THE PRESCHOOL ADHD TREATMENT STUDY: 100% FRAUD & CHILD ABUSE - Comments of Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD (2/16/01) (All of the Children they Label and Drug are Normal—Wake up America!)

http://www.nypost.com/commentary/23654.htm


RISKING KIDS' HEALTH FOR SAKE OF SCIENCE  February 12, 2001

By DOUGLAS MONTERO

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      AT WHAT COST?
      Columbia's Dr. Laurence Greenhill heads the Ritalin study.
      - NYP: Rick Dembow

TWO city research institutions will extend their tentacles into our
communities today, looking for hundreds of kids, some as young as 3, to use
as guinea pigs.

The experiments, to determine the safety and efficacy of Ritalin in
preschoolers, have advocates up in arms - they think researchers are playing
fast and loose with the brains of children.

"Where's the limit?" asked Dr. Ellen Isaacs, a member of the Coalition
Against the Violence Initiative, a grass-roots group in the Washington
Heights section of Manhattan. "Are they going to give it to kids in the
womb?"

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
This is an entirely logical question since they seem beholden to no
scientific, medical, ethical or moral guidelines]

The rationale of the nationwide experiment on the preschoolers seems noble -
Ritalin is already prescribed by doctors like lollipops without any sound
medical evidence to show that it's safe for a child's developing brain.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
That this is already being done with no validation of ADHD as a
disease, in any age group, much less in infants and toddlers, is a
crime. The first thing that needs being done, but which cannot be done
is to prove that ADHD is a disease; that children said to have it are
‘diseased’, abnormal, and that they need treatment; normalizing.
Without such proof, both the ‘practice’ of labeling and drugging infants
and toddlers thus, and research that would test such ‘treatments’ on
those having no proven disease/abnormality are medically/scientifically
and ethically and morally unjustifiable. Psychiatry would rather we all
presume that just because they go to medical school like all other
doctors, the things they 'diagnose’ are diseases. Such is never the
case. The only real disease they encounter are the ones they produce
with each and every psychotropic drug they prescribe—and then—they are
usually the last to know. Most such complications are the result of the
real brain alterations these drugs cause, and most have to be referred
to neurologists like myself for proper diagnosis. The psychiatrist’s
standard retort to their newly brain-diseased (drugged) patient is that
‘it’s your ADHD/OCD/BD/MDD/LD/schizophrenia getting worse.’ Such is
never the case because not a single DSM psychiatric ‘disease’ has been
validated as such; none of them disease, none can produce physical
morbidity or mortality. It can only be psychiatrist-caused; their
drug/many drugs/electroshock/psychosurgery.]

About 2 million kids nationwide, nearly a quarter-million of them between
ages 2 and 4, take Ritalin and other psychiatric drugs, according to a March
2000 report by the Journal of the American Medical Association.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
A marked, purposeful under-estimate. In this report, that of the
Council on Scientific Affairs of the AMA, nowhere having validated ADHD
as a disease, the Council said their was no evidence of over-diagnosis
or over-treatment of so-called ADHD. With that declaration, the AMA
became a party to the great American ADHD fraud. More recently they
have endorsed the no less fraudulent diagnosis and treatment ADHD in
infants and toddlers.]

The report inspired then-First Lady Hillary Clinton, who was a candidate for
the U.S. Senate at the time, to prod the White House to look at ways to stop
the alarming trend, and that translates into experiments. Some thought
Clinton's motives were political, others applauded her.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
I tend to doubt that Senator Clinton, and most Senators and
Congressmen, yet fully understands the fraud that is psychiatry’s
representation of all of their ‘disorders’ as ‘brain diseases’ due to
‘chemical imbalances’ of the brain. It is now her duty, just as it is
that of all legislators who pass laws legitimizing such things, to learn
and never forget the difference between psychiatry and the rest of
medicine, that is between fraudulent, illusory diseases and real
diseases, which are physical abnormalities]

The National Institute of Mental Health subsequently gave $6 million to a
consortium of six institutions, led by Dr. Laurence Greenhill of Columbia
University, to conduct the Ritalin study. New York University also is part
of the group.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
That the NYU, School of Medicine, my alma mater,
would be a participant in such ‘research’ is a disgrace.]

Two-thirds of the more than 300 kids in the nationwide study called
Preschool ADHD Treatment Study (PATS) will be under 6 years old.

They are looking for kids with symptoms of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity
Disorder who have never been medicated.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Herein lies the claim they are diagnosing a disease, a physical
abnormality within the child. Regardless the age of the child/person
thus diagnosed, ADHD has never been validated as a disease,
children/persons said to have it as other than normal.]

Members of the coalition two weeks ago protested outside Columbia
Presbyterian Medical Center, which is affiliated with Columbia University,
handing out leaflets alerting parents, schools and community groups.

The coalition is worried researchers will offer money for subjects or give
parents false hopes that their children will be cured. They also worry that
the unknown, long-term side effects of the drugs might harm kids.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
All drugs bear the potential for manifest and silent, unknown,
injury, even death. The Ritalin/amphetamine group of stimulants
invariable damage children/persons to whom they are given; the higher
the dose, the longer the ‘treatment’ the more the damage—whether seen or
not.]

Advocates are also wondering how researchers are going to properly diagnose
the preschoolers - some of who can't express themselves thoroughly.

"Obviously, if it's the researchers doing the diagnosis, it is in their
interest to diagnose kids with ADHD because they need them for the study,"
said Leonard H. Glantz, a law professor at Boston University and author of a
book on the ethics of researching on children.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
What the public, including most legislators and most in the
judiciary still fail to understand, is that regardless of their
‘diagnoses’ ‘labels’ and claims of ‘diseases’ (this, from the NIMH) ,
‘disorders’, things ‘neurobiologic" (CHADD) or ‘neurobehavioral’ (Am.
Acad of Pediatrics, Child Neurology Society, Am. Psychiatric Assoc.,
American Acad. of Neurology, Am. Acad of Family Practice), none of these
children, not a single one, not of any age, have a real, actual, bona
fide, demonstrable diagnosable disease. It is all a monstrous scam to
turn normal human beings into ‘patients’ to be ‘treated’. If they begin
this drugging of a single normal child, regardless of their ‘diagnosis,’
the district attorney of the jurisdiction in question should be called
and urged to make an arrest based on the fact that it is not legal
according to drug codes pertaining to Schedule II, controlled substances
(the main group of drugs to be ‘researched’) to give such drugs to
normal infants/children/persons. ]

"Unlike doctors, researchers don't have the best interest of the patient in
mind."

Greenhill said the five-stage, 40-week study has been reviewed and
re-reviewed by five ethics panels "to make sure the rights of the children
and their families' rights are protected."

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
The ‘ethicists’ come
from within medical academia which like all of psychiatry is industry
bought-and-paid-for]

Researchers will seek kids by advertising, by referrals from local doctors
and by sending flyers to private schools - since they are prohibited from
recruiting at public schools, Greenhill said.

The children will be diagnosed by a special group of researchers composed of
up of six institutions, including Johns Hopkins, University of California at
Los Angeles, University of California at Irvine, and Duke, said Greenhill,
who insisted the parents will only be given money to get and from the
hospital.

Greenhill is seeking more than 60 kids whose parents will first receive
training to see if their child's behavior improves. The second stage
involves low-dose medication that's later upgraded, Greenhill said.

The fourth stage includes a placebo experiment, where some kids get a sugar
pill. Advocates say children will suffer from withdrawal symptoms because
Ritalin is addictive.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Highly addictive, dangerous, sometimes
deadly. See 1995 DEA Background Paper on Methylphenidate (Ritalin) ]

Parents have to sign consent forms for each stage, including the last, which
includes a gradual tapering off or continuation of
the drug.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
We must get and review all elements of their informed
consent documents. NIMH informed consent documents I have reviewed,
vaguely allude to ADHD being biological and a ‘disease’ which is a
violation of informed consent. Someone, at one of these medical
schools, get informed consent documents and submit them to CIRCARE and
to DrB@adhdfraud.com for review. ]

Informed of the study she inspired, Clinton spokeswoman Karen Dunn said,
"Hillary Clinton is very concerned about the increased use of Ritalin in
young children and has strongly supported efforts to determine whether it is
being used appropriately and effectively."

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Quite simply, it is
never ever OK to medicate children who have no evidence of real, actual,
organic, physical disease.]

That sounds politically and morally correct, but the folks in Washington,
D.C., aren't going to be around to see what becomes of these kids who
donate their brains to science.

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Be very clear on this point; when psychiatry tells patients with
emotional and behavioral problems that they have ‘brain diseases’ and
‘chemical imbalances of the brain’ that need ‘chemical balancers’—pills,
that is deceit—pure and simple, not the legitimate practice of
medicine. When they take normal human beings of any age with emotional
and behavioral problems, and proclaim that they have ‘brain diseases’
and ‘chemical imbalances of the brain,’ deceive them and enroll them in
medical/biological ‘research’ trials, this is not science, it is fraud
and nothing but. My letter to the editor of SCIENCE, regarding PATS,
published Jan. 26, 2001, read:

"Regarding the Preschool Treatment Study that Marshall describes in his
article--there is no disease. No proof exists that ADHD is a disease
with a validating abnormality. Yet the public is told it is a "disease"
(1—Nat. Institutes of Mental Health) that it is neurobiologic"
(2—Children and Adults with Attention Deficit Disorders) or
"neurobehavioral" (3—Guidelines, Amer. Acad. Pediatrics). WB Carey,
(University of Pennsylvania) testified at the National Institutes of
Health (NIH) Consensus Conference on ADHD in 1998 that "ADHD…appears to
be a set of normal behavioral variations" (4). The Consensus Conference
Panel concluded: "we do not have an independent, valid test for ADHD…no
data…indicate that ADHD is due to a brain malfunction" (5). Every
physician has the responsibility to distinguish disease from absence of
disease and to communicate this to their patients and the public. In
that children who would be the research subjects in the Preschool ADHD
Treatment Study (PATS) have no demonstrable disease, there is no
justification for giving them Schedule II, stimulant medications." ]