I was talking to folks in my local coffee shop and the subject of ADD and hyperactive children came up, as did Ritalin. This made me remember several things. Here are some of them in the form of an article.
I am delighted to report that at least some parents have begun to use common sense, instead of a reflex acceptance of the word of an expert looking for his next Mercedes payment. There is a class suit underway that accuses the makers of the drug Ritalin and the American Psychiatric Association, (APA) of being in a conspiracy. The sole aim of this conspiracy, says the suit, was the making of money (in huge amounts) by diagnosing children as ADD and hyperactive.
This has been a matter of deep suspicion to every health writer who has researched the methods used to diagnose and treat children labeled as hyperactive or with attention deficit disorder, or both. But they had the advantage over the parents of not having several different layers of officialdom leaning on them from schools and medical facilities.
You already know how parents are being pressured to have their children injected with many vaccines, simply to fulfill legal requirements to attend school. This is the same drug company/medical complex at work, and not on behalf of your children. The same applies to the prescribing of Ritalin as a reflex by the psychiatrist, and sometimes now even at the suggestion of the school nurse.
Read this with care. It may apply to someone near and dear to you. You must NOT always go along with the ‘experts know best’ theory where your children are concerned. Yes, you go to the ‘experts’ but you MUST think for yourself as well, in real world terms. To do that of course you need data that it may not be in the expert’s financial best interests to give you..
Here is some such data. If you have or know a child diagnosed as an ADD or hyperactive child, some of this data may help you. I hope so. I am not prescribing, of course, that is the sole legal prerogative of physicians, whose prescribed drugs kill an average of over 120,000 people a year according to the AMA’s own statistics. And all those drugs are approved by another set of experts, the FDA.
Don’t be sucked in by the theory that knowing anything that a doctor knows is impossible for your brain because you don’t wear a white coat as standard equipment. You can read. You can think. Think on these things before you make decisions about Ritalin, or allow anyone else to do so without your consent. Your kid usually has only one chance at each grade. Make sure it’s the best one your efforts can provide.
Politicians and corporate leaders talk a lot about the next generation and its future accomplishments. As a health writer I wonder who they are talking about. It isn’t the generation that I see. Over 4 million children are currently taking part in a huge drug experiment, that is likely to end up being a money-making scam. These children, mainly boys, are being dosed every day with a mind-altering brain stimulant that works like Speed and other amphetamines, and is in the same drug classification as heroin and morphine. That is what Ritalin is. It isn’t a baby aspirin.
An adult found possessing this drug without a prescription would go to jail. Some parents who became Ritalin addicts as children know this. They put pressure on doctors to prescribe Ritalin for their children, and then take it themselves. It’s illegal for them to have it. But where there’s a will there’s a way. 'The family that drugs together hugs together,' to twist a well-known phrase into the Ritalin realm.
The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has put out a list of behaviors that are, to it and their followers, sufficient cause for a child to be given this dangerous drug. Their members, and the drug companies, and some sections of the education establishment have got together to convince the public that the drug Ritalin is both necessary and safe.
This is not a mistake. It is a lie. The public as usual is being conned into going along with the experts. The children suffer, and will continue to suffer on this dangerous, habit-forming drug. The drug companies, also as usual, will make millions, and then set the scene for other ‘anti-depressive’ drugs to be used later on, as patents expire. The drugs are already being prepared, as is the propaganda that will sell them. It’s easy to plan ahead if the behavior of your market is predictable.
I am going to give you, word for word, the behaviors that the APA uses in their unscientific and probably spurious, APA diagnostic tests. Those who have had children will see from this list that it is easy to put ANY alert, intelligent child into the ‘needs drugs’ category’ using it, and the drug companies are gearing up to have about half of America’s youngsters dependent on their products.
Please note that these criteria are totally non-medical. They are used by observers with a pretty clear agenda. There are no brain scans, X-rays, blood tests for allergies, or any established medical evidence that these children have a mental disease of this kind. The list of behaviors below comes from the diagnostic manual of the APA. I must mention that it was in Dec.'96 that the revised manual had just abandoned the assumption of Freudian analysts that religious belief was a sign of immaturity, possibly even neurosis.
Remember that if you go to church, or believe in the existence of a Supreme Being. Until that date, the official line of the APA was that you were certainly immature, and possibly neurotic, if you did those things. This profession, I have read, has the highest percentage of atheists of any profession, probably because it is so cool to be superior to all the folks living in superstition, and anyway it is also very lucrative.
Remember that is people like this who can, and do, translate just about any human behavior, yours included, into terms of mental illness ( steady income), just like their neurotic master Sigmund Freud, who fainted when people mentioned his father.
All that is required to set the Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder profit machinery in motion is that kids display such behaviors as these, which you and I or other intelligent students probably displayed for centuries before Ritalin. Read with care. It could easily have been you if the drug had been available, and your parents had been intimidated. These are the questions that produce the data.
Does the child often:
• fidget with his hands or feet or squirm in his seat,
• have difficulty remaining seated when required to do so,
•run about or climb in situations in which it is inappropriate,
•have difficulty playing quietly,
• blurt out answers before questions have been completed,
•have difficulty sustaining his attention,
•talk excessively,
•shift from one uncompleted activity to another,
•not seem to pay attention when spoken to directly,
• make mistakes in schoolwork,
Look at those listed behaviors. DON’T LAUGH. A whole generation of kids is being drugged because of this list. Read the list again. That’s a list made by the same people who gave us Freud for the Millions, and made millions of parents uncertain about how best to bring up their children, thus ensuring a never-ending group of clients. These are the experts.
If the child exhibits any of these behaviors in class it can be, and has been taken as an indication of Attention Deficit Disorder or possibly Hyperactivity.
This list is like the thirty plus volumes of IRS regulations that nobody can obey. There isn’t any normal child who couldn’t be labeled as ADHD by some official who used this list with an axe to grind, and many of the behaviors are in fact typical of very alert, intelligent children, who are bored by stuff that’s too easy, or by reviews of material they know well already.
Do we really have to be impressed by the profession whose representative psychiatrist Chester Pearce addressed the 1973 Childhood International Education Seminar, and said
“Every child in America entering school at the age of five is mentally ill because he comes to school with certain allegiances to our Founding Fathers, toward our elected officials, toward his parents, toward a belief in a supernatural Being. It’s up to you as teachers to make these sick children well.”
Read that again too. If you think the Founding Fathers did a good job, bought a flag after 9/11, or your parents did their best for you, or if you believe in a Supreme Being, you are automatically mentally ill according to what the ‘expert’ said. And note that he was asking teachers to act as diagnosticians, an illegal matter.
I don’t know personally many teachers who hold such views, nor parents either, come to that. But it is men like this expert whose values go into absurd diagnostic tests like the one we have looked at. If you don’t feel the need to disagree with that sort of value destruction then your children will suffer.
Our industrial competitors, and recent enemies in Germany, Japan and half a dozen other countries that regard us as the bullies of the world, must be pretty pleased to realize that their next undrugged generation or two will be competing with a country of mentally handicapped people, and that all the bright ones have been drugged into helpless passivity and addiction, and need their drugs to function at all.
In this country, just about every great achiever of the past would today be on Ritalin because of the ‘symptoms’ listed by the APA, very few of who would seem to have had any experience of normal children on the face of it.
Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, Sacajawea, Thomas Edison, Florence Nightingale, Orville Wright, Bill Gates, I could list 100 other famous men and women who would all be drugged in today’s schools, and whose creativity and energy would be non-available to the world because of that fact.
This list of spurious, untested, non-medical criteria is what has put over 4 million children on drugs without a preceding medical condition. They are being drugged because they behave like kids! So far, according to the International Narcotics Board we have over 12% of all the boys between 6 and 16 on this drug.
Are we becoming a country of insane people who give our children away to anyone in a white coat so that they can take our money, and then we have to bring up the damaged human being that results? Why do we in America fail to protect our children from such vultures, while parents in other countries recognize the money-hungry, self-styled experts for the ruthless profiteers they are, and reject them?
In some elementary schools up to 40% of the children are taking Ritalin daily. That is INSANE! What is the matter with us as a nation that we allow this kind of nonsense? Ritalin is completely banned in some countries. There are others that use it only in special cases, but the U.S. uses at five times more than the rest of the world combined. Doesn’t that tell us anything about those who prescribe it? Can we really be so naïve?
The LIE put out by the health care providers, and the drug companies' flunkies, is that these ‘abnormal’ behaviors stem from an imbalance in brain chemistry that can be remedied by a drug...Ritalin. It’s the same as saying that the kids have a medical condition like a Ritalin deficiency, and parents and teachers and physicians buy into this propaganda,
Ritalin and cocaine are on the same FDA Schedule II list of narcotics and have practically the same effects in the same part of the brain. Cocaine addicts find it hard to tell the difference between the two. This data comes from experiments by drug enforcement agencies. Ritalin abuse is responsible for more emergency room visits among certain age groups than cocaine. Other drugs on the same schedule are opium and morphine.I repeat, it’s not a kiddy aspirin. It’s serious bad news.
In 1990 there were 900,000 children on Ritalin. In 1995 there were over 3 million. Now it’s 4 to 5 million. Doesn’t that tell an intelligent parent something about the drug companies and the psychiatrists?
I’m happy to repeat that there are now lawsuits and malpractice suits against school administrations and physicians, because the parents had not been informed about the severe side effects of the drug. These include nervousness, weight loss, insomnia, nightmares, hallucinations, stunted growth of the skull, with consequent interference with normal brain growth, nausea, headaches, irregular heart beat, chest pains and drowsiness, to name a few.
There are others. And all this interference with normal life occurs at the time when maximum growth occurs. Nature’s blueprint NEVER allows for backtracking. Miss a step and it’s gone for this lifetime. A double disaster!
And if the current rate of increase in writing prescriptions continues, then these symptoms, and the subsequent interference with normal development, will be experienced by about 8 million American children when we are a little further into this millennium.
What a thing to look forward to! The debraining of America by the profit motive, left unchecked in the hands of unscrupulous experts, and with the willing, though ignorant consent of the teachers and parents of the damaged-for-life children.
And, like other habit forming drugs, when and if Ritalin is discontinued, there are very severe withdrawal symptoms, among them suicidal depression. What are they going to do then...go onto another drug; get the expert psychiatrists involved again? Dracula in charge of the blood bank indeed!
I have written other posts about the Columbine disaster and the Cho incident, pointing out how in just about every case the gunmen were on drugs like Ritalin and had been for some time. Yet the drug connection was never mentioned in the press, clear though it was. Something to do with ad revenue maybe.
The drug companies that aren’t making their money on Ritalin are planning to get into the ‘kids with depression’ market, as soon as they can, and companies are spending millions right now on preparing the propaganda and the new products, like peppermint flavored Prosac. The ad campaigns for these drugs are being prepared by the ad agency that McDonalds uses.
They know what works. They will make it cool to be on drugs in school. You as parents will be brushed off as behind the times. These same friends of your children, who talk about health care for the future of America, are also pressing for legislation to get clinics into every school, and to make it unnecessary to have parents’ permission to give the drugs.
Much of the next generation is going to be useless to anyone unless these criminals in the white coats are stopped. Right now there are about 4 million youngsters whose creativity and ingenuity are being destroyed, and who are being set up for severe brain damage and addiction in the not too distant future. It would take you well over a month, counting at a rate of one second per number, day and night, to count up to 4 million. And each count would be a young child being handicapped, probably for life.
There will no doubt be studies about this no-brainer, funded by the tax money of the parents of the damaged children, and overseen by people in the pay of the drug companies, like the spurious studies done by the tobacco people. After 10 or 20 years and millions of dollars in someone’s pockets, they will say that the evidence is inconclusive. By then America will have to be relegated to the status of a country of dolts and addicts. But the drug companies will have their billions and will then be targeting other countries.
The people I’m talking about are NOT on your side, though they say they are in skilfull terms. But as Emerson said, “What you do speaks louder than what you say.” Or as the book read by the immature and neurotic, according to the APA says, “By their deeds ye shall know them.” Listen to the wise ones, not the clever ones.
Every day, all over this country, kids are lining up at the nurse’s station in the school for their daily fix of a harmful, habit-forming drug with dangerous side effects. Sometimes the local police will have their drug officers in the same schools teaching children to say NO to drugs with the excellent DARE program. What kind of message are we giving these kids? You need drugs to behave normally? You need drugs to improve your abilities? When under any kind of stress take a pill? But don’t take habit-forming drugs. No wonder so many are confused.
This kind of chicanery, is pretty familiar to any health writer who has been writing since the 70’s. But what makes me angry and despairing at the same time, is that the general public doesn’t seem to have learned anything from the drug company methods, or the collusion of white coated experts for immense sums of money...always made out to be in the public interest.
Generations of TV medical propaganda, and birthing practices that treat pregnancy as a disease, have made it a knee jerk reflex to call the doctor, and get a pill. I am certainly not alone among current and retired health writers in thinking that American allopathic medicine should be the last resort, not the first.
So what can be done about this mess? Dr .Gemmer of Who Stole America's Health fame, mentions the example of Wesley Elementary school in Houston. It is in a tough neighborhood, low income, broken homes; the whole catastrophe. At the time of his example it had 1062 students.
Taking the U.S. average of similar schools it should have had between 60 to 400 children on Ritalin. There are two children on the drug! This is because the school nurse is interested in the children, and in addressing the cause of the problems.
She deals with the nutritional problems, and looks at possible allergies, eye problems, ear problems, no breakfast, high IQ, TV and video before going to school, late nights culminating in TV and video games and junk food. Only two pupils out of 1062! In a depressed neighborhood. It can be done. And those two may indeed be deriving benefit.
Psychologists and social workers have to deal with these problems completely without the use of drugs. The psychiatrists are all M.D.'s. They can, and obviously do prescribe as a first option. Possibly it’s because they are used to the kick back systems of the drug manufacturers. And it is the prescribing that is the problem. There are dozens of possible causes of the ADHD effect that are not even considered by the magic bullet people.
We cannot put all the blame on the manufacturers of Ritalin, because they state very clearly in the Physicians Desk Reference that Ritalin by itself it not a cure for ADHD. Among many other statements that are ignored by the quick fix people are these actual words:
Ritalin is indicated as an integral part of a total treatment program which typically includes other remedial measures ( psychological, educational, social)....Drug treatment is not indicated for all children with this syndrome. ....Stimulants are not intended for the child who exhibits symptoms secondary to environmental factors....Appropriate educational placement is essential and psycho-social intervention is generally necessary......
These are clear warnings NOT to treat all children indiscriminately or exclusively with Ritalin. And they are clearly stated in the book that is regarded as the Physicians' Bible, where drugs are concerned. You can get it yourself at a Sam’s Club, or read it in the library. Obviously the drug companies are not going to refuse to sell the drug after having fulfilled their legal requirement by giving clear warnings about it.
The definite, but very small proportion of children who actually NEED to be on Ritalin has been demonstrated by the school nurse of Wesley Elementary. Here are a few other options that the magic-bullet allopath, or the nurse anxious for divine status as a medical professional is not likely to consider, but which have all helped in various circumstances.
Food allergies can manifest as behavioral problems as uncontrollable to the child as sneezing, or breaking out in hives. The Feingold diet of the 70's was very effective for many children with behavioral problems. This diet eliminated many common food colorings and preservatives and worked magically on some children.
In 1993 the Cornell U. project tried giving ADHD children a diet free of dairy products, wheat, corn. citrus, eggs, peanuts, and artificial flavorings and preservatives. After only two weeks about 75% of the children displayed much less hyperactivity. It returned when they went back to their old diet. Did you hear about it on TV? Was it news?
In Britain, in 1992 the Lancet reported that 116 out of 185, that’s 63% of the children responded well to a low-allergen diet with extra calcium, magnesium, zinc and vitamins. Allergy testing and examination of diet should be the first thing looked at. Drugs should be the last. Was that study in your school newsletter?
It does not take a multi-million dollar research effort to know the effect of too much sugar on children. Every teacher and parent knows what happens to a great percentage of children during and after the sugar binge at Hallowe'en. Trust your own observation. Don't wait for a white coated worker to say what you already know, years after you knew it, and too late.
Research in the 70's showed a clear connection between sugar addiction and violent behavior among prison inmates. Research by Weintraub in 1997 proves that "destructive, aggressive, and restless behavior significantly increases with the amount of sugar consumed." Must this simple, established fact be rediscovered every twenty minutes before someone connects the dots?
Simply eliminating sugar from the diet significantly lessens the symptoms of ADHD in a large percentage of cases. Hyperthyroidism has many of the same symptoms as ADHD. The basic fatigue of hyperthyroidism, and the child's need to keep in motion to fight the fatigue, seems to be remedied by the stimulant effect of Ritalin. The behavior is modified but the real problem remains unaddressed.
The difference between right brain dominants and left brain dominants in the classroom is also a cause of Ritalin prescribing. The right brain dominant does not do well in an environment devoted to, and organized for left brainers, and taught by a left brained dominant teacher. Sitting in a desk for hours is not natural for young children, and the right brainers find it more onerous than the others and could tend to be disruptive.
The answer is not to drug them. It is to give them an educational environment in which right brainers thrive. Edison, and Einstein were both right brainers who had problems in their left brain dominated school systems. It is a good thing for the world that they were not students in America in the past few years. If your kid is right brained dominant buy the paperback book, The Gift of Dyslexia, by Ronald Davis, and see how the talents that a left brained system crushes can be developed.
Some children exhibit problem behavior simply because they cannot see properly or hear properly. Many cases are known in which behavior problems vanished when astigmatism was dealt with, or impacted wax removed.
Don’t automatically blame the teachers either. They are ordered to do insane things under pressure of losing their jobs. My wife Shirley was ordered, with the other teachers to supervise fluoride mouth washes for her class. She knew that the fluoride being used was a chronic poison and refused to give poison to her pupils. The nurse and other authorities could not understand her viewpoint because EVERYBODY knew that fluoride was good for teeth. The dentists said so.
But the fluoride that is good for teeth, as nature intended, is calcium fluoride. What is in mouth washes and toothpaste is sodium fluoride, used in rat poison. It is a toxic waste product of the aluminum industry and the atom bomb industry. . By using the term fluoride, instead of saying which of the dozens of fluorides it could be, the issue can be clouded.
Independent research has known forever that sodium fluoride is poisonous. But the military and political trickery that got it into the water and toothpaste because of the Cold War, is too long a story for here. It’s gone into in documented detail in my Health Matters monograph. Here it’s mentioned to show that even people who know better, and want to help your child, can be threatened with being fired, because the man in the white coat must be believed.
Check it out for yourselves. Switch off the TV, which is designed to divert your attention from what is going on, not to inform you. You can get on the Web and find out anything. Go to the experts last. You will have lots of information by then that they are not going to tell you, or want you to know. Good fortune to you. Your kid cannot do it. It’s one of the extra jobs of a parent in an economy where only the bottom line counts.
As a prime example of how expectations affect us, let me use as an example the psychiatric profession I pilloried in another health article about the way they are pushing Ritalin, when many other ways of treating kids are possible. It couldn’t happen to nicer people.
In 1972 a group of researchers got themselves admitted into twelve mental institutions by reporting that they could hear voices saying these three key words, 'empty', 'hollow' and 'thud.'
All of them were admitted with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, the catchword that can include almost anybody. All of them behaved perfectly normally during their average stay of nineteen days. They were all discharged with the comment of “Schizophrenia in remission.” So they did have a record of mental illness.
When this piece of research got into the psychiatric journals one prominent mental hospital challenged the team and said that it could not possibly happen in their fine facility.
The research leader, Dr. L. Rosenhan accepted the challenge, and said that he would send one or more such pseudo-patients to their facility in the next three months, and challenged them to identify the ones he sent. All staff members of this prominent facility were to rate all patients over the three month period as real or possible pseudo-patients.
The total number of patients admitted in those three months was 193, and the staff members rated forty-one of them as being possible pseudos, just over 21%..
But the clever Dr. Rosenhan knew his psychiatrists and their mentality. He hadn’t sent ANY of his people to the facility in those three months. He was smart enough to see that the psychiatrists would sink their own boat, without his doing anything other than say the words that made them EXPECT to have fake patients.
The same experts who continually fool the public, fooled themselves. Watch the words you say, and the words you accept as true. What your conscious mind believes, the subconscious uses as a law in your universe. And that’s true of people with white coats too. Doubt may be the first step to truth when talking to white coats who will benefit from what they suggest to you.
