Hacker CinemaThe Drugging of Our Children
2005 · Film · documentary · 104 min
Directed by Gary Null
Excessive talking, fidgeting, or squirming. Often loses things. Difficulty remaining seated, playing quietly, or sustaining attention. Sound like your child? The American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV) lists these as the symptoms of Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Once diagnosed, these behaviors would make your child a candidate for Ritalin, Prozac, or both. In this investigative documentary, acclaimed public health advocate and filmmaker Gary Null examines the increasingly common practice of prescribing psychotropic drugs for children, including preschoolers as young as age 2 to 4, who have been diagnosed with ADD, or ADHD. Psychiatrists may write these prescriptions without first exploring other causes or aggravating factors, like diet, or environment, and without making it clear to parents that these medications can have severe side-effects...
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Holistic health professionals are subjected to an online Inquisition when they attempt to edit false statements and libel out of their profiles only to have the edits immediately reverted and their life’s work dismissed. It was Dr. Gary Null’s investigation into this phenomenon that first alerted me that Wikipedia was playing fast and loose with the facts beyond of the political realm, and I use him here as an example not to sing his praises but because his case is such a clear example of the site’s bias. Null is a board-certified clinical nutritionist who has conducted over 40 clinical studies on lifestyle and diet, more than anyone else in his field. He hosts the longest-running daily non-commercial radio program in history and for 12 years ran the most popular show on WABC. He has published over 700 articles, many in peer-reviewed journals, and has been invited to present his findings at scientific conferences. His research showed humans could not only survive but thrive on a diet wholly devoid of animal protein. His documentaries, including Death by Medicine, the Drugging of Our Children, and Seeds of Death, have won more than 276 awards, placing him among the country’s top documentary filmmakers. He has counseled tens of thousands of people over his 50-year career, never charging a penny. None of these achievements are in his Wikipedia bio, which focuses instead on his divergence from medical orthodoxy and accuses him of quackery. I did not merely take Null’s word at face value when evaluating his statements against those of the Wikipedia page he has been wrestling with for the better part of a decade. Instead, my investigation revealed a pattern of systemic bias that has the entirety of Wikipedia’s medicine and science coverage in its thrall.
Some of this article raises known issues (Phillip Cross for example), but a lot of it just seems to amount to, “my biases are not adequately represented!”