Diseases are physical abnormalities (chemical included. Disease are diagnosed one patient at a time. The fact that Castellanos, et al, or anyone claims to have found a difference in a group of patients at the NIMH or any medical center does not mean that a patient in a physician's office in Arizona or California or anywhere meeting the wholly subjective ADHD criteria of the DSM-IV, or any edition of the DSM, has a disease.

Nowhere in medicine or surgery is the presence of a disease/abnormality confirmed by subjective criteria; but only by objective physical evidence; a mass or a lump; palpable, a skin lesion, visible to the naked eye, cancer cells, seen by microscope from a Pap smear, or effusion fluid in the abdomen or pleural space, or elevated blood sugar in diabetes, phenylalanine or galactose in phenylketonuria or galactosemia--all of them, like the thousands of diseases in pathology/disease textbooks, real, actual, tangible diseases. The absolute fraud of ADHD is that the children who are "diagnosed," pathologized, called ADHD/abnormal have no brain or body abnormality that Castellanos, Jensen, Swanson, Barkley, Koplewicz, or anyone at the NIMH or anywhere in US psychiatry can adduce/demonstrate/diagnose. And yet they have us "treat" 6 million and would call parents who question and hesitate "negligent" and have their children court-ordered to "treatment." Try as you might you will find no mention whatsoever of ADHD or any psychiatric entity in any pathology/disease text book because, not one is a disease, the children thus fraudulently pathologized, are normal; normal, that is, until the poisoning starts. Every drug in medicine is a exogenous compound, a poison. When there is an abnormality/disease, made more nearly normal by the judicious application of a drug we speak of disease, medication, treatment and of a positive risk/benefit ratio. When the child/person "diagnosed"/ "pathologized" is normal we speak of poisoning. When a disease is declared present by honest mistake we speak in medicine of "iatrogenic" injury (there is always injury whether conspicuous or not). When those who declare the normal child/person "diseased"/ "abnormal" do so knowingly, on purpose, for profit, we speak of poisoning, we speak of lying, of violation of informed consent of medical malpractice, of assault and battery.

Not having availed yourselves of the essentials of medical procedure and of the elements of determining whether or not disease has been diagnosed/demonstrated, you have lent the pages of your paper to the furtherance of what is the greatest, most heinous of healthcare crimes in US history; the crime that is ADHD/Ritalin--the model invented disease, the model invented epidemic.

Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD, 12/9/02