Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
If someone selling you a treatment for ADHD uses the word cure, that is your cue to leave. There is no cure. What good treatment offers is fewer symptoms, and that is a real and worthwhile thing.
A registered clinician is not allowed to promise you an outcome, because nobody can honestly guarantee one. So a provider who promises makes you a clean piece of information about themselves: they are either unaware of the standards other practitioners work to, or they have decided those standards do not apply to them. Neither is a good footing for handing over your money or your child.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
He who cures me when I am ill (Quran 26:80). Curing is described as God's to give, which is a good reason to be suspicious of anyone selling it over a counter.
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A systematic review covering fifteen years of research on adolescents with ADHD coded the studies and calculated effect sizes for medication and for behaviour therapy. What that literature reports is degrees of improvement, some of them substantial. It does not report elimination, and no treatment in it is described as removing the condition.
Sibley MH, Kuriyan AB, Evans SW, Waxmonsky JG, Smith BH. (2014). Pharmacological and psychosocial treatments for adolescents with ADHD: an updated systematic review of the literature.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A promise nobody could honestly make tells you what the person selling it is really doing.
This one is still a draft. It is waiting on a scholar and a clinician to read it before it is published.
Near this one
Do not write off simply sitting with someone. When researchers looked into why dummy treatments helped, one of the things they kept finding was half an hour of a person's full attention.
Two things happening together is not one causing the other. Learn that once and you have a reply to most of the claims you will meet.
Programmes built on crossing the midline or on balance and inner ear work do not appear to beat ordinary exercise. If movement is what you are after, movement is available free.