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.
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.
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
-
ten talks excessively
-
eleven interrupts
-
twelve
can’t listen
-
thirteen loses things
-
fourteen 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.
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.
Mike: Well, let’s get back to the parents if we could for a
minute. People in positions of authority, people who apparently
have an education in neurology or psychiatry, are telling
parents that their children have a chemical brain disorder. It’s
a very convincing argument to the parents.
Dr. Baughman: Yes it is, and I must point out that virtually
every physician-patient encounter in the country, regardless of
specialty, has wholeheartedly embraced this scheme. That includes
the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Child Neurology Society,
of which I am a member, the American Academy of Family Practice,
and by various psychological groups.
The American Academy of
Pediatrics in fact, republished in the DSM for diagnostic
criteria for ADHD in the journal Pediatrics, I think it was in
1999, and subsequently published a guideline for the
psycho-stimulant treatment of ADHD the following year, I believe
in 2000. In so doing, the American Academy of Pediatrics, along
with the other groups I just mentioned, served notice that they
intended to enter the business of diagnosing and drugging
entirely normal children for profit.
That’s one of the things
that has spurred the epidemic.
Mike: Now, do you have any colleagues who are also standing up
and openly questioning this practice, or are you pretty much
finding yourself isolated?
Dr. Baughman: I’ve been isolated, but there are a small cadre of
honest scientific physicians who feel as I do, and a smaller
number yet, that are speaking out. I’ve really been surprised to
behold the impact that my web site has had. Now I’ve got a book
that is going to be published soon.
Mike: Can you give us the title of that book please?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, it’s called “The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry
Makes Patients of Normal Children.” It will be available through
www.Trafford.com - Trafford publishing company
- and it should be
available within the week.
Mike: Have you been pressured to censor your views in any way or
have you taken any heat?
Dr. Baughman: Back in 1994-95, I made a formal written proposal
to the American Academy of Neurology to write practice parameter
for ADHD that would essentially determine the best advisable
practices for the disease. The Academy wrote an encouraging
response and gave me the go ahead in writing.
I presented them
with a statement saying that my review of the world scientific
literature found no evidence that ADHD was a disease. The next
thing that happened was that I heard from members of the Quality
Assurance Committee that my efforts wouldn’t really be needed any
longer. So I was essentially deep-sixed; I was put on the shelf.
Mike: Do you know which of these groups accept money from
pharmaceutical companies?
Dr. Baughman: Every one of them. Every one of them accepts lots
of money and there is no such thing as a psychiatric expert in
any psychiatric disorder that is not wholly owned or operated by
the pharmaceutical industry.
Mike: That’s a big statement.
Dr. Baughman: That is a big statement and a big and tragic
truth.
Mike: So these experts are really just paid promoters of the
drugs.
Dr. Baughman: They’ve got M.D. degrees and so they masquerade as
scientific physicians but they have sold their souls and they
have sold whatever scientific credentials they ever had.
Mike: What kind of money can they make writing these
prescriptions for children?
Dr. Baughman: They are making an immense amount of money;
millions of dollars.
Mike: This is all very difficult for the average American parent
or consumer to swallow. They simply cannot believe that
individuals would be so evil as to sell their souls to
pharmaceutical companies.
Dr. Baughman: I think this has a great deal to do with
the magnitude of the psychiatric epidemic in general and the
ADHD epidemic. Parents, ordinary layman, going with their
children at the behest of school officials in the first place, could not
believe that someone would tell a total lie to them. They cannot
imagine that.
At the moment, I’m working with individuals to put
together a consumer fraud suit here in the state of California,
based on fraudulent diagnosis of ADHD and subsequent drugging. If
you’ve been lied to and told you have a disease when you don’t
and then drugged, that’s battery.
Mike: Will you keep me posted on this action?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, people keep asking about it. I tell them to
keep an eye on my web site because if we get this thing going, I
certainly will be posting notes as to our progress or lack of
it.
Mike: If you set a precedent in California, this thing could
really sweep the nation.
Dr. Baughman: That is what we hope. They’ve had such obscene
amounts of drug company money to defend themselves, that no one
has really succeeded against them as is necessary to put an end
to this fraud. It’s so much more than a fraud when they actually
poison normal children, which is what they’re doing.
Mike: I’ve heard it described somewhere else on the internet as
a chemical holocaust or crimes against humanity.
Dr. Baughman: There has been a perversion of the language. They
have taken entirely normal children and made patients out of
them by diagnosing them with fictional chemical imbalances of
the brain. It’s a total fraud.
I have observed two national news
programs recently, talking about a new kind of disability that
our soldiers in the Iraqi conflict are developing. I listened to
hear what the new disease was. Lo and behold, it was PTSD,
post-traumatic stress disorder.
I grant you, there are a lot of troubling visions and
experiences that all men in a war are exposed to, and these cause
troubling flash-backs and troubled sleep. But it’s not an organic
disease of the brain as psychiatry would have us believe, nor
are these symptoms inevitable. They would have all the soldiers
over there believe that PTSD is a disease with a grave
prognosis.
They tell them they are never going to get rid of
these terrible flash-backs without the help of a new drug that
they’re trying to develop to obliterate those painful memories.
Mike: Well, that’s the way to make a permanent customer, isn’t
it?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, and the media has bought into this
psychiatric disease mongering, and that’s why it is rampant.
That’s why the drugging of our children is rampant.
Mike: Isn’t the next great marketing frontier for these
companies adult ADHD now?
Dr. Baughman: Well yes, it’s not the future; it’s the
present. There has been a tremendous year-to-year growth in the
billions of prescriptions for
Adderall,
Ritalin,
Concerta, and
all the other amphetamines. My alma mater, New York University
School of Medicine, is at the very forefront of this fraud.
There was a story in the magazine section of the New York Times
roughly a year ago, describing the launch of an adult ADHD
clinic at the university. They had a hall or a big space at the Helmsley Hotel. I guess they had signs out on the curb saying
this was underway on the top floor. If you want to be checked for
ADHD, go on up.
Mike: They had a recruiting service there.
Dr. Baughman: People went up and they took this behavioral
checklist test and 85 percent of those taking the test had the
disease. They got labeled and were on their way the very next
day to their doctors with a new label.
Mike: Is it true that I could make an appointment with a
psychiatrist walk in and say I have trouble focusing, I’m easily
distracted and I fidget a lot, and right then I could be
diagnosed and put on these drugs?
Dr. Baughman: Let me tell you something. In a 2002 survey done
by the American Academy Of Child and Adult Psychiatry, they
looked at the surveying practices of child psychiatrists and
found that 91 percent of children seeing child psychiatrists
came out of their initial visit with a prescription for a drug.
Mike: Ninety-one percent?
Dr. Baughman: Ninety-one percent. I would say that a third to a
half of all the patients I saw as a neurologist had no organic
disease. Now contrast that with this 2002 study survey of child
psychiatry, where 91 percent are coming away with a prescription.
Were the 90 percent commonsense parents? Most likely.
Mike: If you look at the big picture of what’s happening here,
what does this say about scientific integrity in Western
civilization, if these well-educated people in this so-called
scientific organization can invent such a widespread hoax? Does
this have you questioning some of scientific truth today, or
what’s your view on it?
Dr. Baughman: I pointed out earlier that it’s not just
psychiatry, but its pediatrics, neurologists, family
practitioners, psychologists, and school teachers across the
country that have become pawns and are not seeing the evil of
their ways by becoming pushers for the drugging establishment.
This is the standard of practice across the board.
The entire
profession has been bought out. On average, every physician in
the country gets $13,000 per year from the drug companies.
Mike: In what form?
Dr. Baughman: They get free dinners, golf, free trips, but that
money isn’t spread around equally. Itis spread strategically so
that your top policy makers in medicine - your top psychiatrists
and your heads of departments - get more money than anyone else.
Some get about $500,000 a year, and it has been so successful
that no one within academic medicine can speak out as I speak
out. I knew along time ago I would not prove compatible with the
sort of control from above that is the rule in academic medicine.
Mike: So you are saying that anybody in academic medicine has to
go along to get along.
Dr. Baughman: If they were to stand up and say things that I
say, they would be out the next day. NYU has become a hive for
disease-inventing psychiatry. I got the sad news that the
department received more funds to train more poisoners of normal
children.
Mike: Well, I think it’s obvious that you have experienced the
idea that when you operate with integrity in this world, it can
be a pretty lonely path. Now let’s talk about poisoning and the
long-term implications. What happens to Americans when one out
of five children grow up on speed or some other kind of
psychiatric drug?
Dr. Baughman: Well, we are at that number clearly. We are
drugging well over 10 million. There is no sign that it’s
getting better. I pointed out that ADHD in adults is a rapidly
growing market sector, so I think when you are told you’ve got a
disease and you are in fact normal, you are damaged just by the
label.
When you are given a drug to normalize an abnormality in
your body or brain that doesn’t exist, that’s poisoning and you
are going to be damaged by that drug every single time. So the
side effect rate for Ritalin or for Adderall is 100 percent.
There is no kid that gets put on these drugs that isn’t altered
by them. Their perceptions, behaviors, feelings and emotions are
always changed and not always noticeably.
They are always
altered and there are horrible long-term consequences that we
can’t begin to know.
Mike: What long-term side effects have you heard of?
Dr. Baughman: I mentioned before that Health Canada found that
there were roughly 20 to 30 cases of strokes in young children,
roughly 10 or 12 sudden deaths, heart abnormalities. Just before
the Feb. 9 FDA hearing, there were 51 reported cases of
complications, deaths, strokes and heart attacks reported to the
FDA MedWatch program. I have written testimony on the record for
the Feb. 9 FDA conference.
In fact, back in the 1990s, I testified in a Kansas City case
for Mr. Gary Bell on behalf of his daughter Stephanie. She
underwent heart surgery for what I think was a complication of
her long-term Ritalin use. At any rate, Gary Bell and I did a
freedom of information request for all the deaths and injuries
related to Ritalin or methylphenidate, and for 1990-1997 there
were 160 deaths from methylphenidate Ritalin.
There were another
26 deaths for 1998 to 2000, 186 deaths for the decade.
Mike: Again, these are only voluntary reports.
Dr. Baughman: These are voluntary reporting schemes to MedWatch,
1 percent of actual incidents the FDA says. That means there may
have been 18,600 for that decade. I have personally been
consulted in about a dozen death cases, including Matthew Smith
of Royal Oak, Michigan, which is just outside of Detroit. He and
his parents had been coerced to keep him on Ritalin from first
grade to age 13.
He suddenly fell over while playing with friends
and died. At autopsy, his heart muscle was diffusely enlarged,
scarred and infiltrated with fat. The medical examiner, Dr. Drakovic, a highly experienced pathologist, said there was no
doubt in his mind that Matthew Smith died of long-term chronic
amphetamine methylphenidate Ritalin poisoning.
Mike: So we have a population that is potentially setting
themselves up for long-term death and harm just like drug
addicts?
Dr. Baughman: Yes. Reports that young athletes, college and high
school athletes suddenly drop dead are not uncommon. There was a
pro ballplayer, I think a pitcher on the Baltimore Orioles, who
had been on supplements that contained ephedrine, which is very
similar to the amphetamines.
My feeling is that steroid use and
amphetamine use is very, very common in athletes at the high
school level and up. I think every one of those deaths is
conceivably related to psychiatric drugs, most of which have
startling coronary cardiac heart consequences. Not just
amphetamines, but all of these so-called anti-psychotics, which
are horrible poisons the pharmaceutical industry is hoisting
upon the population.
Almost all those drugs have cardiac side
effects
as well.
Mike: Before I wrap this up. I have to ask about the front
groups for psychiatric medicine, like
TeenScreen and
CHAD. Give
us a rundown on these groups and what they do.
Dr. Baughman: Teen Screen is coming to us out of Columbia
University, once an esteemed medical school uptown from NYU,
which was also once a proud scientific institute.
David
Schaefer, the psychiatrist who has authored Teen Screen, along
with the pharmaceutical sponsors, is not content with the rate
of growth of psychiatric poisoning in this country, so they want
to make it mandatory that all kids in our captive population,
our schools to take diagnostic tests.
Mike: So they think four out of every 10 kids…
Dr. Baughman: That is probably a low yield for Teen Screen. I
would think that more of these screens would have a 60, 70 or
even 80 percent positive diagnostic rate like the adult ADHD
screen run by New York University at one of the Helmsley Hotels.
As long as they’ve got enough friends in Congress and in the
White House to write these things into law, they’re going to
carry on.
Teen Screen is very much a product of the White House.
The President’s new Freedom Commission on Mental Health launched
the notion of Teen Screen.
Mike: Which is mandatory mental health screening, right?
Dr. Baughman: Yes. I think Illinois already passed it and made
it law. They are not asking parents whether or not they want
their kids screened. This is Big Brother to the max. This is
worse than anything Stalin could have imagined. This population
had better wake up; the implications go far beyond the drugging
of our normal school children.
Mike: That leads me to my final question:
-
How does all of this
ever end?
-
How does this return to normal?
-
When is the fraud
exposed?
-
How long will it take?
-
If the pharmaceutical companies
are so powerful and control so many big players, how does this
ever get exposed?
Dr. Baughman: Exactly. Right now there is a pharmaceutical
company lobbyist for every member of Congress and probably three
or four for every senator. Who knows how many for the president?
It is really a horror story unfolding. When I started medicine
in 1964, I thought we were a wonderful profession. We didn’t
have to compromise ourselves by inventing things to do. That has
changed 100 percent. The medical profession is a disgrace today.
Mike: Again for those reading, you are hearing from Dr. Fred
Baughman, pediatric neurologist and M.D. Your web site is
www.ADHDfraud.org. What is the title of your upcoming book?
Dr. Baughman: “The ADHD Fraud: How Psychiatry
Makes Patients of Normal Children.”
Mike: Okay, that’s a title that we will be looking forward to.
Any last thoughts, Dr. Baughman?
Dr. Baughman: Yes, you might also consider getting a DVD
production by Gary Null Associates in New York City, called
“Drugging Our Children.” I was interviewed for it in a powerful
hard-hitting video view of what we’ve talked about here. I also
have a video that I produced with footage from the 1998 ADHD
consensus conference. My video is called “ADHD Total 100%
Fraud.” It can be purchased through my web site.
Mike: If you have any new items, books, videos or press
releases, send them my way. I will be happy to get that out to
the readers.
Dr. Baughman: I sure will.
