CLICK HERE
to view Letter from Thomas Greening Ph.D to Gardiner Harris
Letter to Thomas Greening, Ph.D., Editor of Journal of Humanistic Psychology (9/11/01)
Thomas Greening, Ph.D., Editor September 11, 2001 Journal of Humanistic Psychology 1314 Westwood Blvd., Suite 205. tgreening@saybrook.edu Dear Dr. Greening, Thank you for sending me a copy of your letter to Gardiner Harris of the Wall Street Journal. It must be understood that the takeover of US psychiatry and academic medicine, by Big Pharma, given entree by Congress and the Senate, is near-complete. Understanding this one can begin to understand the unprecedented criminal act that is the orgy of diagnosis and drugging (authored and orchestrated by the NIH, NIMH, NINDS, NIDA, CHADD and NAMI) of no less than 6 million, entirely normal, US infants, toddlers, children and adults, told, in-unison, by US, for-profit, medicine, that they suffer from the invented, totally fraudulent, disease/disability called ADHD. Not only are families told this lie by their childrens schools, they are forced coerced to accept the lie as fact and begin the drug, proffered by the sponsor of it all (Big Pharma), lest they be deemed negligent and lose custody not only of that child but of all of their children. I know many such victimized families. The Bazelon Foundation alerts us to the fact that their have already been a few million "custody relinquishments" in the US (of all places) to qualify children for Medicaid and other payer plans to afford the child "essential" psychiatric care, they could not otherwise afford. The lynch-pin of the ADHD fraud and of the burgeoning, limitless, fraud that is "biological psychiatry" is its insistence that it diagnoses and treats brain "diseases" and "chemical imbalances," when, in fact, there are no such things. They have turned all they know about the human mind and behavior to the deception and subjugation of the people for their enablers; their puppeteers, Big Pharma and Big Government. Know this: their is not an iota of biological or medical legitimacy to their diagnoses or to their treatments. The first and only objective abnormality/chemical imbalance is the first drug/foreign compound that they prescribe, coerce, court order. The second, third and fourth are the second third and fourth drugs/foreign compounds that they prescribe, coerce, court order. Over the objections of Martin Stein, MD and James M. Perrin, MD of the American Academy of Pediatrics subcommittee on ADHD, Jerold Lucey, Editor-and-Chief of PEDIATRICS published my reaction to the AAPs Clinical Practice Guideline on ADHD in the May, 2001 issue. It reads as follows: To the Editor, CHADDChildren & Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorders refer to AD/HD as a "neurobiological disorder", or "neurobiological disability" [1]. Is there any doubting their implication that there is something abnormal/diseased about the brain/nervous system of the individual. Throughout present-day psychiatry, the term "disorder" is taken to mean "disease," which, throughout medicine, means an demonstrable abnormality is present within the patient. The AD/HD, Clinical Practice Guideline, of the American Academy of Pediatrics-AAP, opens: "Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder is the most common neurobehavioral disorder of childhood." "Neurobehavioral," implies an abnormality of the brain; a disease. And yet, no confirmatory, diagnostic, abnormality has been found. With six million children said to have it, most of them on addictive, dangerous, stimulants, ambiguity as to the scientific status of ADHD is not acceptable. Goodwin [1], acknowledged the: narrow definition of disease that requires the presence of a biological abnormality. Carey [2] testified at the 1998, Consensus Conference (CC): " What is now most often described as ADHD in the United States appears to be a set of normal behavioral variations This discrepancy leaves the validity of the construct in doubt " The CC Panel [3] concluded: " we do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD, and there are no data to indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction." * More recently, Castellanos [4], confessed: "Incontrovertible evidence is still lacking!" Where has the notion come from that it is a disease? Carey [2] observed: "ADHD behaviors are assumed to be largely or entirely due to abnormal brain function. The DSM-IV does not say so, but textbooks and journals do." If not science, what are textbooks and journals to purvey? Later in the conference, Carey [3] issued the plea: " we see that the causes of these behaviors called ADHD are entirely speculative. And yet parents and children are being told that these behaviors are due to a brain malfunction. Can you not please strengthen the statement to discourage practitioners from making this statement when there is not adequate proof to support that at this time?" Pearlman [5], wrote: "I take issue with Pincus (DSM-IV Task Force ) assertion that the elimination of the term organic in DSM-IV has served a useful purpose for psychiatry elimination of the term organic conveys the impression that psychiatry wishes to conceal the nonorganic character of many behavioral problems that were, in previous DSM publications, clearly differentiated from known central nervous system diseases." It is apparent that virtually all professionals of the extended ADHD industry convey to parents, and to the public-at-large, that ADHD is a disease and that children said to have it are diseased-abnormal. This is a perversion of the scientific record and a violation of the informed consent rights of all patients and of the public-at-large. The wording of the AAP Guideline should be changed, forthwith, to reflect the scientific and medical facts of the matter. Sincerely, Fred A. Baughman Jr. References 1. Goodwin D. Is Alcoholism Hereditary? Ballantine Books, New York, NY. 1989. 2. Carey, WB. Is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder a Valid Disorder? Invited presentation to the NIH Consensus Development Conference on ADHD, November 16-18, 1998, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. 3. NIH Consensus Development Conference on ADHD (transcript), November 16-18, 1998, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD. 4. Pekkanen J. Making Sense of Ritalin (interview of F.X. Castellanos). Readers Digest, January, 2000:159-168. 5. Pearlman T. Clinical Psychiatric News (letters). December, 1994. *This wording appeared in the version of the final statement of the CC Panel distributed at the press conference, the final part of the CC, November, 18, 1998. This wording, which appeared for an indeterminate time on the NIH web site, was subsequently removed and replaced with wording claiming validity for ADHD. I must add, however, that no one from the American Academy of Pediatrics, its subcommittee on ADHD, or the journal PEDIATRICS, answered the extraordinarily grave charges I brought. They know they cannot validate ADHD as a diagnosable abnormality/disease within the children so they elect not to respond, and to carry on with their market-based propaganda campaign and their heinous, in-the-name-of-medicine, in-the-name-of-help, victimization of all (if possible) of the normal children of the nation. Not by accident, discussion has been focused on the dangers of the drugs. All drugs are dangerous, all of them are exogenous/foreign, chemicals/compounds. But the drugs are not the issue; the representation that incredible numbers of children with emotional, behavioral, educational, and adjustment problems--but absolutely no objective abnormalities, have actual diseases, brain diseases, is the crux of this horrible, unimaginable, crime. There is no physical, chemical, or other abnormality, there are only elaborate, incredible, invented illusions of diseases, the inventors of which must now be publicly identified, charged and indicted for a crime of such monstrous proportions that its dimensions will not be known for decades. Imagine, if you can: 6 million children with the fraudulent label, ADHD, 6 million of our very own, entirely normal children on addictive (regardless of what the paid liars say), dangerous, deadly (more often than we know or can find out) drugs. And they go on, inventing more label by the day. When I graduated for the NYU, School of Medicine, there was no such thing as a psychiatric disease. There are none today, despite psychiatrys fraudulent claims to the contrary. Actual brain diseases are the province of neurology, my specialty, and whats more, all of the pretenders know it. To Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher, Dr. Peter S. Jensen, of CHADD, NIMH and Columbia University; Dr. Harold Koplewicz, of the NYU, School of Medicine (my alma mater), author of Its Nobodys Fault, and the totally anti-scientific concept of "DNA roulette;" Dr. Steven Hyman, Director, NIMH; Dr. F.X. Castellanos, Dr. Judith Rapoport, Dr. Alan Zametkin (all of the NIMH); Dr. A.I. Leshner of NIDA;Dr. James Swanson; Dr. C. Keith Conners; Dr. D.J. Kupfer; Dr. R.A. Barkley; Dr. S.P. Hinshaw; Dr. L.L. Greenhill; Dr. Joseph Biederman; Dr. H. Abikoff; Dr. L.E. Arnold; Dr. R.S. Baltimore; the American Medical Association (and its Council on Scientific Affairs, and the Editor-in-Chief and editorial Board of JAMA); the American Academy of Pediatrics (and the Editor-in-Chief and editorial board of its journal, PEDIATRICS); to the editor in chief and editorial boards of LANCET, the New England Journal of Medicine, the American Journal of Psychiatry, the Journal of the American Academy of Child the and Adolescent Psychiatry; the American Academy of NEUROLOGY (and editor-in-chief and editorial board of its journal, NEUROLOGY); and the American Academy of Family Practice the time has come for each and every one of you to stop communicating to the children, parents and citizens of the US that ADHD is a disease and that children said to have it are diseased-abnormal. This is a perversion of science and medicine and is a lie. And yet, it is what they have been lead to believe and what, attesting to the power of the lie, virtually all have come to believe. This is a perversion of the scientific record and a violation of the informed consent rights of all patients and of the public-at-large. Not only must the wording of the American Academy of Pediatrics, ADHD Guideline be changed, forthwith, to reflect the scientific and medical facts of the matter, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association and every scientific journal and textbook must, hereafter, communicate the science and truth of the matternamely, that children who evidence the commonplace behaviors said to constitute ADHD, in fact that children who evidence any psychologic/psychiatric condition, have no objective physical or chemical abnormality; no known diseasethat they are physically and medically normal, and that no one--no one at all, shall medically victimize them. Hannah Taylor Gordon learned much about Anne Frank as she prepared to play Anne in ABCs recent remake, Anne Frank. She "seemed so ambitious and happy, and she had so much going for her," Gordon said. "She wanted to do everything. I want to do everything as well, and thats how I relate to her." What about 9-10 million, US schoolchildren mental health has labeled and drugged, their lives forever medicalized? What do they dream of? What about Matthew Smith, 14, Stephanie Hall, 11, Macauley Schowalter, 7, and untold others, dead from psychiatric drugs for "diseases" that do not exist. Sincerely yours, Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD Fellow, American Academy of Neurology Certified by ABPN in Neurology & Child Neurology 1303 Hidden Mountain Drive El Cajon, CA 92019 fred-alden@worldnet.att.net CC Gardiner Harris, Wall Street Journal CC Tunku Varadarajan, Wall Street Journal CC Rep. Bob Schaffer CC Rep. Pete Hoekstra CC Rep. Chris Shays CC Jerold F. Lucey, MD CC Kelly OMeara, Insight Magazine