In a report entitled "Trends in the Prescribing of Psychotropic Medications to Preschoolers," in the February 23, 2000, Journal of the American Medical Association, Zito, et al, confirm that "psychotropic medications prescribed for preschoolers increased dramatically between 1991 & 1995." They conclude, "The predominance of medications with off-label indications calls for prospective community-based, multidimensional, outcome studies."What Zito, et al, and most physicians, fail to explain to parents is that " off-label " means that no scientific study of the drug has been conducted and whether or not it is safe or beneficial (as treatment for a given disease) is simply not known. The other point they fail to consider is that virtually all children put on psychiatric drugs have no actual disease, but are entirely normal.
It comes as a shock to most parents to learn that physicians can and do prescribe drugs that have never been proven to be safe or beneficial (therapeutic). The vast majority of psychiatric drugs given to children, are prescribed "off label," which means they are "unknowns." For the 'patients' studied by Zito, et. al. --infants, toddlers and preschoolers -not a single one of the psychiatric drugs being given to them with such abandon, are known to be either beneficial (therapeutic) or safe; i.e., other than poisonous.
Imagine what these drugs are doing to the wonderous, infinitely complex, developing, brains of infants, toddlers, preschoolers, and even of the 7-8 million now on psychiatric drugs, K-12, in US government schools. This is an astounding 15 percent of all students. Five to six million are on Ritalin and other amphetamines, known to be addictive, dangerous, and sometime deadly, as 'treatment' for the invented, fraudulent 'disease' ADHD. Another 1-2 million, with other psychiatric labels, get any and all of what remains of the considerable psychopharmacologic armamentarium: specific serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), those of the Prozac, Luvox, Zoloft family, which themselves, cause mania in 6-8%; the older-line, tricyclic antidepressants, bearing special dangers for the heart, and special deadliness for those seeking to commit suicide; Cylert, banned in Canada, but not in the US, due to it's propensity to cause liver deaths; the anti-high blood pressure pill, Clonidine, known, especially when used with Ritalin, for it's prominent role in cardiac emergencies and deaths, and anti-epileptic and antipsychotic drugs as well. It is unconscionable to give neuroleptic/antipsychotic medication to children. Taken long enough, all drugs of this type cause conspicuous, undeniable brain damage. What is going on here? In the parlance of the marketplace; in the parlance of provider-induced-need, every prescription written, like every diagnostic label appended, translates to 'patient capture.' That is what is going on here.
All patients and all parents have a right to 'informed consent;' a right to know all that is 'material' about the condition or disease as well as the treatment or treatments proposed. In this instance, the 'benefit' side of the 'risk' vs. 'benefit' equation, contains drugs or 'treatments' about which nothing is known. On the 'risk' side we have only NORMAL, if misbehaving, children -no actual diseases whatsoever. I say this because ADHD, conduct disorder -CD, oppositional defiant disorder -ODD, emotional disability -ED, severe emotional disability -SED, all of the learning disabilities -LDs, and every last one of psychiatry's 'disorders,' those which they so stridently represent to us as 'diseases' due to 'chemical imbalances' in the brain, are not diseases at all, but are inventions, contrivances and illusions of disease, made expressly for the purpose of labeling, drugging, and billing. It is that simple. It is that heinous.
Lawrence Diller, MD, author of the book, Running on Ritalin, (Washington Post, Over-Medicating America's Kids, 2/2/2000, page A 21) puts his finger on the one-and-only cause of the US (like nowhere else in the world) psychiatric/educational, labeling/drugging frenzy. He states: "Both the professionals and public have come to believe most serious childhood emotional problems have a biological basis and therefore should be addressed with a medication." Professor William Carey of the University of Pennsylvania, testified at the November, 16-18, 1998, National Institutes of Health Consensus Conference on ADHD: "What is now most often described as ADHD in the United States appears to be a set of normal behavioral variations... This discrepancy leaves the validity of the construct in doubt..." Writing in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), April 28, 1999, I stated, "Once children are labeled with ADHD, they are no longer treated as normal. Once methylphenidate hydrochloride or any psychotropic drug courses through their brain and body, they are, for the first time, physically, neurologically, and biologically abnormal."
The US hasn't just 'come' to believe this, they have been 'lead' to believe in a new reality in which there is no longer any such thing as 'normal childhood,' or a 'normal child.' This is the lie of so-called biological psychiatry, the lynch-pin of the psychopharmaceutical propaganda campaign. They call every psychiatric 'disorder' a 'disease,' without a shred of evidence of a physical or chemical abnormality within the brain or body of the individual - -the definition of the word 'disease.'
Deceiving the child, and all of the adults in the life of the child, having them believe that he or she has a 'chemical imbalance of the brain,' a 'brain disease,' they damage every one--psychologically. Prescribing such drugs, they cause physical/chemical damage as well - whether we can detect it or not. Such is the way with drugs of addiction -Ritalin and with all of it's fellow amphetamines. What's more, brain scanning research over the past 15 years has proved, not that ADHD exists, caused by the 10% brain atrophy seen in ADHD subjects, but rather that Ritalin/stimulant therapy, ongoing in nearly all such research subjects, is itself, the cause of the brain atrophy (shrinkage). This is yet another fact not shared with the public or with the parents of children psychiatry prepares to 'treat.' In psychiatry, there is no such thing as true 'informed consent.'
Where Zito, et al, call for "prospective community-based, multidimensional, outcome studies, " the only appropriate recommendation is "an immediate condemnation and embargo of all such practice -none of it legitimate medical practice at all."
*Also, in the 2/22/00, The New York Times, as Sharp Rise Found in Psychiatric Drugs for the Very Young, by ERICA GOODE, and in the 2/22/00 THE WASHINGTON POST as Behavioral Drug Use In Toddlers Up Sharply by Susan Okie. San Diego Union Tribune, 2/23/00: Use of potent medications on preschoolers increases (Experts warn effects are largely unknown) by Lindsey Tanner, AP.
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Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD
Email: FRED-alden@worldnet.att.net
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