Dr. Fred Baughman - if you research ADHD on the net you should know this name

[scuro]

His home page.
http://www.adhdfraud.org/

Articles, essays, and other information pertaining to the fraud of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)--Compiled by Dr. Fred Baughman

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD has been an adult & child neurologist, in private practice, for 35 years. Making "disease" (real diseases--epilepsy, brain tumor, multiple sclerosis, etc.) or "no disease" (emotional, psychological, psychiatric) diagnoses daily, he has discovered and described real, bona fide diseases.

It is this particular medical and scientific background that has led him to view the "epidemic" of one particular "disease"--Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)--with increasing alarm. Dr. Baughman describes this himself. Referring to psychiatry, he says:

"They made a list of the most common symptoms of emotional discomfiture of children; those which bother teachers and parents most, and in a stroke that could not be more devoid of science or Hippocratic motive--termed them a 'disease.' Twenty five years of research, not deserving of the term 'research.,' has failed to validate ADD/ADHD as a disease. Tragically--the "epidemic" having grown from 500 thousand in 1985 to between 5 and 7 million today--this remains the state of the 'science' of ADHD."

In addition to scientific articles that have appeared in leading national and international medical journals, Dr. Baughman has testified for victimized parents and children in ADHD/Ritalin legal cases, writes for the print media and appears on talk radio shows, always making the point that ADHD is fraudulent--a creation of the psychiatric-pharmaceutical cartel, without which they would have nothing to prescribe their dangerous, addictive, Schedule II, stimulants for--namely, Ritalin (methylphenindate), Dexedrine (dextro-amphetamine), Adderall (mixed dextro- and levo-amphetamine) and, Gradumet, and Desoxyn (both of which are methamphetamine, 'speed,' 'ice').

The entire country, including all 5-7 million with the ADHD diagnosis today, have been deceived and victimized; deprived of their informed consent rights and drugged--for profit! It must be stopped. Now!

His opinions
http://www.adhdfraud.org/frameit.asp?src=commentary.htm



and links to Scientology


An active opponent of the ADHD diagnosis, Baughman has been a child neurologist, in private practice, for 35 years. He is also a medical expert for the Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR), an advocacy group founded by the Church of Scientology in 1969. -> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontl...ng/interviews/
An interview in Freedom Magazine which is published by Scientology ->http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol31I2/page02.htm
and another -> http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-...%20scientology


Although he is frequently cited by CCHR and has written articles in support of Applied Scholastics, Dr. Baughman is generally regarded as an unrepresentative and ill-informed voice on learning disabilities. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI) told the Congressional Committee on Education and the Workforce in a letter of September 29, 2000 that Dr. Baughman "represent[s] fringe opinions about the disorder and about psychiatry." His position is certainly at odds with mainstream research and ignores the findings of a huge amount of research from around the world.

Even Dr. Baughman does not go quite as far as some supporters of Study Tech, who claim that the symptoms attributed to dyslexia are in fact caused by psychiatry:

"Dyslexia" is in fact a coverup for the victims of a deliberate psych-based assault on the mind which is also now another catch-all "treatable (and chargeable) psych illness".
(Ned Hoover, email to TNX mailing list, June 17, 1996)

[scuro]

So what you have with Baughman is a Dr. who has lost all objectivity and has become completly biased and shares the same belief system as Scientology. Scientology websites often link to his material or website. IMHO his message is a message of fear. That is the only way the Antipsych movement has any hope of influencing parents decisions.

More on Scientology here ->http://www.addforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=18118

[Hyperion]

in addition to believing that add, autism, schiophrenia, and bipolar disorders do not exist, his rationale for refusing to accept them as valid disorders could just as easily be used to deny that parkinson's disorder exists, which would be news to anyone who has witnessed family members confined to a wheelchair and unable to move due to this horrible illness.

his is a good website to illustrate the 'logic' often employed by pseudoscientists. he often repeats the same assertion over and over, even when it is not actually relevent to the point that he thinks he is refuting. he fails to provide affirmative arguments, that is to say that you see a lot of 'you are wrong,' arguments, without seeing any 'here is what is really happening here.'

in addition, you will note that he does not cite any other researchers or studies, makes no mention of scientific articles, and includes no peer-reviewed literature. much of the time, his 'commentary' involves picking apart news stories where the journalist is clearly either misunderstanding or oversimplifying very complex scientific issues. rather than discussing a peer-reviewed article, he sticks with common media.

finally, beware of anyone who claims that any area of science is simple, and appeals to 'common sense' as being more valid than scientific observations. 'common sense' is what led people to believe that the earth was flat and the sun revolved around it. neurology especially is a complicated subject. i know that i often try to simplify it and talk about how it's not too difficult to understand, and this is true, but a good writer will also convey the fact that while this is not exactly rocket science, it is brain surgery.

finally, one last important thing about science. scientific discoveries build on and corroborate discoveries in other fields. so with neurology and the issue of chemical imbalances, this is confirmed by what we know from cellular biology and organic chemistry. men like dr. baughman may try to make something like add seem like just a wild guess, but in order to do so, one would have to ignore pretty much everything known about biology and chemistry, not to mention that the entirety of the american psychological association, american psychiatric association, american medical association, national institutes of health, national institutes of mental health, and the world health organisation would all have to be either possess a level of incompetence usually only associated with fema, or be in on the conspiracy...of course, if the conspiracy to push prescription drugs on kids were that large, dividing up the money would leave each conspirator with fifty cents...or about the cost of a couple of pens.

little things like this should be good tip-offs that a particular website may be pushing pseudoscience.

compare this with the webpage for add that is run by the national institute of mental health. note the very obvious differences not only in factual content, but also in terms of the logic and the ways that evidence is presented.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/healthinformation/adhdmenu.cfm

[stanzen]

Thanks Scuro,

Gotta love his certitude; there are NO mental disorders!

That absolutist, black and white statement is a tip off that the information that follows will be equally empty and slanted.

Indeed, he follows with a homily about self-control.

Fred A. Baughman Jr: D and L, if you agree with "most" but not all of what I say: that there is no such thing as a mental, psychiatric disease/physical abnormality/chemical imbalance, you do not yet understand that such "disease" claims are a total,100% fraud. Absent objective brain diseases, all humans are capable of learning self control. It is up to the adults in their lives--parents, teachers, mostly, to teach them self control, and up to the individual, increasingly through childhood and adolescence, to learn self-control on his own. Parents, teachers and individuals who have come to believe in the chemical imbalance, psychiatic diagnosis as disease model, not knowing what to expect from themselves and the adults in their lives are terribly handicapped as set forth in life.

[scuro]

Originally Posted by Hyperion

in addition to believing that add, autism, schiophrenia, and bipolar disorders do not exist, his rationale for refusing to accept them as valid disorders could just as easily be used to deny that parkinson's disorder exists, which would be news to anyone who has witnessed family members confined to a wheelchair and unable to move due to this horrible illness.

Funny you should mention Parkinsons. That question was put to him in this PBS interview.

You've said that ADHD doesn't have a biological marker. But that's true of the majority of times that someone comes to see a doctor, unless they have a broken leg or an obvious malady. They're diagnosed on the basis of symptoms. The art of medicine is to read symptoms and guess what the problem is and apply drug therapy or some other kind. So are you misleading people by making the point that there's no biological marker?

... All physicians take a history, and that's most important in the diagnostic process. But history-taking remains in the realm of the subjective. You get cued as to where to go on--with your physical examination or with laboratory diagnosis or with radiologic diagnosis--in your search for objective evidence of an abnormality. So I may fully suspect in the history-taking that the spells I'm being told about are seizures. I might, on the other hand, suspect that they're ... fainting spells due to cardiac arrhythmia. But certainly, before I would start electroconvulsive therapy, which is usually lifelong once a patient has been diagnosed as epileptic, I would need to find abnormalities on an EEG.

But that doesn't always apply in many cases. How would you identify someone early on, biologically, as having Parkinson's disease?

There are all sorts of objective things that the physician sees with the typical stooped, still posture as the patient comes into the office.

How is that different from a child who's jumping off the walls? That's something you can see.

Yes, but ... children's level of activities vary tremendously from one location to the other, from one to the other. ...

I'm not a doctor or a neurologist. But I know I will talk to doctors who tell me that, 70 percent of the time, they're confronted with symptoms, and we don't find biological markers before diagnosis or prescription.

There are a lot of ... busy family practitioners, busy pediatricians, busy general internists, who, under the pressure of time, do make diagnoses and do prescribe, based primarily on history. But when it comes to diagnosing something that's serious--and if we're talking something abnormal about a child's brain or something abnormal about an adult's brain--that has lifelong consequences. A diagnosis of ADHD, most psychiatrists will tell you, is going to require lifelong psychotropic medication, usually Schedule II control psychostimulants, amphetamines, of which Ritalin is one. That's an extraordinarily serious diagnosis. ...

You've got to demonstrate the characteristic confirmatory physical abnormality before you obligate that patient to lifelong treatment. I can suspect diabetes based on the history, but I've got to confirm it. I've got to know whether the blood sugar is 420 or 800. ... I can't ever start insulin treatment or any oral anti-diabetic treatment without confirmatory evidence.

Representing such things as depression, anxiety, conduct disorder, ADHD, oppositional defiant disorder, learning disabilities as diseases absent any scientific proof, is to deceive the public and is to preempt the public's right to informed consent in every single case

[Hyperion]

the similarity goes even beyond similar diagnostic techniues. our understanding of the etiology of parkinson's disease is no better than that of add. just like with add, it appears to result from a lack of dopamine, although in very different areas of the brain. unlike add, however, we don't have much of an idea of what might cause the lack of dopamine, whether it's due to lack of vesicular stores, damage or permanent downregulation of the postsynaptic dopamine receptors, or perhaps actual physical damage or death of the dopamine producing neurons in that region. however, for all his talk of how chemical imbalances can't cause disease and any disease thought to be caused this way must be a fraud, clearly parkinson's is caused by a neurochemical imbalance, and just like with add, our current technology doesn't allow the kind of lab testing that you could do to test for hypoglycemia or diabetes or anemia.

incidentally, while he mentions that there is a characteristic look to parkinson's patients, he ought to know that there are other factors that can cause parkinson's symptoms in non-parkinson's patients. there was a famous case of an underground chemist attempting to synthesise a designer heroin analogue, and he screwed up and accidentally created a different drug, called mptp. pretty much all neurologists and cognitive neuroscientists have heard of this. patients who used this drug so completely burned out their dopamine system that they suffered from parkinson's-like symptoms, even though they were in their 20s, far below the normal age for the onset of the disease and had no family history of the disease.

my point is that neurochemical imbalances are very real, and have very real effects on behavior, and it is most certainly possible for drugs to modify these imbalances, either for good or for bad. as a neurologist, dr. baughman must surely know this.

[karenm]

I have spent the last couple of days in very interesting conversation with a Bob Collier, one of Baughman's followers. He has a couple of sites that support that ADHD is a myth.. Won't even attempt to polute this site with his comments or the links to his site.

Anyways.. I presented a challenge to Dr. B and Mr. Collier -- Dr B was was cc"d by Mr Collier - simple challenge to put his money where his mouth is.. If he really thinks that ADHD is not real, that it is only a scam created by the medical community.. try the following

Create a Publicly Announced CONTROLLED Scientific study.. A simple one for sure. Get a number of Diagnosed, articulate ADHD ADULTS in a room for several hours. Adults because we may be better able to describe their physical feelings.

Make sure that none of these individuals haven't taken any form of medication or suppliments. Then interview them/us, see how they/we are, what they/we are like.. Ask them to describe their emotions, their feelings - have them/us perform complex tasks. Tasks that we have difficulty performing or following through.

Then have us/them take their medication and interview them again .

I suggested that the test must be performed in a Controlled environment and for fairness and neutrality, there must be ADHD Medical Experts who are also involved with the questioning and research. In fact out of fairness there should be a meta study (meta-analysis combines the results of several studies that address a set of related research hypotheses) so that there will be no doubt or concern.

This challenge was offered to Collier on Monday Morning, and was forwarded to dr. b about an hour ago. At this time, I got a lot of foot dancing from Collier, where the challenge has not been acknowledged.. Hmm, I wonder, could it possibly be that we may Actually be able to Prove once and for all that there has been so many advancements in science, and even more discoveries since the DR has retired in 1999?

As I asked in my email, what does he have to lose if he "really" believes in what many believe to be totally unsupported personal thoughts and rhetoric.

I will advise the group to his response..

But, I did suggest that there would be many who would be willing to have him put up or shut up..

What are your thoughts?
Karen M

[meadd823]

We could always offer to send him all of our unmedicated hyperactive children for a week I can even throw in a hyperactive spouse free of charge. After the week is over then we shall see who is hallucinating. . . .

[KittenPoker]

!!!ACK!!!Freakin' Scientologist. I've been researching as a skeptic since 1998 and then I get this? Grrrr. I need to read more in depth...

[kilted_scotsman]

Out there on the web there will be the peer reviewed double blind trials of all the drugs licenced for ADHD treatment.

If these trials do not exist then there is a problem.

Only by including a placebo in the test/trial can it be statistically valid, particularly when dealing with unmeasureable outcomes such as improved wellbeing that are the objective of ADHD medication.

As you will see from the link here http://www.addforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=43658 referring to the destruction of 15 years worth of data following children with ADHD like SYMPTOMS in Sweden after individuals with an alleged but unproven links to Scientology attempted to use the courts to gain public access to the underlying data.

The researchers had (rightly in my view) argued that they had given a promise of confidentiality to the subjects and consequently could not release the underlying data into the public domain as in such a small population as Sweden the records could not be anonymised sufficiently to prevent identification of most if not all the subjects.

Given the nature of many of the issues confronting individuals with ADHD like SYMPTOMS (note I do NOT say ADHD diagnoses) the release of intimate details of mental health, illegal drug use, relationship and marital problems, promiscuity, financial mismanagement, sexual history and the like even the possibility that this data could be released to the wider world would make most potential subjects wary of taking part in trials.......which of course strengthens the hand of those wishing to "prove" there is no scientific evidence for ADHD like symptoms being linked to a common neurological and treatable cause.

Because of the subjective nature of many of the diagnosing symptoms and our lack of understanding of the nature of how the brain works sceptics and charlatans will always have plenty of ammunition to support their own pet theories particuarly if scientific research is hindered and academics and researchers have to defend themselves in courts.

kilt

[hollyduck]

Originally Posted by karenm

Anyways.. I presented a challenge to Dr. B and Mr. Collier -- Dr B was was cc"d by Mr Collier - simple challenge to put his money where his mouth is.. If he really thinks that ADHD is not real, that it is only a scam created by the medical community.. try the following

Create a Publicly Announced CONTROLLED Scientific study..

The difficulty with any of these scientific studies is that the Scientologists and other pseudoscientists have no interest in whether something is proven or unproven. They have a raw opinion and do whatever they have to do to maintain that opinion. If what they had was a theory which they wanted to investigate, prove or disprove, they would have already dug into the existing literature or added to it with their own studies.

So, a study such as you describe would be a complete waste of time, if its purpose was to change the minds of Dr. B. and his cohorts. Also, they would easily make the case that the people in the room would know whether they were supposed to be affected or not, therefore they could get all goofy for the first session -- deliberately so -- and then get all controled for the second session.

Since the difficulty of ADHD lies in the ability to control attention and focus, ADHD deniers can easily make the case that since the condition does not exist, anything that indicates it does exist is a result of control being exerted in order to demonstrate lack of control. Crazy, but there you are.

Ducky

[karenm]

Hi Guys,
thanks for answering. Actually I was one of the members of a controlled study for stratterra at the san diego university. Pretty cool experience. The Controlled studies must be acknowledged and okayed by the board of psychiatry; the questions would be created and instrumented by both doctors pro and con, thus the research would be fair, valid, accurate, precise, and honest. Very little room for wiggle.

They will also recognize the concerns that are mentioned, like people "pretending" or such like.. that is also why there are extensive interviews before one even becomes a member of the studies - my interview process to get on the research with staterra was very intensive.

Since I sent that initial email to bob collier (bc to dr b) there were about a dozen email exchanges, the last two were after I asked him to quit sending me emails unless they were willing to take the challenge. Put up or shut up!

NOT once were they willing to consider or address the challenge in Any way! the emails were full of the same old rhetoric that they spout. No scientific data, no proof. Nothing.

This is the same people who also say that depression, anxiety, OCC and other disorders are myths.

The biggest concern is that B is very influential, and the louder he get's the bigger his "movement" gets that eventually the FDA may end up giving into the pressure, and we may find it more difficult to obtain medications, or even worse, the drug companies will find it more challenging and will spend less time finding better medications for us.

Today the ADHD is considered one of the best researched disorder in American History. Unfortunately it is only in the past decade or more that the reality is that We don't grow out of it after the age of 14 - and more and more Adults are finally able to find the help we need. (very frustrating decade of my life was spent trying to get help)

There is still so much to learn about ADD/ADHD, and I am hoping that people like Dr B. and cronies will not put the damper on this area with their lack of informed proof, but personal prejudices.

It is imperative that we become as Loud as they do, and fight for OUR RIGHTS TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.

Karen M.

[meadd823]

Originally Posted by Karenm

It is imperative that we become as Loud as they do, and fight for OUR RIGHTS TO BE ACKNOWLEDGED.

Some of us are and have been for over a decade. Naturally the negative is what draws the most attention thus the most media.

Here is a thread addressing just such a thing. You may be intersted in some of the responses.

[KittenPoker]

At least Tom Cruise shot himself in the foot over the summer of 2005. "You're being glib, Matt! You don't know the history of psychiatry; I do!" and of course his manic couch jumping antics, PDAs with KatieBot2000, tell Brooke Shields that vitamins will cure PPD, etc. He has instrumental in exposing the craziness that makes up Scientology.

This quack doctor won't do too much in terms of real scientific R&D. The general public won't ever see him at seminars. The only ones who'll be receptive to his (read: Scientology) theories will be other brainwashed minions and people in search of a "cure" because they're in denial.

Tom, darling, please come out and admit you're gay and ADD. It's okay...we'll like you even more!

[karenm]

Unfortunately the Dr even though retired prior to much of the many major discoveries of this disorder is firmly rooted, established and acknowledged in the Science world. Was on the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology; and a fellow on American Academy of Neurology

He is frequently invited to speak at many of the conferences, he has testified before the FDA, Congress, the European Union, and the Parliament of Western Australia. Many of his articles appear in the leading scientific journals accross the world. He is often called to be an expert witness and has done so in several landmark cases, and yes, even received awards.

I unfortunately am unable to diminish his influence, and it is concerning. Even though his campaigning started in 1969, and it has been predominately based upon children it doesn't seem to stop others in acknowledging his beliefs

I didn't want to create an image of distinguishment about this person, because obviously based upon personal, real life experience, it is obvious that he does Not really aware of what he is saying. but, unfortunately, he continues to have a very strong following.

Which is why we must Stand up for our rights to be acknowledged as well