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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
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 rhythms and has been offered for years on much shakier ground. The research version aims at a specific structure that theory points to, and has one small positive result behind it. Neither is a reason to spend the family savings this year.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
Ask those who have knowledge if you do not know (Quran 16:43). When a new treatment reaches the news, the useful move is finding somebody who has read the actual trial.
النحل
وَمَآ أَرۡسَلۡنَا مِن قَبۡلِكَ إِلَّا رِجَالࣰ ا نُّوحِيٓ إِلَيۡهِمۡۖ فَسۡـَٔلُوٓاْ أَهۡلَ ٱلذِّكۡرِ إِن كُنتُمۡ لَا تَعۡلَمُونَ
[Prophet], all the messengers We sent before you were simply men to whom We had given the Revelation: you [people] can ask those who have knowledge if you do not know
Qur’an 16:43read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The first randomised controlled trial of real time fMRI neurofeedback in adolescents with ADHD targeted the right inferior prefrontal cortex. First is the important word there. A first trial tells you something is worth pursuing, not that it works, and with numbers this small and no replication the honest position is interest rather than recommendation.
Alegria AA, Wulff M, Brinson H, Barker GJ, Norman LJ, Brandeis D, Stahl D, David AS, Taylor E, Giampietro V, Rubia K. (2017). Real-time fMRI neurofeedback in adolescents with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.. Human brain mapping doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Aiming at a specific mechanism is a better bet than training a general signal, though a good aim is not yet a result.
Coaching for adult ADHD comes down mostly to one thing: a standing appointment with somebody who will ask how it went. That sounds thin until you have tried keeping a plan alive entirely on your own.
After a working lifetime in this field, Barkley names the change in how a family sees the child as the most important step of all. Not the medication, not the charts.
The point of explaining ADHD to a parent is to produce a particular kind of parent: one who is kind about it, quick to forgive the day's failures, and willing to make a nuisance of themselves at school.