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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
The under responsive child is the one climbing, chewing, pressing into things, hunting for sensation in order to feel settled. The over responsive child is flinching at the seam in a sock and the hum of the strip light. Give a wobble cushion to the second and a quiet corner to the first and both get worse, and it goes in the notes as a failed intervention rather than as a mismatch.
so that you may rest and seek His bounty (Quran 28:73). Two opposite needs, rest and activity, both provided for at the right moment, which is how sensory support has to work as well.
القصص
وَمِن رَّحۡمَتِهِۦ جَعَلَ لَكُمُ ٱلَّيۡلَ وَٱلنَّهَارَ لِتَسۡكُنُواْ فِيهِ وَلِتَبۡتَغُواْ مِن فَضۡلِهِۦ وَلَعَلَّكُمۡ تَشۡكُرُونَ
In His mercy He has given you night and day, so that you may rest and seek His bounty and be grateful.’
Qur’an 28:73read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Who receives something often decides whether it helps. A small trial of vitamin D and magnesium in children with ADHD found improvement in mental health measures, in children who were deficient to begin with. Narrow groups like that are exactly where an effect can appear and then vanish once the same thing is handed to everybody.
Hemamy M, Pahlavani N, Amanollahi A, Islam SMS, McVicar J, Askari G, Malekahmadi M. (2021). The effect of vitamin D and magnesium supplementation on the mental health status of attention-deficit hyperactive children: a randomized controlled trial.. BMC pediatrics doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Two people can need opposite things from the same sense, so what soothes one will overload the other.
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.
Food colouring is the one narrow exception in this area. Large studies suggest it may mildly wind up some very young children, so a trial removal in a preschooler is a reasonable thing to do.
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.