ADHD fraud and the chemical holocaust against a generation of children

[Guest guest]

http://downloads.truthpublishing.com/LivewithFredBaughman.pdf1 Live with Dr. Fred Baughman: ADHD fraud and the chemical holocaust against a generation of children Mike: Hello everyone, this is Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, and I’m talking about the mythical disease known as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, and the overmedication of the population, with Dr. Fred Baughman. I want to give you a little background about why I’m so interested in interviewing you. Our readers will really appreciate your information, because we cover this subject quite extensively. We have similar views on it and there is a lot of increasing interest out there. People are realizing that they have been fooled all these years, so that’s why I wanted to get in touch with you. Dr. Fred Baughman: In the area of child psychiatric drugs, the main focus has been the recently commenced FDA hearings, which pertain to reports of death, strokes and heart attacks in children and adults. The first report concerning Adderall came out about a year ago. Adderall is the number one ADHD drug, and that report dealt with 12 or so individuals that were said to have had strokes, if you can imagine a stroke occurring in a young child. Some were sudden deaths and others were heart complications, and a total of 20 to 30 such reports lead Health Canada to take Adderall off the market. Mike: Now these records are through the voluntary MedWatch system, correct? Dr. Baughman: Exactly, which the FDA explains in a booklet about the mechanics of MedWatch and other similar voluntary reporting schemes. They confessed that such schemes ordinarily identify no more than 1 percent of actual occurrences. So at any rate, we had that occurrence about a year ago with Health Canada taking Adderall off the market and our FDA not taking Adderall off the market. Subsequently, we learned our FDA lobbied Health Canada behind-the-scenes not to take it off the market. Mike: That is unbelievable. The FDA applied pressure to foreign nations to protect dangerous drugs in our own market? Dr. Baughman: Yes, it’s just that. Then about three or four months ago, Health Canada put Adderall back on the market. It wasn’t because they had any good evidence of its safety or effectiveness. Adderall is a mixture of the two salts of amphetamine, so it’s a pure amphetamine. Mike: I want to talk to you more about what’s actually in these drugs later. Dr. Baughman: The fascinating thing about Adderall is that it was a weight reduction drug for adults called Obetrol. It’s was so extremely addictive that Obetrol was taken off the market for that reason. Now we have the FDA bringing this extraordinarily addictive drug to market for little children. 2 Live with Dr. Fred Baughman Mike: So it was too dangerous for adults but not unsafe for children? Dr. Baughman: In fact, they are bringing it to market for entirely normal little children said to have the illusory, bogus disease called ADHD. Mike: For those reading, you’re a pediatric neurologist, correct? Dr. Baughman: Yes, and I practiced both adult and child neurology; board-certified in both. I have been a long-standing fellow of the American Academy of Neurology. Mike: Okay, so you come from the world of what I might call conventional medicine. You are an M.D., and yet, over the years, and I’m sure you’ll explain how this happened, you found some mass distortions happening with ADHD so you launched a web site called www.ADHDfraud.org. My first question: At what point as a pediatric neurologist did you begin to see something was wrong with this picture? Baughman: I began to publish actual research works when I was in training, first at Sinai Hospital in New York and after that, at the Boston Veteran Hospital. After the first 10 years in my practice, which was in Grand Rapids, Michigan, I published a considerable body of original research mainly having to do with genetically determined brain decisions or neurological diseases and chromosome abnormalities. Much of that work was published with Dr. Joseph Mann, also of Grand Rapids. I have discovered and described actual diseases, and that’s the background that I bring to my newfound duty of evaluating and critiquing modern-day psychiatry, especially where it pertains to their wholly fraudulent claims that their diagnoses, such as ADHD, bipolar OCD and depression are actual brain diseases when they are not. Now I was in private practice from 1964 to 1993 when I retired, and it was during the ‘70s that I began to notice, first in Grand Rapids and then here in San Diego where I relocated, the increasing frequency of the burst of diagnoses of hyperactivity and brain damage. Then in 1980, the American Psychiatric Association invented ADD, or attention deficit disorder, and with that the epidemic seemed to worsen. It appeared to me that the frequency of such diagnoses and their treatment with Ritalin, an amphetamine-like drug every bit as addictive as cocaine, were increasing in my community. At first I took note and later became alarmed at the frequency with which children were being referred to me by schools through their physician with these diagnostic labels put in place, basically by schoolteachers. Mike: This was a “disease” that almost appeared to be spreading like a virus. Dr. Baughman: It was a notion of a disease, an illusory disease; with child psychiatry repeating the lie often enough that it was becoming a reality, especially for the educational establishment and teachers nationwide, and increasingly, the media or the public at large. Then in 1997 with the epidemic standing somewhere around 500,000 to 700,000 nationwide, they simply rewrote the diagnostic criteria by adding hyperactivity to the attention deficit. 3 Live with Dr. Fred Baughman Mike: Do you mean to say that there is a group of psychiatrists who meet in a room somewhere and they just write down and invent whatever behavioral observations they want to assign to this disease definition? Dr. Baughman: That is exactly the way it works. In medicine, including my specialty, neurology, if a curious, observant physician discovers a new abnormality in a patient in his practice or in his clinic at medical schools, that previously unobserved abnormality is the new disease. So there has to be an objective abnormality. In diabetes, there is elevated blood sugar in the blood throughout all the tissues. With cancer, a pathologist has to see cells that have abnormal nuclei and chromosomes under the microscope in order to contend that that patient has that disease or a disease. But in psychiatry, the committee of the diagnostic and statistical manual meets in a room and by a show of hands, they consider one another’s favorite galaxies or mixture of behaviors and vote those into existence and give it a code number or an entry into the DSM, and they are all psychiatric disorders. By the word “disorder,” they mean disease. Mike: Can you give us an example of the type of behaviors that are listed in the DSM as being diseases or disorders? Dr. Baughman: In the case of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, here are the 14 symptoms that appeared in the 1987 DSM. Remember, a child found to have eight of them was deemed to have ADHD. Number one is often fidgets or squirms; two is trouble staying in one’s seat; three is easily distracted; four is can’t wait one’s turn; five is blurts out answers; six is trouble following instructions; seven is can’t sustain attention; eight is shifts from one activity to another; nine doesn’t play quietly; 10 talks excessively; 11 interrupts; 12 can’t listen; 13 loses things; 14 does dangerous things, thrill seeking and so on. Mike: Wow, I think you just described probably half the population. Dr. Baughman: Right, exactly, so much for their motivation. It’s just absolutely brilliant, the marketing scheme, as long as you get away with it. Mike: And they are getting away with it. Dr. Baughman: The Center for Disease Control estimated in 2004 that there were 4 million cases nationwide in children 17 and under. Mike: Now isn’t it one out of every 10 children in public schools? Dr. Baughman: As of 2003 I believe it was. Professor William Cary of the University of Pennsylvania testified to Congress that 17 percent of all school children as of 2003 are on some type of psychiatric drug, not all ADHD drugs and not all with an ADHD diagnosis. I think that the number today is probably one in five, or 20 percent. It was 17 percent according to Dr. Cary in 2003. It’s probably 20 percent today. Live with Dr. Fred Baughman Mike: It’s astounding. Even if this disease were legitimate, this was something that doesn’t exist in other countries and it didn’t exist anywhere two generations ago. How do the psychiatrics explain the abrupt emergence of this apparent disease? Dr. Baughman: They don’t much explain it. People who try to ask legitimate questions of them are generally ignored because they don’t have any scientific answers. They know it is a big lie, and as long as they are getting away with it and as long as they have full access to the U.S. Department of Education and the lobbyists to members of Congress, they enact the diagnosis and treatment of this into law. Consequently, there are laws on the books that mandate a certain level of diagnosis in the schools and that even pay extra to school districts for every child that is diagnosed with one of their bogus and contrived diseases and treated as special-education subjects. Taxpayers end up paying two or three times as much for children thus labeled as they do for normal kids. Mike: Let me clarify that. So a school district that gets more of its children are diagnosed with ADHD, it gets rewarded with more funds? Dr. Baughman: They get more funds. There are even laws on the books that pay parents a stipend for every child they have who is diagnosed and thus considered disabled. So I think they get Social Security disability. I think the stipend, at least a few years ago, was $400 a month. Mike: Isn’t this a situation where everybody is on the take, so they can turn the bodies of our children into profit machines? Dr. Baughman: That’s exactly what is happening. These entirely bogus, junk science, pseudoscientific labels are a barcode on the forehead of a child, and once the label gets in their record, it sticks. They can’t get rid of it. If a child or an adult gets one of these labels, this stigmatizes that individual. They are going to have more trouble getting health care insurance and trouble finding employment. The armed services will not take children who have been on these drugs. I must confess that as the Armed Forces have failed to meet their quota for the Iraq war, they have dropped their standards and they are recently accepting persons who have such labels and have been on such drugs. [Cont'd on site] =====In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. 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