Ritalin bill on the docket - Commentary of Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD (1/22/2002)

Ritalin bill on the docket
Associated Press
MONTPELIER, Vt. -- Lawmakers have introduced a bill that could reduce the
state's high use of Ritalin.
Vermont ranks among the top states in the nation for per-capita use of the
drug.
The bill would stipulate that schools may not require students to take
Ritalin or a similar behavior-modification drug as a condition of attending
school .
One of the three senators who introduced the bill said the proposal would
call attention to what might be over-prescription of Ritalin.
"I think we should be really concerned if we're No. 2 per-capita in writing
prescriptions," said Sen. Richard Sears of Bennington County, who
introduced
the bill with fellow Democrats Nancy Chard and Peter Shumlin of Windham
County

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
COULD THEY POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND THAT ADHD IS AN INVENTED 'DISEASE,'
AND ILLUSION OF A DISEASE, THAT THE CHILDREN CALLED 'ADHD' ARE ENTIRELY
NORMAL].

"Maybe physicians will take notice."

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
A SUGGESTION THAT PHYSICIANS
ARE BEHIND THE DRUGGING, AS LIKELY THEY ARE--'PUSHERS' IN THAT THEIR CLIENTS
ARE NO LESS NORMAL CHILDREN/PERSONS THAN ARE THE CLIENTS OF COLOMBIAN AND
MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS--JUST YOUNGER.]

David Egner, a child psychologist from Rutland, said schools trying to
address behavioral problems are over-medicating students and fostering an
attitude that drugs are the answer to their problems.
"You severely sedate them and use a drug that will make students, quote,
manageable," Egner said. "It's teaching the kid that you can't function
unless you're drugged."
There is no state law addressing what schools may or may not say to parents
about such drugs, said Bill Reedy, a lawyer for the Vermont Department of
Education

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
WHAT STOPS THEM FROM MISINFORMING, TELLING PARENTS IT IS A
DISEASE, CHEMICAL IMBALANCE, NEEDING CHEMICAL BALANCER, THEN COERCING AND
FORCING, WHILE, AT THE SAME TIME SAYING THE PARENTS HAVE THE RIGHT TO SAY
'NO'? NOTHING--NOTHING AT ALL!]

While there apparently aren't many
instances of schools' forcing
parents to agree to the use of Ritalin, legislation is needed to let
parents
know they have the final say, the bill's supporters contend.
Egner believes a youth who died of a heroin overdose in Rutland last year at
age 17 began his short life of drug abuse when he was prescribed Ritalin as
a hard-to-handle 12-year-old

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
SURE FITS WITH THE FINDINGS OF NADINE
LAMBERT: Nadine Lambert's research presented at the NIH Consensus
Development Conference. In her paper, Stimulant Treatment as a Risk Factor
for Nicotine Use and Substance Abuse, she concluded:" This prospective
longitudinal study of ADHD and age-mate control subjects...has provided
evidence that childhoo use of CNS treatment is significantly and pervasively
implicated in the uptake of regular smoking, in daily smoking in adulthood,
in cocaine dependance, and in the lifetime use of cocaine and stimulants"
p.198 Dr. Lambert is a professor and the Chairperson of the UC-Berkeley
School Psychology Program].

.
That boy was Shawn Farnsworth. His mother, Connie Forrest of Pittsford,
doesn't know if Ritalin, a stimulant the federal Drug Enforcement
Administration calls psychologically addicting, led to her son's drug
problem. She supports any bill that might limit its use.
"I think we need to stop putting our kids on medication before we find out
what's wrong with them," Forrest said.Other states have laws addressing
Ritalin, commonly used to treat attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or
ADHD. Connecticut and Minnesota enacted
laws last year stipulating that parents can decide whether their children
should be given drugs to control their behavior.

Sears said the bill he helped introduce would make clear that schools may
not require Ritalin or a similar drug.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
THIS MUST BE AN ABSOLUTE PARENTAL
RIGHT, DISALLOWING ANY SCHOOL PERSONNEL INVOLVEMENT IN SUGGESTING DIAGNOSIS
OR TREATMENT, INCLUDING REFERRAL TO ANY SORT OF HEALTH CARE PROFESSIONAL, AN
ACT CONSTITUTING THE PRACTICE OF MEDICINE IN ITSELF. THIS IS A COMMON
STRATEGY OF SCHOOL PERSONNEL, NOT MENTIONING ADHD OR RITALIN PER SE BUT
INSISTING THAT THE PARENT GET MEDICAL OR MENTAL HEALTH CONSULTATION FOR
THEIR CHILD--ALL IT TAKES TO SET THE BALL ROLLING.]

The bill would allow medication to be
required if a health inspector determines drugs are required "without delay
due to risk to the child's life or health."

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
THIS WOULD RULE OUT ALL
PSYCHIATRIC/PSYCHOLOGICAL RX, AS THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PSYCHIATRIC
'DISEASE' AND YET THE GOOD DR. PETER JENSEN, ONE OF THE LEADING AUTHORS OF
CHILD, PSYCHO-PHARM MARKETING STRATEGY HAD THIS TO
SAY :

ADHD/Ritalin: Teachers, Psychiatrists, Social Workers, Judges, Know Best.

By Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD, 9/1/00

An Albany, NY, couple who faced child abuse charges for taking their son
off of Ritalin has been ordered by the court to continue medicating him
(A.P., July 19, 2000). Social Service charges against Jill and Michael
Carroll were dropped on the condition that they keep 7-year-old Kyle on
Ritalin. Social Service workers will be required to visit the family
throughout the next year. Does this sound the US? Is it rare?

This is going on in family/divorce courts all over the country, with
school-diagnosed, school-coerced, ADHD/Ritalin being the pivotal, divisive
issue. In virtually all cases the court sides with the parent believing in
ADHD as a 'disease,' and in Ritalin as proven, essential, medical treatment.
The parent resisting is deemed negligent and loses their share of custody.

Having participated in 15-20 such cases, I can attest that judges almost
always rule along the lines of reigning psychiatry mythology the matter.
Hopefully, the science of the matter--that ADHD is not a proven disease, and
that the children are NORMAL, will be aired in the near future.

Child psychiatrist, Peter S. Jensen, (Opposing View, 8/15/2000 USA Today,
p. 16 A) advocates the legal enforcement of drug treatment for ADHD and
other psychiatric problems diagnosed in school. He asks:

"So what should society do if a child with a disorder with lifelong
consequences (which the panel concluded was true of ADHD) is denied
treatment? The answer, of course, depends on the severity of the child's
condition, what other treatments have been tried and the likelihood that
treatments such as Ritalin will restore that child to normal or near-normal
functioning.

Allow us to analyze Jensen's language carefully. By 'disorder'
psychiatrists mean 'disease.' Non-psychiatric physicians, on the other
hand, would point out that 'disease' means that a physical or a chemical
abnormality can be found within the brain or body. This is not true of ADHD
and Jensen knows it. Writing "treatments such as Ritalin will restore that
child to normal or near-normal functioning, Jensen leaves no doubt he views
children with ADHD as "abnormal," which is to say: "diseased."

The 'panel' Jensen invokes, is the panel of the National Institutes of
Health, Consensus Conference on ADHD, of November 16-18, 1998. Having heard
3 days of testimony, the panel did not conclude that ADHD was a disabling,
crippling, or life-threatening disease--they concluded it was not a disease
at all!

ADHD Consensus Conference Panel, November 18, 1998:

"...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."

ADHD, for which we drug 6 million schoolchildren today, remains nothing
but an illusion of a disease. Jensen, having gone to medical school, knows
this-- knows the difference between normalcy and disease, knows that no
abnormality equals no disease!

In an interview in the January, 2000, Readers Digest, F.X. Castellanos
summarized a quarter of a century of 'biological' research on ADHD:

"Incontrovertible evidence is still lacking...In time I'm confident we'll
confirm the case for organic causes."

Jensen continues (FB: read carefully):

"Not all children (FB: with ADHD or any psychiatric diagnosis--none of them
diseases) respond to medication and some benefit from behavioral therapy.
Yet society requires that children's caretakers see that children get
immunized, schooled, fed and clothed and receive treatments for other
disorders such as asthma and diabetes."

About the only time authorities and the courts intervene in parental
decision-making, is in the event of a medical emergency in which treatment
that is truly life-saving is not being provided. Such might be the case
with trauma or an operation with blood loss requiring a transfusion, or in
the case of immunization in the face of a grave epidemic, such as that of an
outbreak of poliomyelitis or meningococcal meningitis. These might be
legitimate reasons to intervene. The examples Jensen gives are asthma,
which can present as life-threatening 'status asthmaticus' or 'brittle'
diabetes with the blood sugar level fluctuating wildly. I have no argument
with Jensen's use of these as examples of life-threatening medical
emergencies. Where Jensen must be stopped is in his clear and repeated
inferences that ADHD and all emotional and behavioral, psychiatric
conditions/diagnoses are akin to medical emergencies, needing and deserving
the wresting of parental authority by schools, child protective services,
courts and even the legislature--when, not only are they not medical
emergencies, grave, life-threatening or crippling--they are not diseases at
all!

Far from communicating "what the science says" (Jensen). psychiatry
routinely perverts science and medicine, claiming that all problems
emotional and behavioral are "brain diseases" due "chemical imbalances
(abnormalities) of the brain." Accepting this, we accept the need for
'diagnosis,' which, absent disease, is labeling - stigmatizing. Accepting
this, we accept the need for 'treatment,' which, absent disease, is
drugging - poisoning.

Follow the money.

In the August 21, 2001 Wall Street Journal (online) editor, TUNKU
VARADARAJAN wrote

(last) Sunday's New York Times carried a front-page story on ADHD, and on how
lawmakers in some states--Arizona, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Utah
and Wisconsin--have introduced bills that would prohibit schoolteachers from
playing shrink in their classrooms by telling parents that they must put
their children on drugs to combat "attention deficit." Such instruction, the
bills declare, must only come from doctors.

This is good news, and to be vigorously lauded. Teachers must be stopped
from playing God. Above all, they must be stopped from shirking their
disciplinary duties and seeking to "fix" every boisterous child with a dose
of drugs. What stops this legislative pattern from being excellent news, however, is
that the doctors can't be trusted. After all, it was they who invented ADD
and foisted it on a generation of American children. Twelve percent of all
American boys between six and 14 have been diagnosed with "attention
deficit" problems. (I get these figures from the International Narcotics
Control Board, a United Nations agency.) These children all take
medication--Schedule II drugs, which share the pharmacological effects of
amphetamine, methamphetamine and cocaine--to sharpen their short-term
attention span. Four million American children take such medication.
Toddlers, and children under five, are being prescribed such medication.
Ninety percent of all Ritalin popped in the world is popped in America.

Varadarajan's message is very clear, it is not just poor, duped,
fad-bound teachers that are the problem--"the doctors can't be trusted."
It is doctors of all kind who have invented adhd and all manner of
school-based psychiatric diseases, including all of the learning
disabilities and made an industry of them of of 'pushing' rugs for them.
What is happening here is quite the opposite of healing, it is
predatory, it is physicians betraying normal children and then drugging
them for profit--poisoning them. That is what it is when they
doctor/physician knows from the outset their is no physical
abnormality/disease, and drugs nonetheless.

]