Focus, starting, and ADHD

Showing a teenager live pictures of activity in one targeted part of their own brain has been tried once, in a small trial, and it looked encouraging. That was around a dozen young people, and nobody has repeated it yet.

This is worth knowing about mainly so you can tell it apart from the neurofeedback that is widely sold. The clinic version reads surface brain…

There is a headband worn at night that stimulates a nerve in the face, cleared by regulators and tested against a dummy version in a single trial. Some children improved. Some felt sick or slept badly and stopped.

Regulatory clearance answers whether a device is safe enough to be sold, not whether it beats what you are already doing. One trial, funded by the…

Magnetic stimulation of the brain has been tried for ADHD and has not yet shown anything. The studies are small, often single cases, and not built in a way that could give a trustworthy answer.

Small uncontrolled studies are generous places. Hope, attention and the freedom to report only the good parts all push results upwards. That does not…

People who use several kinds of help tend to report more benefit than people relying on one. Medication, therapy, coaching, reading, sleep and movement all seem to add something rather than compete.

That turns a hard conversation into an easier one. Instead of pressing a reluctant partner towards the single thing they least want, you can offer a…

Managing the ADHD is not the goal. Being happy together is the goal, and the ADHD work is only worth doing to the extent that it gets you there.

Keeping that order straight changes the atmosphere of the whole effort. A partner who has spent years being a project stops being one. Requests stop…

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.

Researchers want their treatment to work, and that hope leaks into how they rate what they see, which is why the person handing out the pill and the…

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.

These packages come with a theory about why they work, and the theory is usually where the confidence comes from rather than from the results. What…

Sleep, food and movement will not cure anything, but they lengthen the fuse. Bad moments still arrive, and you handle them differently when your body is not already running on empty.

This matters more here than it sounds, because ADHD tends to wreck exactly these three and then the wreckage feeds back into the flare ups. Late…

The diet evidence has drifted away from cutting particular things out and towards eating decently overall. That is easier on everyone at the table.

Removing additives or colourings helps a small number of children, and the trouble is that you cannot tell in advance who they are, so most families…

Paying someone to help sort the house will not mend the marriage. It will remove one of the things you fight about most weeks, and that counts for more than it sounds.

Nobody should pretend this reaches anything deep. The point is arithmetic. A couple has a certain number of rows in them, and if the living room is…