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Areas › Focus, starting, and ADHD › Treatment and medication
Medication travels reasonably well, since a prescriber can be found in most places. The psychological and behavioural work travels badly, because it needs trained people and there are not many of those outside a few cities. If you are a clinician, the gain available to you now is probably in reaching people who currently get nothing, by training others, by running groups, by taking the work to where it is scarce.
This explains how treatments work. Never start, stop or change a medication because of something you read here.
In which there is healing for people (Quran 16:69). A remedy existing and a remedy arriving are two different things, and the second one takes people willing to carry it.
النحل
ثُمَّ كُلِي مِن كُلِّ ٱلثَّمَرَٰتِ فَٱسۡلُكِي سُبُلَ رَبِّكِ ذُلُلࣰ اۚ يَخۡرُجُ مِنۢ بُطُونِهَا شَرَابࣱ مُّخۡتَلِفٌ أَلۡوَٰنُهُۥ فِيهِ شِفَآءࣱ لِّلنَّاسِۚ إِنَّ فِي ذَٰلِكَ لَأٓيَةࣰ لِّقَوۡمࣲ يَتَفَكَّرُونَ
Then feed on all kinds of fruit and follow the ways made easy for you by your Lord.’ From their bellies comes a drink of different colours in which there is healing for people. There truly is a sign in this for those who think
Qur’an 16:69read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The updated European consensus statement on the diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD sets out where the evidence supports each treatment option. A document like that is the field saying, with reasonable agreement, that the effective options are already known. What no consensus statement can do is get any of it to the person who needs it, and that is the part left over.
Kooij JJS, Bijlenga D, Salerno L, Jaeschke R, Bitter I, Balázs J, Thome J, Dom G, Kasper S, Nunes Filipe C, Stes S, Mohr P, Leppämäki S, Casas M, Bobes J, Mccarthy JM, Richarte V, Kjems Philipsen A, Pehlivanidis A, Niemela A, Styr B, Semerci B, Bolea-Alamanac B, Edvinsson D, Baeyens D, Wynchank D, Sobanski E, Philipsen A, McNicholas F, Caci H, Mihailescu I, Manor I, Dobrescu I, Saito T, Krause J, Fayyad J, Ramos-Quiroga JA, Foeken K, Rad F, Adamou M, Ohlmeier M, Fitzgerald M, Gill M, Lensing M, Motavalli Mukaddes N, Brudkiewicz P, Gustafsson P, Tani P, Oswald P, Carpentier PJ, De Rossi P, Delorme R, Markovska Simoska S, Pallanti S, Young S, Bejerot S, Lehtonen T, Kustow J, Müller-Sedgwick U, Hirvikoski T, Pironti V, Ginsberg Y, Félegyházy Z, Garcia-Portilla MP, Asherson P. (2019). Updated European Consensus Statement on diagnosis and treatment of adult ADHD.. European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A treatment that exists but never reaches anyone helps nobody.
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.
What a person expects from a treatment genuinely changes what they get from it. That is not a trick to be exploited, and it is not nothing either.
Move the family's picture from a child who will not do as they are asked to a child whose capacity for holding themselves in place is genuinely limited. It is a change of category, not a softening.