DOES A DOCTOR HAVE TO HAVE A DISEASE TO DIAGNOSE IT? DOES HAVING A DISEASE QUALIFY A PERSON TO DIAGNOSE IT?

H**** K******* wrote:

I read your short piece on (Exposing the Fraud of ADD and ADHD).
For cripes sake! If you don't live with it you do not know anything about
this disorder!!!!!!!!!
I have lived with ADHD for 43 years (35 of them undiagnosed and untreated!)
and it is far from unreal.
ADHD is real and very painful to live with.
You are as wrong as you can get!
Stop and smell the manure.
People like you interfere with the hope people like me have, the hope that
there is something that can help us. Because we do need help. There are many
options. Ritalin is just one of them.
To me Ritalin is what Insulin is to the diabetic.
You apparently have no clue!
You cannot learn about ADHD from textbooks. No degree can make you an expert
in this field.
Move on! Find something else to bash!

H**** ** K*******

[Fred A. Baughman Jr., MD: Saying "If you don't live with it you do not know anything about this disorder!!!!!!!!!" equates to every physician would have to have/suffer from every disease in order to be able to diagnose them. Fortunately for doctors and for the patients of the world this is not the way diagnosis works. Doctors go to medical school to learn (1) about the normal/disease-free functioning of the body and (2) about the abnormalities/diseases of the body. Next they learn to distinguish (1) from (2). The first step of diagnosis is to determine: Is there an abnormality/disease--yes or no? The second part of diagnosis (2), having determined that abnormality/disease is present, is to determine WHICH abnormality/disease, of the hundreds, if not thousands, that exist. In ADHD no abnormality has been found. This means that the answer to the first question of diagnosis: "Is there an abnormality?" is NO. There is no going on, therefore, to ask: "Which disease." I am sorry you believe in ADHD. This means you have been and are, decieved. This is the only way you can believe Ritalin is like insulin, with the later a real treatment for a real abnormality/disease, while Ritalin given to normal persons is a poison--an addictive, dangerous, sometime lethal poison. All foreign compounds, intentionally, or by accident, given to normals, are poisons.]