Posted on 08/06/2007 7:18:11 AM PDT by Lennyq
WHO KILLED REBECCA RILEY?
By Fred A. Baughman, Jr., MD, Neurologist, Child Neurologist
Author: The ADHD Fraud—How Psychiatry Makes “Patients” of Normal Children
www.Trafford.com
June 21, 2007
Neurologists, such as myself, diagnose and treat real diseases of the brain. Psychiatrists do not. They only claim to. 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. It is fascinating to behold the charges brought by behavioral pediatrician-ADHD authority, Larry Diller in his attack upon child psychiatrist-bipolar disorder authority, Joseph Biederman of Harvard (Bipolar Madness, San Francisco Chronicle, June 18, 2007, p. D-5). Is ADHD any more legitimate than bipolar disorder or any other psychiatric disorder/disease? It is not.
The December 13, 2007 death of 4-year-old Rebecca Riley of Hull, MA, has triggered high nervousness throughout psychiatry, all mental health, and the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Diller tells us Rebecca was diagnosed “bipolar disorder” at 2 ½ years of age and begun on 3 psychiatric drugs--Seroquel, an antipsychotic, among them. Incredibly, Rebecca’s parents have been charged with murder while her brother and sister continue, court-ordered, on these same deadly poisons for these same bogus diagnoses. Diller writes of “bipolar disorder” as “a purported psychiatric illness,” impugning it’s legitimacy. Strangely, Diller neglected to mention that Rebecca was also diagnosed with ADHD—the “disease” he is an authority on. Writing of “bipolar disorder,” Diller asks: “Can or should children that young be diagnosed with a disorder that ostensibly lasts a lifetime?” Dr. Diller, are children with ADHD any less likely to be told that their “disease” will last a lifetime? Hardly! Is ADHD any more real and legitimate a disease than “bipolar,” “Asperger’s,” “conduct,” or “oppositional defiant disorder,” or any other contrivance from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association. For an idea of how real Dr. Diller thinks ADHD is see p. 7 of his book Running on Ritalin where he writes: “Before 1990 I needed perhaps one pad of a hundred forms every nine months; by 1997 I realized it was one every three months.” If he did not think ADHD was a real disease would he be writing 400 prescriptions a year for it? For all of Dr. Diller's objections to the “bipolar” diagnosis, Rebecca Riley, at 2 ½ was said by her psychiatrist to have ADHD as well—ADHD that was her first diagnosis! But make no mistake, both ADHD & bipolar disorder are dangerous, deadly diagnoses—dangerous and deadly not because they are real diseases/ physical abnormalities posing real physical risks (there are none) but because of the dangerous, deadly medications invariably prescribed for them and for every contrived, fraudulent psychiatric “disease”/ “disorder”/ “chemical imbalance.”
The Atlanta (GA) Journal-Constitution (January 11, 2007) has documented 364 deaths in Georgia’s state mental hospitals in the five years, January, 2002 through mid-December 2006. Two-thirds were said to have died of natural causes, 115 were deemed suspicious. The greatest number of these--36 –died from choking on food, vomit or foreign objects a side effect of antipsychotic/neuroleptic-induced bulbar palsy. Mind you, these are in-patient deaths only, in only one state. Between 1990 and 2000, 186 deaths related to the use of methylphenidate/Ritalin were reported FDA/MedWatch program. The actual numbers of drug-caused deaths can never be known because that is the way the pharmaceutical industry and their friends in government want it. It is estimated that the number of deaths and adverse drug reactions otherwise, voluntarily reported to FDA-MedWatch represents one to ten percent of the actual number. Dr. Diller has confessed to my colleague and friend, Sue Parry that there has never been validation of ADHD as an actual disease. If that is the case, is he any more scientific or moral than Dr. Biederman—prescribing addictive, dangerous, deadly amphetamines to upwards of 400 children per year who he knows to be medically/physically normal. Nor does this set him apart from all the rest in pediatrics, psychiatry, family practice and neurology who are happy to use the APA-DSM diagnostic scheme that allows them to make patients of normal children—children in whom the first and only abnormality is the intoxication/poisoning by their first and each subsequent drugs.
Rebecca Riley died at 4 years of age. Angel Trantham of Sheridan, Arkansas, whose records I have just finished reviewing was 14 when court-ordered into psychiatric care, and fifteen going on 16 when she died, not just a victim of ADHD and bipolar disorder but of the countless psychiatric drugs she ingested and was injected with over the final eight months of her short, tragic life. Like Rebecca, and like all psychiatric patients, Angel had no real disease when at “diagnosis.” Her first and only abnormalities/diseases were the drugs coursing throughout her body and brain. The disease labels in psychiatry are nothing more than a parody-sham to justify the for-profit drugging/poisoning.
Should you, the reader, doubt what I say, you owe it to yourself to read the letter I received from the former President, Bernard S. Alpert, MD of the Medical Board of California, the state agency created to protect Californians when they seek medical care.
On May 28, 2002, I wrote Dr.Alpert, MD, President of the Medical Board of California (MBC): “Every time parents or a patient is lead to believe that their child’s emotional/behavioral problem is a “disease” due to an abnormality within their body or brain, they have been lied to, their informed consent rights wholly violated…”
On June 14, 2002, Dr. Alpert, responded: "As you outline in your letter, there is tremendous professional support for categorizing emotional and psychological conditions as diseases of the brain. In published materials, some quoted in your letter, you will find that support from chairs of psychiatry departments, the American Psychiatric Association and professors of major medical schools. It is clear that the psychiatric community has set their standard, and while one might disagree with it, that standard becomes the legal standard upon which the Board (CMB) must base its actions."
Unbelievably, what Dr. Alpert, speaking for the Medical Board of the State of California, is saying here, is that whatever the majority do, even lie to every patient, knowingly violating their informed consent rights, that that becomes the unassailable, legal “standard of practice. ” And, so it goes with state medical boards across the country—part of the problem, not part of the solution.
It should be abundantly clear by this point that there is no such thing as a psychiatric disorder/disease/chemical imbalance of the brain—that this is a total, one hundred percent lie, meant, knowingly--by design--to make “patients” of normals of all ages then to poison them--for profit. It cannot be called “treatment”—the drug was their first and only abnormality. Unlike the rest of medicine, no psychiatric drug targets a diagnosed abnormality to make it normal or more nearly so. No! it is not just Dr. Biederman or just the child psychiatry department at Harvard-Massachusetts General Hospital that is doing this, it is the entire psychiatric profession lead by all of psychiatric academia—the APA and the NIMH. It is the entire medical profession--neurologists, pediatricians, GPs, FPs—it is psychologists and teachers, aided and abetted by the Congress, the White House and every last health care agent and agency of the federal government—all of them bought and paid for by the obscenely wealthy, all-controlling, world-wide pharmaceutical industry. No, Dr. Diller, it is not just Dr. Biederman.
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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