as usual, his comments have been partially reported and taken WAY out of context. What he basically said is that pediatricians used to be the lowest paid of all physicians and rarely, if ever, prescribed drugs for most behavior problems. Now that they are prescribing mood altering drugs, the long-term effects of which are typically unknown or very dangerous, they are paid on par with the rest of the medical world. He specifically said he was not talking about LEGITIMATE cases of autism or mental or physical disability but that Autism is the new favorite diagnosis for kids who are a little weird or have some behavioral problems - similar to the overdiagnosis of ADD/ADHD in the recent past. What he's critical of is the tendency of Americans to medicate themselves or their children for everything, which is dangerous. We're drugging our children and taking away their personalities, turning them into emotionless zombies. A kid with a rotten home life SHOULD be acting out. It's a normal response to dealing with problems. Instead of teaching them to better deal with their emotions, we drug all the emotion out of them. He's tired of drug companies using children as guinea pigs for their products. And I think he's right in that regard. Instead of adjusting how we deal with high energy kids who don't learn well sitting in a classroom and use a more hands on approach to learning, we drug them so they'll behave in class. When a teenage girl has mood swings, we drug them into static emotional states. Teenage girls are supposed to have mood swings. By drugging them, we stunt their emotional growth. That's what he was harping on, not making fun of LEGITIMATE Autism.
Absolutely. I just saw a video on, of all things, the AIDS cases in Africa. It was quite interesting. It made the point that all that AIDS funding is directed by, and controlled by, the drug companies. The AIDS epidemic in Africa is largely a hoax, because they changed the diagnosis criteria from the actual blood count of the viral antibodies to a set of four or five symptoms, which do not correlate to the actual disease itself. High fever, persistent cough, more than 10% weight loss from baseline, these are the top three, I cannot remember the other two off the top of my head (be nice, it's 5AM!); these are basic symptoms that are present for 99% of the patients seen in the clinic. They do not draw blood for diagnosis. Present in Africa are several strains of TB, which account for all the symptoms, as does malaria, which is also a known killer. Plus, you add on all the parasites they have over there, and the fact that most of the population over there has been exposed to these diseases, and survived, and your diagnostic criteria is severely inadequate. Could be TB, could be malaria, could be parasite infection, yet it all goes in the AIDS bucket, which is why AIDS is the leading cause of death in Africa. Turns out it is the same diseases that have been killing Africans since the beginning of time!
I'd like to know what the criteria for diagnosis really is for autism these days, as any two symptoms can put one on the autism "spectrum"; diagnosis of autism had a specific set of criteria up until the last ten years or so, and it was a rigid list. Now, from what I hear, they have similarly retooled the clinical definition of autism, and the new definition is MUCH more broad and loosely-defined. So if they change the baseline for a diagnosis of autism, and they prescribe drugs for behavioral anomalies that may or may not be attributable to autism, what is the result? Increased sales of *expensive and profitable* drugs.
Same thing happened with Lipitor. They moved the bar, so to speak, from a cholesterol reading of 220 mg/dl to 200 mg/dl as the starting point of people being on statin drugs. Previoulsy, if you were a big guy, had your blood drawn, and the count was 219 mg/dl on your cholesterol count, you'd get an admonition from your doctor to watch your diet and stay off the couch. Now, with the bar reset, you are firmly in the undesirable range, and you must be on statin drugs to lower your cholesterol. Guess what happened when they reset the upper limit? Sales of statins skyrocketed, since the pool of "eligible customers" suddenly got about 4-5 times bigger. Nice, huh?
I think that's the point that Savage was trying to make- that doctors are under the influence of "Big Pharma", and have become all too willing to "upsell" little Johnny into mind-altering drugs. The bar HAS been lowered.
ASK YOUR DOCTOR IF CRESTOR IS RIGHT FOR YOU!
Yes DR2000 is one of my all-time faves... I don't think I could bear to watch a remake. How do you top Stallone as Machine Gun Joe Viterbo, anyway? 
), IF he said what was quoted, without any further qualification, he's an @$$hole on top of being an idiot.
