Methods Of Attack

EoR has pointed out previously that the Dore program's latest radio advertisements work on the scare tactic that ADHD drugs are causing strokes and heart attacks in children.

In Australia, that doesn't seem to be a wholly true statement.

It’s not easy for consumers. There is a theoretical risk from ADHD medications and they should only be used when they’re needed. Nothing you swallow for therapeutic purposes is absolutely safe whether it’s a herb or a pill. We also have an appalling system for monitoring medication side effects - so it’s hard from random reporting to ascribe cause and effect. Governments need to insist that post marketing surveillance - watching drugs once they’re on the market - is the rule rather than the exception.

EoR is also fascinated about the comment in the story that

In Australia the Church of Scientology, which is ideologically opposed to medications for mental illness, has been whipping up concern with stories of hundreds of complications.

EoR wishes to make it clear he is in no way suggesting a link between the anti-psychiatry Church of Scientology and Dore. He just finds it fascinating how the two organisations seem to be operating from similar assumptions.

Meanwhile, Dore is causing problems in the UK, as reported by Liz Ditz. Five members of the editorial board of British Dyslexia Association's (BDA) Journal, Dyslexia, have resigned in protest at some rather poor research published in that journal regarding the Dore program. Questions of funding aside (and they are not totally irrelevant), EoR fails to see how a reputable journal could publish research about dyslexia that fails some extremely basic scientific principles:

The study also faced criticism as most of the children assessed were not dyslexic. Some were 22 months ahead of their reading age before the treatment while the writing and semantic fluency of most was above average. John Stein, professor of physiology at Cambridge University, was also concerned by the lack of a control group and the small scale of the study.

So how can a therapy be said to assist a certain disability group, if that disability group was not assessed in the "scientific" study? Or were the whole group the control?