Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
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.
The word approval carries an authority that advertising borrows freely, and device pathways are shorter and lighter than the ones drugs travel. It is fair to ask which route a product went through, what it was compared against and which outcome it moved. A premium price for a regulatory technicality is worth spotting before you pay it.
Qur’an and Sunnah
those who squander are the brothers of Satan (Quran 17:27). Strong words, and the gentle version of them is that money handed over for a claim rather than a result is money gone.
إِنَّ ٱلۡمُبَذِّرِينَ كَانُوٓاْ إِخۡوَٰنَ ٱلشَّيَٰطِينِۖ وَكَانَ ٱلشَّيۡطَٰنُ لِرَبِّهِۦ كَفُورࣰ ا
those who squander are the brothers of Satan, and Satan is most ungrateful to his Lord
Qur’an 17:27read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
Device evidence genuinely runs both ways. Home based transcranial direct current stimulation improved inattention in adults with ADHD compared with sham, in the largest trial of its kind so far, while deep transcranial magnetic stimulation gave no benefit over sham in a trial of twenty six adults. The same broad family of technology, opposite results, which is why it has to be the trial you look at and not the packaging.
Leffa DT, Grevet EH, Bau CHD, Schneider M, Ferrazza CP, da Silva RF, Miranda MS, Picon F, Teche SP, Sanches P, Pereira D, Rubia K, Brunoni AR, Camprodon JA, Caumo W, Rohde LA. (2022). Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation vs Sham for the Treatment of Inattention in Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: The TUNED Randomized Clinical Trial.. JAMA psychiatry doi
Paz Y, Friedwald K, Levkovitz Y, Zangen A, Alyagon U, Nitzan U, Segev A, Maoz H, Koubi M, Bloch Y. (2018). Randomised sham-controlled study of high-frequency bilateral deep transcranial magnetic stimulation (dTMS) to treat adult attention hyperactive disorder (ADHD): Negative results.. The world journal of biological psychiatry : the official journal of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Different approval routes ask for very different amounts of evidence, so the label on its own tells you little.
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 what happens after the course ends, not only what happens during it. A gain that fades once the sessions stop was probably never a change in the person.
Ask which direction a person's sensory difficulty runs before offering anything. Someone who is under responsive needs more input and someone who is over responsive needs less, and the wrong one makes the day harder.
Vitamin C cannot really be stockpiled, since the excess leaves in your urine. A, D, E and K are stored in fat, so a large daily dose keeps adding to itself.