In 1997, 5 million children were listed as using psychotropic drugs, Ritalin being among the most common. Ritalin use has increased by 700% since 1990. By the year 2000, it was prescribed for approximately 7 million children.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is diagnosed eight times more often in boys than in girls.
It seems like an eternity since Major League Baseball finally got around to admitting it had a problem of the performance enhancing variety, but in reality it has barely been a half a decade. Players once thought to be first-ballot Hall of Famers are struggling to garner more than a pittance of support from sports writers and fans alike as the sport carries on the best it can. Attendance remains high—despite an ongoing quasi-recession—television revenue is streaming in and it appears that many of the measures taken by commissioner Bud Selig and his merry band of nitwits salvaged what little dignity this great sport had left in the wake of all that ugliness. But alas, as always, looks can be deceiving. I, for one, was more than a little bit surprised when MLB decided to include a ban on stimulants in its new drug program a few years back….When the league banned these drugs, an amazing thing happened. The number of players claiming and obtaining “therapeutic use” exemptions for stimulants nearly quadrupled from 28 to 103…I mean how the hell can ADHD multiply fourfold in a sport in a single year? How can it become three times as prevalent in that sport as in the adult population? Is it contagious? Can Derek Jeter give it to Dustin Pedroia if he coughs on him as he slides into second base? Of course not.
The American Psychiatric Association is under fire today by an independent health news site’s launch of the “Disease Mongering Engine” – an online tool that allows users to instantly generate disorders, dysfunctions and syndromes that sound real, but aren’t. Available at www.NewsTarget.com, the Disease Mongering Engine was created by Mike Adams, a vocal critic of modern psychiatric medicine and its practice of labeling healthy people with fictitious diseases, then over-medicating them with patented pharmaceuticals.
“Modern psychiatry has lost its way and has now become a marketing branch of Big Pharma,” Adams said. “Convincing healthy people that they’re diseased, then harming them with unsafe chemical medications, is not a legitimate approach to health and healing.” Diseases ranging from ADHD to Social Anxiety Disorder were “invented” by drug companies and psychiatrists, Adams says, as a way to generate billions of dollars in profits by selling treatment drugs and services to people who don’t need them.
“ADHD, it’s just a couple of symptoms — it’s not a disease,” the Dutch researcher tells All Things Considered weekend host Guy Raz. The way we think about — and treat — these behaviors is wrong, Pelsser says. “There is a paradigm shift needed. If a child is diagnosed ADHD, we should say, ‘OK, we have got those symptoms, now let’s start looking for a cause.’ ”
According to Pelsser, 64 percent of children diagnosed with ADHD are actually experiencing a hypersensitivity to food. Researchers determined that by starting kids on a very elaborate diet, then restricting it over a few weeks’ time.
A mother-turned advocate’s journey that links a non-profit children’s advocacy group, with assets over $15 million [2009] with nationally-renowned mass tort and class action defense law firms, to the Connecticut DCF – an $865 million bureaucracy, as described by the Connecticut Mirror.