Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Rather than memorising which treatments to avoid, keep a few questions you can put to any of them. New products arrive faster than anyone can keep a list.
Ask how it was tested and by whom, and whether anyone independent of the company has looked at it. Ask what it costs, whether insurance touches it, and what the risk is next to the benefit. Ask whether you have to sign anything. Then ask the one people forget: does the gain hold once the treatment stops, or does it fade the month you stop paying. A treatment with good answers will not mind the questions.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Conduct their affairs by mutual consultation (Quran 42:38). Talking a decision through with someone before committing to it is described as the ordinary way of doing things.
وَٱلَّذِينَ ٱسۡتَجَابُواْ لِرَبِّهِمۡ وَأَقَامُواْ ٱلصَّلَوٰةَ وَأَمۡرُهُمۡ شُورَىٰ بَيۡنَهُمۡ وَمِمَّا رَزَقۡنَٰهُمۡ يُنفِقُونَ
respond to their Lord; keep up the prayer; conduct their affairs by mutual consultation; give to others out of what We have provided for them
Qur’an 42:38read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
A meta analytic review of nine randomised and three uncontrolled trials looked at whether psychosocial treatment gains in adult ADHD are still there at long term follow up. It is a good example of your last question being asked properly, and of how rarely anyone asks it. When a seller has no answer about what happens after treatment ends, that gap is itself information.
López-Pinar C, Martínez-Sanchís S, Carbonell-Vayá E, Fenollar-Cortés J, Sánchez-Meca J. (2018). Long-Term Efficacy of Psychosocial Treatments for Adults With Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder: A Meta-Analytic Review.. Frontiers in psychology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A set of questions keeps working on next year's products, and a list of banned treatments does not.
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
Brain training and therapeutic games raise one question above all others. Does the improvement show up anywhere except inside the game, and does it last once you stop playing?
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.
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.