Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
You are going to look things up anyway, so start somewhere with proper review behind it. CHADD and Understood both have professionals checking what goes on the page.
Telling anyone to stop searching online has never worked and only means they search without saying so. Better to hand over two or three places worth trusting and let everything else be measured against them. It is also fair to ask a professional where they have a connection, and worth noticing when they tell you before being asked, since somebody who volunteers that is usually reliable elsewhere too.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
You can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know (Quran 16:43). Asking is presented as the ordinary route, so there is no shame in not already knowing.
وَمَآ أَرۡسَلۡنَا مِن قَبۡلِكَ إِلَّا رِجَالࣰ ا نُّوحِيٓ إِلَيۡهِمۡۖ فَسۡـَٔلُوٓاْ أَهۡلَ ٱلذِّكۡرِ إِن كُنتُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ
[Prophet], all the messengers We sent before you were simply men to whom We had given the Revelation: you [people] can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know
Qur’an 16:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The updated European consensus statement on diagnosing and treating adult ADHD sets out, option by option, where the evidence supports a treatment and where it does not. That is what carefully reviewed information looks like from the inside, and it is the sort of document good public resources are built on. It is a consensus statement rather than a trial, so it reflects expert reading of the evidence at a point in time.
Kooij JJS, Bijlenga D, Salerno L, Jaeschke R, Bitter I, Balázs J, Thome J, Dom G, Kasper S, Nunes Filipe C, Stes S, Mohr P, Leppämäki S, Casas M, Bobes J, Mccarthy JM, Richarte V, Kjems Philipsen A, Pehlivanidis A, Niemela A, Styr B, Semerci B, Bolea-Alamanac B, Edvinsson D, Baeyens D, Wynchank D, Sobanski E, Philipsen A, McNicholas F, Caci H, Mihailescu I, Manor I, Dobrescu I, Saito T, Krause J, Fayyad J, Ramos-Quiroga JA, Foeken K, Rad F, Adamou M, Ohlmeier M, Fitzgerald M, Gill M, Lensing M, Motavalli Mukaddes N, Brudkiewicz P, Gustafsson P, Tani P, Oswald P, Carpentier PJ, De Rossi P, Delorme R, Markovska Simoska S, Pallanti S, Young S, Bejerot S, Lehtonen T, Kustow J, Müller-Sedgwick U, Hirvikoski T, Pironti V, Ginsberg Y, Félegyházy Z, Garcia-Portilla MP, Asherson P. (2019). Updated European Consensus Statement on diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD.. European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Somewhere sound to begin does more good than an instruction not to look.
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
The stack goes: understand it, medicate where that is right, change what the adults do, change what the day asks, and keep arguing the child's corner. Each layer does a job the others cannot.
Showing a teenager live pictures of activity in one targeted part of their own brain has been tried once, in a small trial, and it looked encouraging. That was around a dozen young people, and nobody has repeated it yet.
A ramp does nothing for someone's legs, and it gets them into the building. Timers, visible clocks, a shorter task list and a calendar somebody else keeps do the same job here.