OPEN MINDS On-Line News Service

March 6, 2000

OPEN MINDS Feature

PERSPECTIVES FROM THE FIELD—Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD, Neurologist/Child Neurologist

Editors Note: OPEN MINDS On-Line News welcomes the viewpoints of professionals and stakeholders throughout the field. In this following piece, our first installment of Perspective From the Field, Dr. Fred A. Baughman, Jr. reissues his call for the resignation of U.S. Surgeon General, Dr. David Satcher. Originally appearing as a national news release, Dr. Baughman's comments cut to the very foundation of what we believe about the cause and treatment of mental illness as well as children's disorders.

Neurologist Calls for Surgeon General's Resignation Over Mental Health Report

Fred A. Baughman, Jr., M.D., a San Diego neurologist, has urged that Surgeon General David Satcher resign as a result of his Report on Mental Health. Baughman described the report as an "infomercial for biopsychiatry and the pharmaceutical cartel." He admonished Satcher: "It is your duty…to convey the medical science of the day to all Americans, yet, you put the considerable weight of your office behind representing the scientifically unproven ‘disorders’ of the psychiatric/pharmaceutical cartel to be actual ‘diseases.’" "The fact that psychiatrists do not perform physical or neurological examinations by which diseases of the brain and nervous system are diagnosed, make their claims of diagnosing and treating ‘biologically- based,’ brain diseases, unbelievable, a fraud." "There is no physical or chemical abnormality to be found during life, or at autopsy, in ‘depression,’ ‘bipolar disorder,’ ‘attention deficit hyperactivity disorder’ (ADHD), or in any other ‘mental illness.’’’ Baughman adds that the representation of ‘mental disorders’ to be ‘diseases,’ due to ‘chemical imbalances’ of the brain, dissuades the individual from attempts to adapt and cope, in favor of reaching for pills— ‘chemical balancers.’ A relentless, money-is-no-object, psychiatric/pharmaceutical dis-information campaign, has convinced the public that all emotional and behavioral problems are ‘brain diseases,’ ‘chemical imbalances of the brain’. Gone are such a things a ‘normal childhood’. Gone is ‘pulling one-self up by the boot-straps.’ Gone is psychotherapy.

Children are especially at risk. There is never medical or moral justification for drugging a normal child to control their behavior? Why else the ‘invented’ diseases? In the US as nowhere else in the world, Ritalin and other amphetamines are being given to 5-6 million entirely normal children to control behaviors the adults in their lives find objectionable. According to Dr. Baughman, ADHD simply does not exist and pills are pushed as a result of never proven, never-provable, fraudulent, diagnosis. The brain-scanning literature, he points out, proves not that brain atrophy (shrinkage, smallness) is the long-sought, confirmatory abnormality of ADHD, but that the chronic Ritalin-amphetamine ‘treatment’ that virtually all ADHD subjects, were on, was the cause of their 10% brain atrophy. This, of course, is a pertinent, material, bit of information that ought to be shared with every parent called upon to give ‘informed consent’ to prescribe Ritalin for their child. But, of course it is not. Nor are parents told, by way of ‘informed consent’ that

ADHD does not exist; that the child they contemplate drugging, is normal. The same is true of the risk vs. benefit computation when considering psychiatric drug treatment for every psychiatric ‘disease.’