Posted on 08/06/2007 7:18:11 AM PDT by Lennyq
Your link doesn’t go to anything but a vanity press site.
Web search shows Dr. Baughman to be a Scientology cultist.
Sounds like what Chuckie Shumer wants to accomplish with the invocation of "stare decisis and the Supreme Court. Precedent without basis.
Ah, another “smear by association, because fact is irrefutable” poster.
She's friggin 2 years old. All kids that age are crazy.
This is nuts. The eduKKKrats are conspiring with Big Pharm to keep YOUR kids in a drug-induced stupor.
Nothing to worry about, she'll be dead anyway from global warming/bird flu/sars/asteroid hits and so on by then.
A disease is a physical abnormality evident macroscopically (lump on the head visible to the naked eye) , microscopically (cancer cells on a ‘Pap’ smear) or by chemical assay (high blood sugar in diabetes). If there is no such objective abnormality, the individual is normal, disease-free.
IOW, if we can't detect it with our present tests, it doesn't exist. Therefore, diabetes did not exist before our ability to detect it with chemical assay, cancer did not exist before tests were developed for it, etc.
New diseases are found all the time. Few are really new, we have just developed a method to determine when they are present.
Actually, I don’t think iowamark is simply saying don’t listen to the scientology weirdo. In this case, I would think that if Dr. Baughman is in fact a scientologist, that puts a valid cloud over his medical opinion, seeing how scientology vehemently shuns all such psychiatric meds and practice. Kind of agenda-izes the article a bit.
I have never met Dr Baughman and do not know if he is a scientolgist. I posted this article because I think the doctor has a valid point. If he does happen to be a scientologist as you say it may cast a cloud over him but it doesn’t change the validity of what he has to say.
This article, and its author, does nothing more than muddy the water. This child’s death was a failure on a number of different fronts. Certainly, a bi-polar diagnosis on 4 year old child and the unsupervised prescription of heavy duty meds are controversial. However, the parents were under DSS investigation. The father was on parole for assaulting another child. There were allegations of abuse in the home. Rebecca’s medical care was being paid for by the state. Her parents medicated her to keep her quiet. Pharmacists notified the doctor that the prescriptions were being re-filled far too often (these warnings were sloughed off). The circumstances of her death were just too disturbing to recount. This was a total Nanny State meltdown, not just an issue of medication and psychiatry. This child was failed by a long list of adults, and to make her some kind of poster child for an anti-pharmacology campaign by Scientologists is an outrage.
I am sorry I posted the wrong link. The correct link is http://www.adhdfraud.org/frameit.asp?src=commentary.htm
There is the lie. Of course there are some organic brain diseases. Schizophrenia, major depression, and bipolar disorder have been well-characterized chemically. Whether ADHD is one of those organic brain diseases is still a matter of debate, but the fact that we don't have a chemical assay to diagnose something yet doesn't mean it doesn't have a biochemical origin; it just means our tools haven't advanced that far yet.
My goodness, ultimately any behavior is a manifestation of chemical processes in the brain; if this author doesn't believe in biochemical brain diseases, what mechanism does he suggest for the behavior of people who have demonstrable mental illnesses? Bad spirits? Dementors? Karma?
If he is a scientologist (who are rabidly anti-psychiatry/psychology) how can you assert that the "validity" of what he's saying, from a scientific viewpoint, isn't tainted by his cultist beliefs?
Did you actually read this article and evaluate it on its merits, or does the usual trick of throwing smears by association convince you that it’s not even worth reading ?
That last is what iowamark is saying.
Had you done any due diligence, you would find that Baughman’s been hired at times as a consultant for Scientology but is not one himself.
Whatever you, I or any one else thinks of Scientology, you should always evaluate a thing firstly on its factual basis.
iowamark did not.
You didn’t understand his point.
What he’s saying is that psychiatrists are calling these “diseases” and referring to them as having physical causes, but as of the current state of research, there is no such basis in fact. Many psychiatrists refer to ADHD as a chemical imbalance in the brain, but there is no study to date where psychiatry or neurology can take any brain chemistry and simply from objective testing, determine the degree of ADHD like you can with diabetes.
That’s all he’s saying.
ADHD, for example, as with bipolar, schizophrena and so on, are “determined” by behavior observed and interpreted by others, not by a physical test.
Hence, they are not “physical” diseases. They are behavioral issues, usually in the eye of the beholders.
Now there's another lie. Show me the study that determines the proper ratios of brain chemicals in "normal" brains, and exact doses of which drugs to correct it in "abnormal" brains. Hmmm ? I've asked numerous people that question and oddly enough, such research does not exist.
Oh wait, there's another lie in that sentence. What is the scientific definition of "normal" ? Does science have a definition of that, or is it the same old "I know it if I see it" ?
My goodness, ultimately any behavior is a manifestation of chemical processes in the brain; if this author doesn't believe in biochemical brain diseases, what mechanism does he suggest for the behavior of people who have demonstrable mental illnesses?
Believe ? First you say there's a measured biological issue, then you say it's a belief ? Which is it ?
Take this article. The little girl who died was from a family that had serious problems. Might her problems have been in response to that environment ? No, no, of course not, that would mean that drugs were unnecessary but interention was. Way too expensive for the nanny state, and way too much work to find well-behaved relatives willing to raise the child properly.
You might benefit by reading Peter Breggin's book "Reclaiming Our Children: A Healing Solution for a Nation In Crisis".
By fact ?
Something so many on this forum tend to overlook.
I read the article. Didn’t do any in-depth research into the merits of Dr. Baughman though. My point was simply this - IF he is a scientologist, it can be rightly claimed that his opinion is tainted.
Speaking of factual basis, seems that Rebecca Riley’s case involved just a bit more than her being given psychiatric drugs.
That said, I think ADHD is WAY overdiagnosed and as a homeschooling mom, I shudder to think what teachers might dispense to my crazy six year old. But to consider all psychiatric ailments as non-biological is frightening as well.
BTW love your tagline. It reminds me of the old joke:
One Quaker said to another; everyone’s crazy but thee and me, and sometimes I wonder about thee.
Smells like Scientology to me. Paging Tom Cruise, paging Tom Cruise.
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