Healthy Skepticism Library item: 10164

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Publication type: news

Baughman FA.
Overdosed kids
Northern Express (Northern Michigan) 2007 May 24
http://www.northernexpress.com/editorial/letters.asp?id=2479

Notes:

Letter to the editor

Full text:

Re: “Are Kids Being Overdosed?” by Anne Stanton, May 17:
To answer these questions one must consider that all physicians go to medical school where they study (1) all things physically normal, (2) all things physically abnormal – diseases – and (3) how to examine, image and chemically test the patient to tell the difference.

All physicians (and this includes psychiatrists) know that in the specialty of psychiatry there are no actual physical abnormalities – diseases. Rather, abnormalities/diseases of the brain and nervous system are the province of the specialty of neurology — things like strokes, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, brain tumors, etc,

Abnormalities of the brain can be found on physical/neurological examination, brain scans and chemical tests. Such is not the case in psychiatry, where we deal with troubled emotions and troublesome behaviors-all subjective-but never with demonstrable, objective physical or chemical abnormalities.

And no such thing as a “chemical imbalance” of the brain has ever been proven to exist in psychiatry. There is no justification to give “chemical balancers”-pills for psychiatry’s “chemical imbalances” of the brain. They do not exist. Could it be this is all done for profit?

It is for this reason that the first and only real abnormality/disease in any psychiatric patient is the intoxication/poisoning with the first psychiatric drug they are given to ingest or are injected with. This is why their second, fifth, seventh and tenth real diseases are their intoxications/poisonings with their second, fifth, seventh and tenth psychiatric drugs; not a single one of them targeting a predetermined physical abnormality/disease.

This is why no psychiatric drug “treatment” has a scientific basis. Throughout the rest of medicine every “medicine” targets an abnormality in a scientifically designed manner: chemotherapy drugs preferentially targeting faster growing cancer cells; X-ray therapy targeting the faster growing cancer cells. Insulin, in diabetes, the shortage of insulin and elevated blood sugar level, antibiotics, the chemical life-cycles of infecting bacteria, etc.

But not in psychiatry! What we start with in psychiatry is a physically normal individual, albeit one who is emotionally troubled, and perhaps, troublesome. What we do with psychiatric drugs is erase or obliterate their being troubled and troublesome and we invariably do so by giving them chemicals, all of which act by damaging the brain in diffuse, inexact ways. Like a machete, one science writer put it.

No less than your children and grandchildren, or mine, what these children need is love, a home, parents, being protected, cared about, and cared for.

Being a foster child is not a medical condition. And yet psychiatry has laid claim to between 60 and 90 percent of foster children nationwide, drugging them all, putting their final stamp on them-the conspicuous physical sequelae of their drugging/poisoning—things like the grotesque, uncontrollable movements of tardive dyskinesias, or of what looks for all the world like a typical case of advanced-age, Parkinson’s disease, but for the fact it is seen in a five-year old-the handiwork of psychiatry.

By rejecting the fact that these children need love, structure, discipline and an education, but instead, imposing a system that makes them profit-points and intoxicates and poisons them we will surely rue the day when, at 18 or 21, they age-out and spill out into society totally unloved, unprepared, full of the realization that this is what was done to them-this and only this. Their cost in terms of life-long disability will be but a fraction of the cost we will pay for having “pimped” them to the for-profit, psychiatry-big pharma cartel.

In 2003, pediatrician William Carey, of the Philadelphia Children’s Hospital testified to Congress that 17% of US school-age children (8.5 million) were on one or more psychiatric drugs. Nor is this epidemic finite, like those of real, objectively verifiable diseases.

Spending on all psychiatric drugs climbed from $7.9 billion in 1997 to $20 billion in 2004, an increase of more than 150 percent (The Washington Times, April 1, 2007). Nor does it stop. Nor does the victimization of normal, defenseless children stop. Nor is there anything in the least scientific, healing or ethical about it.

Ask Steven Sharfstein, president of the American Psychiatric Association for proof that even one psychiatric diagnosis is a real disease. On June 27, 2005, on the Today Show with Matt Lauer, he had no answer for ethical psychiatrist, Dr. Joseph Glenmullen, who had told the truth of the matter: that there were no such things as “chemical imbalances” of the brain-the sales pitch of every unethical medical practitioner who make this their justification for making “patients” (usually lifetime “patients”) of normal children and drugging them.

Fred A. Baughman, MD
El Cahon, CA

Dr. Baughman is author of “The ADHD Fraud—How Psychiatry Makes ‘Patients’ of Normal Children.” www.Trafford.com He was in the private practice of neurology and child neurology in Grand Rapids from 1964-1975 before relocating to San Diego, CA. He is a former director of the March of Dimes, Western Michigan Birth Defects Clinic and assistant professor of Neurology at the Michigan State University School of Human Medicine.