"Hatter, Jeff" wrote: > I truly hope most people who visit your website are open minded enough to > see it for the disinformation that it truly is. Your ignorance of the > ADD/ADHD issue is astounding. People like you have done such a diservice to > victims of the disorder that educators have a difficult time helping many > students to cope with it effectively.
[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD:
Jeff Hatter, in medicine, the obligation of the physician is clear to see--to
determine whether an objective abnormality (disease) is present or is not. 1/3
to 1/2 of patients who consult their physician turn out to have no abnormality
and therefor have no organic disease. This ruling out disease, excluding
disease, is the most important step of all in determining that a patient's
behavioral, emotional symptoms are due/determined by stresses, strains,
challenges, demands, problems in their everyday life. Psychiatrists do not make
this 'no organic disease' determination, neurologists and all other kinds of
physicians do and then, where the situational, every-day-life issues seem more
deep seeded, do such doctors refer such patients on to mental health
professionals. I stopped sending patients to psychiatrists in the early 80's
when it occurred to me that they did nothing but 'label' and 'drug' and that
they had stopped speaking with their/my patients about the real, troubling
issues in their lives. Psychologists, so far without a license to prescribe,
are left to do the right thing, a cannot do the harm that inevitably results
from one-dimensional drugging.
Are you an educator? Are you making the ADHD diagnosis; recommending
Ritalin/amphetamines/psychiatry as essential in--as you say in "helping many
students to cope with it effectively." Nowhere in the scientific literature is
their proof that ADD or ADHD is an abnormality/disease, due to an abnormality
within the child.
Can you possibly imagine that calling normal children abnormal, having them and
all adults in their life believe they are abnormal and then putting them on
dangerous addictive, even deadly drugs that you say are harmless and that they
will need all of their life, can possibly be other than horribly damaging and
in a mental sense--deforming. Jeff, I will await your reply. Get specific.
]