Letter of December 9, 2002 to Editors of the Arizona Star - by Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD

Diseases are physical abnormalities (chemical included. Disease are
diagnosed one patient at a time. The fact that Castellanos, et al, or
anyone claims to have found a difference in a group of patients at the NIMH
or any medical center does not mean that a patient in a physician’s office
in Arizona or California or anywhere meeting the wholly subjective ADHD
criteria of the DSM-IV, or any edition of the DSM, has a disease.

Nowhere in medicine or surgery is the presence of a disease/abnormality
confirmed by subjective criteria; but only by objective physical evidence; a
mass or a lump; palpable, a skin lesion, visible to the naked eye, cancer
cells, seen by microscope from a Pap smear, or effusion fluid in the abdomen
or pleural space, or elevated blood sugar in diabetes, phenylalanine or
galactose in phenylketonuria or galactosemia–all of them, like the
thousands of diseases in pathology/disease textbooks, real, actual, tangible
diseases. The absolute fraud of ADHD is that the children who are
“diagnosed,” pathologized, called ADHD/abnormal have no brain or body
abnormality that Castellanos, Jensen, Swanson, Barkley, Koplewicz, or anyone
at the NIMH or anywhere in US psychiatry can adduce/demonstrate/diagnose.
And yet they have us “treat” 6 million and would call parents who question
and hesitate “negligent” and have their children court-ordered to
“treatment.” Try as you might you will find no mention whatsoever of ADHD
or any psychiatric entity in any pathology/disease text book because, not
one is a disease, the children thus fraudulently pathologized, are normal;
normal, that is, until the poisoning starts. Every drug in medicine is a
exogenous compound, a poison. When there is an abnormality/disease, made
more nearly normal by the judicious application of a drug we speak of
disease, medication, treatment and of a positive risk/benefit ratio. When
the child/person “diagnosed”/ “pathologized” is normal we speak of
poisoning. When a disease is declared present by honest mistake we speak in
medicine of “iatrogenic” injury (there is always injury whether conspicuous
or not). When those who declare the normal child/person “diseased”/
“abnormal” do so knowingly, on purpose, for profit, we speak of poisoning,
we speak of lying, of violation of informed consent of medical malpractice,
of assault and battery.

Not having availed yourselves of the essentials of medical procedure and of
the elements of determining whether or not disease has been
diagnosed/demonstrated, you have lent the pages of your paper to the
furtherance of what is the greatest, most heinous of healthcare crimes in US
history; the crime that is ADHD/Ritalin–the model invented disease, the
model invented epidemic.

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD, 12/9/02