leads to
physician referral and drug treatment, “they”, the Pre-K teachers and
personnel are practicing medicine without a license. Likewise, their
urging physician/medical consultation is the further practice of
medicine without a license. If you and all others in your family have
been of the feeling that your son is normal and have had no suspicions
of your own or from physicians who have seen him thus far, to the
contrary, I would suggest to you that you place your son in some other
Pre-K, one you have carefully interviewed—one having personnel who have
no illusions as to their responsibilities as staff in a Pre-K. If the
only suspicions voiced as to the normalcy of your son are these, and you
were to take them (with your son) to most any medical practitioner or
clinic in the US today, your son would be at a clearly increased risk of
being labeled and drugged—all of it unnecessary and without scientific
or medical justification. For assistance in finding the kind of Pre-K,
and after that, K-12, that is most consistent with a happy, healthy &
normal, childhood and schooling for your son, call my good friend Robert
Unger of Great Neck, N.Y. (……….) Tell him I told you to call. Bob is
a fellow consultant to the National Right to Read Foundation. He and
his wife (a reading consultant familiar with the rampant illiteracy that
so often results from public education), will be sure to give you the
recommendations you need. Home-schooling is perhaps the only sure way
to avoid the psychology, psychiatry and drugging that has so tragically
replaced discipline, literacy, education and a preparation, as the
mission of US government-public schools.