ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the movement's willingness to dismiss science and reasonableness and play hard ball than its actions surrounding the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Consensus Development Conference (CDC) on the Treatment of Destructive Behaviors in Persons with Developmental Disabilities. NIH CDCs are intended to help clinicians by creating an authoritative, credible consensus statement that sums up the scientific evidence on treatments for a specific condition. The public controversy/topic clearly fit within the CDC's scope and purpose of publicly evaluating a body of scientific information and arriving at a Consensus Statement that would be useful to practitioners, the public and scientists. The Consensus Statement is an independent report and not a policy statement of the NIH or Federal Government. The final report included the panel's Consensus Statement and Report as well as all of the materials used to develop them. The final report stated that "No panel member was committed to a specific form of treatment for destructive behavior".
