Posted on 04/18/2003 12:38:09 PM PDT by FreeRadical
Pacific Rim Bureau (CNSNews.com) - The debate over attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and the drugging of children diagnosed with it has been rekindled in Australia, one of several countries to have followed the U.S. trend over recent decades.
A youth conference in the eastern city of Brisbane this week was told that no proof has been found that ADHD exists at all.
U.S. psychologist Dr. Bob Jacobs told the Youth Affairs Network Queensland conference that doctors and pharmaceutical companies had turned behavioral problems in children into a disorder.
He voiced concern that misdiagnoses resulted in youngsters being prescribed powerful drugs like Ritalin, which may affect their long-term mental and physical development.
In a radio interview afterwards, Jacobs - who is on the advisory board of the International Center for the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology - said his conclusions had been made as a result of his own observations during many years in practice, working with children and families.
He cited cases where parents reported that their ADHD-diagnosed children could not pay attention - but then those same children could play video games for hours without being distracted.
Sometimes where parents made changes in the way they were doing things, the symptoms would go away.
"A real disease doesn't go away when somebody else does something," he argued.
Jacobs said experts had put labels on different behaviors and called them a disease.
"There's no proof. Nobody has ever presented any evidence of a condition called ADHD, except to say all these children are hyperactive; all these children are inattentive, and therefore they all have the disease. It's the 'and therefore' that I'm concerned about."
Jacobs acknowledged that many parents would disagree with him. Parents tend to believe what has become the mainstream view, in part because the drugs prescribed for ADHD do work in that they make the child more docile and more compliant.
"The child's not getting into trouble at school any more. The child's easier to manage at home, so we say, well this is great, it works."
Also, parents struggling with a behavior problem were made to feel better. Instead of feeling inadequate as parents, they felt they were now struggling with a sick child and doing the best they could.
Money trail
In the United States in 2001, pharmaceutical companies made more than $600 million in profits just on stimulant drugs used for attention deficit disorders.
"If ADHD doesn't exist, those hundreds of millions of dollars in profits go away."
"You have to follow the money," agreed Peyton Knight, legislative director at the American Policy Center, a Virginia-based think tank.
"It's big money," he said by phone late Thursday. "The more diagnoses there are every year the more Ritalin and other mind-altering drugs they are going to be able to market and sell."
Many would vehemently disagree with the arguments against the existence of ADHD, he said.
"But it's never been validated as a disease," Knight said. "It's arbitrary."
"The number of diagnoses has risen exponentially over the past decade. It's not like some epidemic is sweeping the nation like a flu virus. It's just a matter of diagnoses going up because of the popularity of diagnosing children with ADHD," he said.
"In today's society, parents look for the easy way out. If their kids are unruly, we give them a pill and it sedates them. That becomes a very easy thing to do and if a doctor tells them to do this, they feel good about it."
Knight said there was a fairly sizeable grassroots citizens' movement in the United States questioning these issues, and more parents and teachers were becoming aware of the problems.
Unfortunately a similar movement had yet to take hold in the scientific community, although there were some bold specialists who disagreed with the wider-held views.
One of them is neurologist Dr. Fred Baughman Jr., who in a 1998 letter to the then Attorney General Janet Reno, called the representation of ADHD as a disease and the drugging of millions of normal children "the single, biggest heath care fraud in U.S. history."
Massive increase in drug use
According to Baughman, 500,000 children were diagnosed ADHD in 1985 and between 5 and 7 million were today.
Substantial growth has also been reported in Australia, a country of just 19 million people, where it's estimated that at least 50,000 children are now on drugs prescribed for ADHD.
A report in the Medical Journal of Australia last November said Australia and New Zealand have the third-highest rate in the world of the drug use, after the United States and Canada.
Unlike the United States, where Ritalin (methylphenidate) is most often prescribed, in Australia dexamphetamine is more widely used.
University of Queensland figures show that legal use of dexamphetamine in Australia has risen from 8.3 million tablets prescribed in 1984 to 38.4 million tablets in 2001. Over the same period Ritalin prescriptions rose from 1.5 million tablets to 19.3 million.
The federal government early this year approved use in Australia of long-acting Ritalin-LA, which is said to be effective for longer than the usual four-hour period for standard Ritalin.
Rosemary Boon, a child psychologist in Sydney for more than 20 years, acknowledged in a recent article that the drugs were effective in settling the child and this benefited teachers, parents and classmates. But there was little benefit to the afflicted child, she added.
Boon does not argue that ADHD doesn't exist, but says it can be managed with the help of diet, exercise, behavior modification, stress management, identification of "triggers" of the symptoms, and a supportive family environment.
Critics list among the problems with drugs like Ritalin the fact children on them tend not to grow as tall as they might otherwise. There are also concerns that a child's intelligence, creativity and spontaneity may be dampened.
The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists says medication should not be the first line of intervention for the vast majority of children. Alternatives should be looked into first.
On its website, Novartis, the pharmaceutical company that manufactures Ritalin, describes ADHD as "a physical disorder caused by differences in how the child's brain works."
Novartis has an article in the April-May edition of its journal, Pathways, arguing for the existence of ADHD.
It quotes Prof. Russell Barkley of the Medical University of South Carolina as saying that ADHD is not overdiagnosed in the United States.
"We have more diagnosis now than before due to better public awareness and greater referrals," he said.
Absolutely. Dyslexia, according to many is considered a gift because of the "highly visually oriented" learning style.
For example..
My just took his standardized tests for school and during the reading comprehension phase, he would score about 25-30% higher if the paragraph was read to him, versus than if he had to read it himself.
Visual thinking is quite amazing. Consider that many of the major inventors/theorists were dyslexics.
(ie: Einstein, Edison)
Laz:
Does an athiest, dyslexic, who suffers from insomia stay awake at night pondering if there is a DOG?
When I was editorial director for publishing company that did health-realted books, I turned down a couple of manuscripts on ADHA because I was not convinced that it was a real disorder. The co-owner of our company, a millionaire, wanted to put out the books because his two spoiled brat kids had zero attention span. I asked him whether he bought the boys every computer game that came on the market. He had to admit that he did, and that they paid attentionto the games.
The point is, even wealthy kids suffer from parents who believe that throwing another toy at their kids is "parenting."
This sounds a lot like Dyscalculia, which is the "numbers" version of dyslexia.
Here's some info I've retrieved about Dyscalculia
Some symptoms of dyscalculia are:
Normal or advanced language and other skills, often good visual memory for the printed word.
Poor mental math ability, often with difficulty in common use of money, such as balancing a checkbook, making change, and tipping. Often there is a fear of money and its transactions.
Difficulty with math processes (e.g., addition, subtraction, multiplication) and concepts (e.g., sequencing of numbers). There is sometimes poor retention and retrieval of concepts, or an inability to maintain a consistency in grasping math rules.
Poor sense of direction, easily disoriented, as well as trouble reading maps, telling time, and grappling with mechanical processes.
Difficulty with abstract concepts of time and direction, schedules, keeping track of time, and the sequence of past and future events.
Common mistakes in working with numbers include number substitutions, reversals, and omissions.
May have difficulty learning musical concepts, following directions in sports that demand sequencing or rules, and keeping track of scores and players during games such as cards and board games.
This was proven w/o a doubt when a neighbor took him to a store and while there, she bought him a hot dog. She couldn't believe the change and it took 3 days for him to wind down again.
I suspect many, many of our other health problems today start with our food supply.
I'm not making a claim about ADD, ADHD in saying that -- just claiming that most -- most most most -- kids on it are on it for the wrong reasons. Because adults are avoiding or unable to deal with the discordancies, unpredictablenesses and enerigies of well-in-band childhood. So the kids are drugged. And ritilan, and the other speed-like drugs are only one class of such lousy, abusive drugging -- prozac type sedatives are also big.
Good point. Sugar may well play a role in hyped up kids, ditto "corn syrup" that shows up in virtually ever processed food, even frozen vegetables. Perhpas our obesity epidemic is in some way related to attention problems.
Twelve years ago, a book came out advancing the theory that watching tv's flickering images actually alters the pattern of brain development. Wracking my brain for the title....been on the comuter to long to recall.
Notice the lack of any numbers collected by anyone about how many of these kids are being raised by just the mother. Most women cannot handle an unruley child. Sure, there are exceptions, but most mothers can't do it. Funny how ADHD didn't become a problem until the divorce rate and single mother households grew to the obscene levels they are have been at in recent years.
In short, follow the money. Large, powerful industries have grown by exploiting kids and gullible parents. Get the government involved (schools, social services, "family relations" courts) as well, and you get this kind of mess. These parents need to wake up. They are being used, and their own children are being used as pawns in someone elses game.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.