Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Untreated ADHD is not free. It turns up in appointments, in repeat trips to A and E, in school reports and in lost work, and the bill lands on the family either way.
So when the cost of treatment is the reason for waiting, it is worth adding up what is already going out, in money and in hours and in the things nobody gets round to. The honest comparison is not treatment against nothing. It is treatment against the slow drip of what goes wrong while nobody is managing this.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Qur’an and Sunnah
God wishes to lighten your burden (Quran 4:28). Treating this is not adding a burden to a stretched family so much as lifting one they are carrying already.
يُرِيدُ ٱللَّهُ أَن يُخَفِّفَ عَنكُمۡۚ وَخُلِقَ ٱلۡإِنسَٰنُ ضَعِيفࣰ ا
God wishes to lighten your burden; man was created weak
Qur’an 4:28read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
In one trial, 410 adults were randomised to six months of atomoxetine or placebo, and the primary outcome was work productivity rather than a symptom count. That choice is unusual and useful, because productivity is the kind of thing a household actually feels. It is one medicine in one trial, so take it as evidence that treatment can move real world functioning, not as an accounting of what any treatment saves.
Adler LA, Spencer TJ, Levine LR, Ramsey JL, Tamura R, Kelsey D, Ball SG, Allen AJ, Biederman J. (2008). Functional outcomes in the treatment of adults with ADHD.. Journal of attention disorders doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
Something that reaches school, work, health and driving costs a household money whether or not it is treated.
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
Two ideas will let you judge most claims for yourself. In a good trial nobody involved knows who got the real treatment, and a study of five people can be swung by one of them having a good month.
If therapy for ADHD did little for your thirteen year old, that is not a sign they were not trying. The self monitoring it leans on is still being built at that age, and it builds later in ADHD than in most.
If someone selling you a treatment for ADHD uses the word cure, that is your cue to leave. There is no cure. What good treatment offers is fewer symptoms, and that is a real and worthwhile thing.