TEACHERS, U.S. CONGRESS, PRACTICE MEDICINE WITHOUT A LICENSE.
When I testified before the Arkansas State Legislature in Little Rock,
May 3, 2000, the chairman of the session, the husband of a teacher,
asserted that schoolteachers in his state do not make diagnoses, suggest
treatment, or in any other way take it upon themselves to practice
medicine. In fact, teachers, across the country, are being trained in
psychiatric diagnosis and are exhorted to go forth and diagnose and
label.
Our own Surgeon General, David Satcher, MD, who knows better, is the
federal government's number one cheer leader, lying to the public,
telling us psychiatric disorders are diseases, as sure as diabetes, and
cancer; exhorting educators--not to teach, not to render literate,
but--to go forth and diagnose ADHD and all psychiatric disorders. And
educators, in a brain-diagnosing ecstacy, are only to thrilled to
comply. They are the ones who start the ball rolling. They finger
suspected cases, then hound parent to get their child to the local
specialist who, somehow, never fails to find ADHD. We heard from a
Little Rock area school superintendent who testified that 15% in their
middle school were on medication administered in school.
When it comes to diagnosing attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder
(ADHD), a parent's idea of ``disruptive behavior'' in a child may be
different from a teacher's, study findings suggest [NEW YORK, Feb 28,
2000 (Reuters Health) ]. Doctors should try to talk to a youngster's
teacher before they diagnose ADHD, said a report in the March issue of
the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry. Parents tend to ``under-identify ADHD symptoms at school,
particularly hyperactive-impulsive behaviors,'' according to Dr.
Jeffrey M. Halperin. Parents report school behavior that is actually
closer to how the child behaves at home, and ``parents are often unable
to precisely indicate which symptoms their child exhibits in the
classroom,'' the researchers found. ``Direct contact with teachers
remains the most accurate way to obtain this information (about
symptoms),'' Halperin writes.
The agreement between the parents and teachers on a child's behavior
tended to be poor. For example, 20 children fit the inattentive subtype,
based on behavior descriptions from either the parent or the teacher,
but for only two of these children did parent and teacher descriptions
agree. ``The parent and teacher agreement regarding the presence of
individual symptoms in the school setting was rarely better than
chance,'' the authors note. [Journal of the American Academy of Child
and Adolescent Psychiatry 2000;39:308-313]
And, to think, they have an entire nation believing we are diagnosing an
actual brain disease. Disgracefully, the medical profession,
trivialized, stripped of its ethic by the physician glut, grasps at the
"financial crumbs" thrown to them by victimizing normal children.
Never mind that they make parents, by the millions, believe their
normal children are abnormal; never mind that they make normal, but
horribly mis-educated children believe their brains are abnormal;
believe they are to blame. No matter that they, next prescribe for and
poison the once normal children by way of convincing themselves that
what they do is legitimate. Allow me to disabuse them of that notion.
Allow me to disabuse members of the Congress of the United States of the
notion that they help any child when they appropriate any funds
whatsoever for such "diagnosis" and "treatment". The children are
normal; the appropriate terms are "targeting," "predatory", "pushing",
"drugging", "poisoning", "ruining (forever)."