What you would all find the most educational related to this I bet, is reviewing the precedent regarding children who had been classified with "attention deficit disorder". A 'disorder' which after many decades of serious study has still failed to find a single physiological evidence and is classified entirely behaviorially, despite quite a few studies demonstrating how merely differently classifying children caused school teachers and playground supervisors to also differently label them.
When a child is marked officially ADD, the school gets extra money for them as a special needs child of a sort. But the school actually does not have to DO anything for this extra money; they don't provide extra classes or extra physical time or anything else in return. They only get this money, however, if the parents will agree to medicate the child. This not only led to what is probably the most massive overmedication of humans, let alone children, in the history of man, but eventually to a situation where schools *depend* on the massive extra money they end up with when a substantial portion of the children are classified to obtain it for them.
This in turn led to a huge emphasis on getting kids classified this way, on schools recommending doctors they could trust to provide parents firm medicating recommendations, and more.
This page is worth reading. It is merely a collection of blurbs from from various internet sites but I think if you get to the end of it you will realize just how staggering the implications are for anything.
http://tinyurl.com/cr0e
When money is involved, you *create incentive* for problems to be "found", for "indefinite treatment" (rather than resolution), etc.
Now what if the lowfat obsessed government decided eventually to prescribe "fat blocking" pills? Etc.? We know what that would do to health, as well as to the physical misery of the kid. The list could go on.
PJ
Linear Mode
