Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
When you read that a treatment worked, look for who judged the improvement and whether they knew what the child had been given. In much of this literature, they knew.
The design to look for is a sham condition, where everybody goes through the same routine and only some receive the active ingredient, with the raters kept in the dark. Without it, an expensive treatment involving months of effort is being marked by people who very much want it to have worked. Rater blinding is a dull detail that decides whether a result means anything at all.
Qur’an and Sunnah
so that you may not exceed in the balance (Quran 55:8). A measure taken by someone with a stake in the answer has already tipped.
أَلَّا تَطۡغَوۡاْ فِي ٱلۡمِيزَانِ
so that you may not exceed in the balance
Qur’an 55:8read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Two trials show what happens when the design tightens. EEG neurofeedback lost its advantage once it was compared with sham neurofeedback in adults, and Cogmed working memory training showed no benefit for children with ADHD when the control condition was properly matched, in a study set up to replicate earlier positive reports.
Schönenberg M, Wiedemann E, Schneidt A, Scheeff J, Logemann A, Keune PM, Hautzinger M. (2017). Neurofeedback, sham neurofeedback, and cognitive-behavioural group therapy in adults with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: a triple-blind, randomised, controlled trial.. The lancet. Psychiatry doi
Chacko A, Bedard AC, Marks DJ, Feirsen N, Uderman JZ, Chimiklis A, Rajwan E, Cornwell M, Anderson L, Zwilling A, Ramon M. (2014). A randomized clinical trial of Cogmed Working Memory Training in school-age children with ADHD: a replication in a diverse sample using a control condition.. Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
People who have put a lot into a treatment cannot see its effects neutrally, however honest they are.
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
Ask for photographs of every bottle rather than a list from memory, then pass that list to the prescriber. Recall is patchy about names and hopeless about doses.
Regulators let devices through by several different routes, and only some of them mean what a family assumes. A game cleared for further investigation has not passed the bar a medicine passes.
If a little helps then a lot must help more is not really a supplement thought. It is an addiction shaped thought that has wandered into the vitamin aisle.