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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Exercise, food and other supports
What is impaired in ADHD is holding back a response and steering your own behaviour over time. Sensory modulation is a different thing altogether. That is why the sessions can go pleasantly for months and change nothing at home, which is a demoralising outcome for a family who gave up their Saturdays for it.
Man will only have what he has worked towards (Quran 53:39). Effort returns something when it is pointed at the actual difficulty.
النجم
وَأَن لَّيۡسَ لِلۡإِنسَٰنِ إِلَّا مَا سَعَىٰ
that man will only have what he has worked towards
Qur’an 53:39read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
A systematic review covering fifteen years of treatment research in adolescents with ADHD found non-pharmacological options generally underperforming medication, with behaviour therapy having only preliminary support. Non-drug does not mean useless, and behaviour work aimed squarely at daily functioning still has a place. It does mean any intervention should be able to say which difficulty it is treating.
Sibley MH, Kuriyan AB, Evans SW, Waxmonsky JG, Smith BH. (2014). Pharmacological and psychosocial treatments for adolescents with ADHD: an updated systematic review of the literature.. Clinical psychology review doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
Work aimed at a capacity that was never the problem does not touch the one that is.
Sixty two children took methylphenidate with either vitamin D or a placebo, and both groups improved. The two ADHD rating scales showed no difference between them, which leaves the positive headline resting on the clinician's judgement rather than on what parents reported.
Regulators let devices through by several different routes, and only some of them mean what a family assumes. A game cleared for further investigation has not passed the bar a medicine passes.
Ask which direction a person's sensory difficulty runs before offering anything. Someone who is under responsive needs more input and someone who is over responsive needs less, and the wrong one makes the day harder.