Mr. Moderate

Michael Savage is a conservative radio talk show host whose program I listen to and whose web site I link to here on my own blog. First and foremost we must recognize that Michael is an entertainer, with millions of listeners, and it is the job of an entertainer to entertain. Entertainers will frequently use exaggeration to get our attention, and Michael is one of the greatest exaggerators I’ve ever listened to. Last week Michael started a controversy about autism when he exaggerated the over-diagnosis of the disease. Media Matters then picked out his most-overblown statements:

On his nationally syndicated radio show, Michael Savage claimed that autism is “[a] fraud, a racket. … I’ll tell you what autism is. In 99 percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’ “

Many people reacted to the above statements with anger and strong complaints against Michael Savage, trying to get his program thrown off the air for those remarks. One conservative blogger even called Michael “the most hated conservative in America.” Well, in some sense I suspect that Michael relishes the label of “most hated” so long as it gains attention for his talk show and increases his base of listeners.

Yesterday, Michael Savage offered this response on his show and on his web site:

My comments about autism were meant to boldly awaken parents and children to the medical community’s attempt to label too many children or adults as “autistic.”

Just as some drug companies have overdiagnosed “ADD” and “ADHD” to peddle dangerous speed-like drugs to children as young as 4 years of age, this cartel of doctors and drug companies is now creating a national panic by overdiagnosing “autism, for which there is no definitive medical diagnosis!

Many children are being victimized by being diagnosed with an “illness” which may not exist, in all cases. Just a few weeks ago doctors recommended dangerous anti-cholesterol drugs for children as young as 2 years of age! Without any scientific studies on the possible dangers of such drugs on children, corrupt doctors made this controversial, unscientific recommendation.

Increasingly, our children are being used as profit centers by a greedy, corrupt medical/pharmaceutical establishment. As the brother of a severely disabled person who suffered and died in a New York “snake-pit” of a “mental hospital,” I know first-hand what true disability is.

To permit greedy doctors to include children in medical categories which may not be appropriate is a crime against that child and their family. Let the truly autistic be treated. Let the falsely diagnosed be free.

I will stand by Michael’s statement, above, and forgive his overblown comments about autism and about Media Matters as a necessary “stirring of the pot” to get people’s attention.

Children are easy marks for a school and medical establishment which is all too ready to paper over its own failures by making false diagnoses of too-broadly-defined diseases. There most certainly is a disease of autism. But it is most certainly over-diagnosed, and this has been true for a long time. My own wife was diagnosed as autistic in the mid-1970s. It wasn’t true; she wasn’t the least bit autistic. And ADHD is also greatly over-diagnosed, usually by school teachers who just don’t have the time to individually handle kids who need a little special attention. Our son was kicked out of a school-run preschool at age 4 when the teacher claimed he had ADHD and needed to be medicated properly before she would allow him to attend the voluntary preschool program. We took our son to a university children’s clinic where they put him through a lengthy medical evaluation and determined that no, our son did not have ADHD. Yesterday, Michael Savage interviewed a doctor who noted that similar lengthy medical evaluations were necessary in order to definitively decide whether or not any particular child is afflicted with autism.

The real difficulty here is that most parents are like my wife’s parents: they don’t know enough about diseases like autism and ADHD to know when they are getting bad recommendations from schools and doctors. A totally-untrained teacher has heard about autism and ADHD and maybe had a short course in how to recognize some symptoms and recommend that kids see their doctor. So, they pick far too many kids out to be set on the path towards misdiagnosis. Add to that the fact that most medical doctors won’t spend more than 5 or 10 minutes with any given patient before making a diagnosis and prescribing a pill and you begin to understand why diseases like autism and ADHD are misdiagnosed more often than not.

Let me say this very clearly: A proper diagnosis of autism or ADHD can only occur in a specialized clinical setting where the child is evaluated over a period of at least several hours. If you have a child who is claimed to have one of these diseases, you should do everything in your power to find a specialized clinic who will properly test your child and give you the best diagnosis you can obtain for these diseases which are, all too unfortunately, fuzzily-defined and difficult to properly detect.

Unfortunately, very few children who are diagnosed with autism or ADHD ever see the inside of such a specialized clinic. The vast majority are treated incompetently by their school teachers and administrators, and then by unspecialized doctors who all-too-willingly prescribe Ritalin and other strong drugs without performing the proper diagnostic procedures first. This is where Michael is right-on when he says: “Just as some drug companies have overdiagnosed “ADD” and “ADHD” to peddle dangerous speed-like drugs to children as young as 4 years of age, this cartel of doctors and drug companies is now creating a national panic by overdiagnosing “autism, for which there is no definitive medical diagnosis!”

There is no lab test for autism or ADHD. You can’t check your kid’s blood or urine to determine of they have one of these diseases. These are behavioral diseases that fall in the general category of “mental illness.” The only way that they can be properly diagnosed is to observe a child’s behavior over a long period of time in a clinical setting using controlled experimental techniques. Again, very few children who are diagnosed with autism and ADHD ever see the inside of such a clinic.

There is a sequel to the story of my son and the claim he had ADHD. That sequel is told in the companion post about Lyme Disease. The mystery in this whole mess is this: Why does the establishment (schools, doctors, drug companies, etc.) want to diagnose kids with autism and ADHD and yet they refuse to diagnose kids (or adults) as being sick with the actual bacterial disease of Lyme?