Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Three things are worth noticing before you buy any treatment: whether the only research on it is their own, whether they will say plainly what it is meant to change, and whether you have to sign something.
Each one covers a different way of being caught out. Research a company funded and ran itself has never been checked by anyone with nothing to lose. Outcomes described in soft words like better focus can never be shown to have failed, so you will never be owed anything. And a contract keeps you paying after you have stopped believing in it, which is exactly when you most need to be able to walk out.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Do not wrongfully consume each other's wealth but trade by mutual consent (Quran 4:29). Consent that has been locked in by a contract you did not really understand is not the kind meant here.
يَٰٓأَيُّهَا ٱلَّذِينَ ءَامَنُواْ لَا تَأۡكُلُوٓاْ أَمۡوَٰلَكُم بَيۡنَكُم بِٱلۡبَٰطِلِ إِلَّآ أَن تَكُونَ تِجَٰرَةً عَن تَرَاضࣲ مِّنكُمۡۚ وَلَا تَقۡتُلُوٓاْ أَنفُسَكُمۡۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ كَانَ بِكُمۡ رَحِيمࣰ ا
You who believe, do not wrongfully consume each other’s wealth but trade by mutual consent. Do not kill each other, for God is merciful to you
Qur’an 4:29read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A review of the level of evidence for EEG neurofeedback across mental and brain disorders concluded that its clinical use still needs better demonstration of therapeutic benefit. It is a useful case: a treatment can be widely sold, and can have research attached to it, while independent reviewers still find the case unmade. That is the gap between having studies and having evidence.
Micoulaud-Franchi JA, McGonigal A, Lopez R, Daudet C, Kotwas I, Bartolomei F. (2015). Electroencephalographic neurofeedback: Level of evidence in mental and brain disorders and suggestions for good clinical practice.. Neurophysiologie clinique = Clinical neurophysiology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Independent evidence, a stated outcome, and the freedom to leave are the three things a treatment that works does not mind giving you.
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
After a working lifetime in this field, Barkley names the change in how a family sees the child as the most important step of all. Not the medication, not the charts.
A lot of what people now know about ADHD came from a video. Some of it is genuinely good, some of it is not, and asking someone what they have been watching is a fair question to open with.
A child's reputation is made in the classroom, mostly out of adult earshot, and it follows them from one year to the next. Teachers who work on how the class treats the child, and not only on the child, can move it.