FRED A. BAUGHMAN JR., MD RESPONDS TO PRODUCER OF FRONTLINE (PBS) DOCUMENTARY “MEDICATING KIDS”
To: 8/3/01 Marcela Gaviria Producer Rain Media 164 West 80th St. New York, NY 10024 From: Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD, Neurology/Child Neurology 1303 Hidden Mountain Dr. El Cajon, CA 92019 Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD Dear Ms. Gaviria, I have written to you previously on the Rain/Frontline/PBS report, MEDICATING KIDS, having to do with medicating children for invented "disease," ADHD. A more appropriate title would have been MEDICATING NORMAL KIDS. I cannot let your letter of July 12, 2001 go unanswered. It is as if Rain Media/Frontline/PBS were speaking from the psychiatric-pharmaceutical, industry script. You state (p 1, para 1) "I know you to be a very passionate anti-medication advocate." What I am, Ms. Gaviria, is a scientific physician, a neurologist/child neurologist, whose primary duty, day in and day out was to determine whether or not my patients, regardless of preexisting diagnoses or beliefs, had a disease and, if so, which one. This included patients said to have "hyperactivity," ADD, ADHD, etc. I did not view them, as you put it, as a "passionate anti-medication advocate." That is not how I was listed in the phone book. They came to me as a scientific physician/ diagnostician (of all neuromuscular diseases) of some reknown, one who has discovered, validated and reported real, organic diseases; something that all of psychiatry has failed to do in 40 to 50 years of trying. Not a single, solitary, psychiatric disorder/condition/diagnosis has been validated as an organic disease, having a confirming/validating, objective, physical or chemical abnormality (genetic, biochemical, within the brain or body). As for your charge that I am an "anti-medication" advocate, I always had patients with actual diseases who I had no hesitation to treat with medication, with other physical modalities, or to refer for surgery. However, as should be the case with every ethical physician, I did not knowingly prescribe or undertake medical or surgical treatment for patients until such time as I had demonstrated/diagnosed an objective physical abnormality. If no abnormality, there is no disease on the "risk" side of the "risk" vs. "benefit" equation; nothing to make normal or more nearly normal with medical or surgical treatment. And yet this has become standard practice in psychiatry in the US today, in collusion with the pharmaceutical industry with "chemical balancers" to sell for the illusory "chemical imbalances," of which more are conceptualized/invented by the day. You say (p 1, para 3) "you (me--FB) have told us that ADHD and many other psychiatric ailments, including schizophrenia and autism, are frauds because there is no objective demonstrable abnormality." While I invariably say it is fraudulent to call ADHD, and any psychiatric diagnosis, a disease (and I testified to this effect to Congress, in hearings on the subject, 9/29/00) I have said no such thing to you or anyone else about autism. Although the term "autism" appears in the American Psychiatric Association's DSM, it is a neurological, not a psychiatric entity, having diffuse brain damage, manifesting a greater or lesser degree of developmental delay and intellectual sub-normality. This and other actual neurological diseases are featured in the DSM, to further attempt to blur the indelible line between psychiatry, on the one hand, and neurology and the rest of medicine on the other. There is no demonstrable physical abnormality in ADHD or schizophrenia to validate either as diseases. The physical abnormality, Ms. Gaviria, is the disease. Psychiatry cannot have its own definition of "disease," but that doesn't stop them from trying, nor does it stop them from inventing illusions of diseases, with which to deceive the public and push drugs. The Consensus Conference Panel's statement distributed at the press conference, the afternoon of 11/18/98 (I still have my copy), clearly stated "We do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to brain malfunction." You, Ms. Gaviria, must be reading from a version of the statement posted to the NIH/NIMH web site at a later date. NIH officials have confessed that changes in the text were made at an unspecified later date, well beyond 11/18/98. It is highly irregular, the alteration of the "final" statement. I am presently writing an analysis of this highly irregular occurrence. This is something the media should have been interested in but for some strange reason or reasons, was not. No matter how many times psychiatry suggests "a central nervous system basis for ADHD," or "evidence supporting the validity of the disorder," the requirement is simple and straightforward in the world of organic medicine-of which psychiatry is not a part-no physical abnormality equals no disease, equals no indication or justification to begin medical, surgical or any other physical intervention. Put another way, since it appears you haven't yet gotten it; if there is no abnormality, there is nothing to make normal, not even more nearly normal. So it is with Ritalin and all of the amphetamines used in ADHD; so it is throughout psychiatry: the only abnormality comes when the foreign chemical compound, the psychotropic drug, begins coursing throughout the brain and body and all of its fluids, cells and organs. You write (p1, para 4), "we reported that ADHD is a valid disease but that scientists are unsure what causes it." It is a common lexical stratagem in psychiatry to speak of not knowing the cause of psychiatric disorders (by which they mean diseases) when the fundamental flaw is that no abnormality (abnormality equals disease) exists. Speaking of its causes, they seek to get the reader/listener to believe there is a disease/abnormality, the cause of which is not known. There being no disease/abnormality, there ought be no talk of causes. You go on to state (p1, para 4) "In our opinion..." You at Rain Media are not physicians or scientists, so your opinion does not really matter. What matters is that you have not availed yourselves of unbiased, definitive, medical/scientific opinions on the matter. Here we have psychiatrists contending that in diagnosing ADHD with parent teacher behavior checklists, they establish, child by child, the presence of an organic disease of the brain, a neurological disease. What you should have done is to have turned to professors of neurology, child neurology, and neuropathology and asked if they knew of such a neurological disease as ADD, the DSM-III, 1980 version, or the DSM-III-R, 1987 version (now ADHD), or even the DSM-IV, 1994 version. It is their duty to know what is a neurological disease, and what is not, not a psychiatrist's. Most patients sent to me with diagnoses of ADD or ADHD had no organic disease whatsoever. Some, however, did have real diseases, the true nature of which had not been diagnosed. There were not infrequent children with recurrent middle ear infections who had good reason to be uncomfortable and there were rare patients with tragic, oft-delayed diagnoses of brain tumors, of the cerebellum, of the cerebral hemispheres and of the supra-sellar, pituitary region. In some, the delay in recognizing the true nature of their organic disease was not critical. Neither, I would add, were psychiatrists instrumental in the recognition of their very real diseases. Not a one, by the way, had ADD or ADHD for the simple reason that neither of those most common and incredible of psychiatric diagnoses have ever been validated as actual diseases, not of the brain, not of the body. In the videotape I produced, entitled: "ADHD-Total, 100% Fraud" you can hear Dr. David Kupfer, Panel Chair, read the final statement of the panel, the afternoon of 11/18/98: "We do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to brain malfunction." At the time this was the one and only final statement. You can also see and hear Joe Palka of National Public Radio offer: "What you're telling us is that ADHD is like the Supreme Court's definition of pornography-you know it when you see it." Funny, there were many members of the national media there who heard these statements and others in the same vein, all calling into question the existence of ADHD, and yet none of them rose to the bait. What stopped them? What stopped you and Martin Smith and Frontline and PBS? What stopped Joe Palka of NPR, even after I put his nose to the fraud, sending him a copy of "ADHD-Total, 100% Fraud." Would you like a copy? If PBS lets your report stand, un-rebutted, they have gotten my very last donation and membership offering. Truly yours, Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD