i am not this body

Sunday

I CAN HAS RITALIN ???

From the NO DUH Department:
A major longitudinal study on drug treatments for ADHD has concluded that medications such as Ritalin and Concerta have no significant difference in outcomes when compared to talk therapies. Oh, and that the drugs may stunt childrens' growth. And that they might have exaggerated about the drugs' alleged benefits back when. Sorry 'bout that part, kids.

I had to fend off small hordes of self-appointed ADHD police when my oldest son entered 1st grade in 1999. Principals, guidance counselors and teachers ranging from the incompetent to the malicious took it upon themselves to diagnose my firstborn after a single incident of non-herdlike behavior, even if they had not witnessed such alleged mortal transgressions. And let's not even get into the 'practicing medicine without a license' issue.

Maybe ADHD was a valid disease diagnosis - and I believe it's not a disease but a set of conditions and propensities that can result in unsanctioned behaviors, especially in the veal farms that so often pass for schools. But school officials and lackeys were so quick to jump on the bandwagon and latch onto that little bit of power dangled before them by the medical-pharma-industrial complex. All they had to do was forget the part where they actually teach children to think and choose and make their own lives as future adults and switch over to drugging or threatening to drug students into compliance. Voices in the wilderness like Thom Hartmann, whose The Edison Gene set out his "Hunter in a Farmer's World" model (backed by solid research and so much more accurate AND humane than the DSM-IV dogma), went largely ignored except by us fringe-dwelling freaks.

Now we may be coming to the dying days of this mass hysteria that washed across our schools almost a decade ago. But the lasting damage to a generation has still not hit us fully. As the Ritalin Kids enter the adult world, we'll begin to understand just how utterly destructive this witch hunt was. Is. Will probably be again.

May I just say for the record: YOU SICK BASTARDS.

BBC report: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/7090011.stm
HealthBolt's take on the study announcement: http://www.healthbolt.net/2007/11/12/ritalin-now-on-sale-every-pill-must-go/
Thom Hartmann's The Gift of ADHD: http://thomhartmann.com/home-add.shtml

Labels: bad pharma, ritalin