Posted by Zeke on January 2, 2000, at 21:20:15
In reply to Re: Dr. Breggin infuriates me, posted by Scott L. Schofield on January 2, 2000, at 13:51:31
If find this review written by Russell Barkely, PhD most insightful of Breggin...
( full review at http://www.chadd.org/news/Russ-review.htm )
from the review of Talking Back to Ritalin: What Doctors Aren't Telling You About Stimulants for Children (Monroe, ME: Courage Press, 1998, $24.95), Peter Breggin, M.D.
For more than 15 years, Breggin has written books that attack established psychiatry, psychology, and now pediatrics, for their approaches to the diagnosis and treatment of children and adults with mental and developmental disorders.
Literally from its opening pages, this book makes contorted attempts at the appearance of scholarship, replete with quotes, footnotes, and references to scientific papers and other sources. Throughout, any quote is mustered from scientific papers that can be taken out of context to support the author's biases along with every exaggerated fact and figure he can flnd to support his call to alarm, no matter the credibility (or lack of it) of his sources. However, the flaws of both his research methods and his arguments are evident to any scientist even slightly familiar with the scientific literature on the topics covered here. Lacking any sense of perspective and proportion, this book fails to place its facts and figures in their rightful context and history, and eschews any attempt at a balanced and thoughtfully reasoned approach to its major topics. We are left, then, with what appears to be a carefully and cleverly crafted piece of artful propaganda against the diagnosis of ADHD and its treatment with Ritalin.
[W]e are asked to take Breggin's subjective and biased impressions over the available scientific research on the matter, no doubt because that research would not support his call to alarm about the issue. Such distortions of fact, dismissives of the scientific literature (tucked away in footnotes), and citations of exaggerated statistics await the reader on every page thereafter.
This book further accuses leading scientists, physicians, the Food and Drug Administration, NIMH, and established psychiatry and psychology of withholding negative or critical information about stimulant medication and ADHD from the public. Meanwhile, the author does precisely this very same sort of thing himself. Breggin draws upon quotes, facts, figures, and the personal musings of laypeople from many sources in the popular media. Never is their accuracy or credibility challenged. Yet this book almost ceaselessly criticizes scientific research that supports the validity of ADHD as neurodevelopmental disorder and on the use of stimulant medications as safe and effective treatments for it. This nit-picking at the petty faults of the clinical studies and the investigators quickly grows tiresome when there is no equally balanced critical treatment of the sources Breggin wishes to cite in support of his own prejudices. It is a lack of balance so lop-sided as to invite disbelief.
Not until the last fifth of this book are we finally told what Breggin believes is the cause of children's developmental disorders, such as ADHD and autism, and behavioral/emotional problems such as oppositional defiant disorder and depression. The causes are said to be: (1) lack of parental love, (2) lack of parental attention, (3) lack of parental discipline, (4) family stress, (5) poor educational methods, and (6) a mental health profession that is prejudiced toward neurobiological explanations for behavior over psychosocial ones. The recommendations proposed for parents to follow are, of course, the inverse of these causes; love more, pay more attention, use more discipline, reduce family stress, work to reform your child's educational system, and avoid getting help from organized psychiatry and psychology. While there may be nothing inherently wrong with some of these admonitions, there is nothing inherently right about them either. Some may even ring with the sound of common sense about them, but common sense is often just that, common and often misinformed. ... Breggin's ... is outdated psychoanalytic thinking, discarded decades ago by the scientific community for its explanatory uselessness not to mention its cruelty toward parents seeking help for their children.
The propaganda Breggin offers here -- will be easily dismissed by the scientific and clinical professional communities as having nothing to add to the important issues related to understanding and managing ADHD. But to the lay reader, such misguidance as Breggin provides in Talking Back to Ritalin can do real harm. Breggin instructs parents to seek outdated, unscientific, and ineffective pop-psychological views of disorders and their treatment. What was so dismaying to me as a professional by the end of the book was the knowledge that Dr. Breggin took an oath as a physician to "first, do no harm." In my opinion, his book has violated that sacred oath.
poster:Zeke
thread:17735
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20000101/msgs/17868.html