Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
One senior researcher in this field is approached by ADHD app startups roughly once a month and no longer takes part, on the view that the companies are not seriously trying to build something that works.
You do not have to share his judgement to borrow the question. Before paying for a digital product, ask who tested it, whether those testers were independent of the company, and what changed at home and at school rather than inside the app. A regulatory clearance and a good launch video are not the same as a result.
Qur’an and Sunnah
Father, hire him: a strong, trustworthy man is the best to hire (Quran 28:26). Trustworthiness is named there as a hiring criterion, and it applies to whoever wants to sell you a treatment.
قَالَتۡ إِحۡدَىٰهُمَا يَٰٓأَبَتِ ٱسۡتَـٔۡجِرۡهُۖ إِنَّ خَيۡرَ مَنِ ٱسۡتَـٔۡجَرۡتَ ٱلۡقَوِيُّ ٱلۡأَمِينُ
One of the women said, ‘Father, hire him: a strong, trustworthy man is the best to hire.’
Qur’an 28:26read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
What the research says
The cost side is not nothing either. A literature review of screen time in children and adolescents links heavy use with a range of physical and psychological problems, while being clear that its design cannot separate cause from consequence. Take that as a reason to count the screen hours a treatment adds, not as proof that screens caused anything.
Lissak G. (2018). Adverse physiological and psychological effects of screen time on children and adolescents: Literature review and case study.. Environmental research doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Why it works
A product can be approved, marketed and popular long before anyone has shown it changes daily life.
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
A weighted vest seems to do its work in roughly the first quarter of an hour. Twenty minutes did not beat fifteen, so longer is not more help.
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.
More clinicians now raise supplements themselves, and more of them will suggest something like omegas. The shift matters less for what gets recommended and more for what it does to disclosure.