Help for ADHD Without Medication: Natural Remedies

ADHD Therapies With No Medicine

How to help a child with ADHD without drugs? It’s a question we hear more often these days.  While lesser known, there are ways to manage and control ADHD without meds. This includes natural, drug-free approaches to manage the symptoms of ADHD and non-medication treatments that aim to remediate ADHD or at least reduce the symptoms permanently.

For several decades, ADHD has been treated as an incurable medical condition, primarily managed with narcotic-grade drugs. Despite research about the adverse side effects, according to a Centers for Disease Control study in most of the US, >50% of children diagnosed with ADHD are taking meds.

This use of ADHD drugs is continuing despite many new natural ADD remedies becoming available based on advances in neuroscience, nutritional, cognitive, and medical research in two categories:

• Managing the symptoms
• Treating the underlying causes of ADD

Natural ADHD Remedies That Manage Symptoms

There are several ways to manage the symptoms of ADD, including neurofeedback, nutrition, meditation, and focus exercises. These approaches can help improve focus while they are in use, but once stopped, symptoms of ADD tend to return.  In this regard, these therapies are directly comparable to meds.

• Neurofeedback, also called biofeedback, uses real-time displays of brain activity to teach self-regulation of focus. Sensors (or a helmet) are placed on the scalp to measure activity, with changes in focus being represented as movement on a screen. This gives the student real-time feedback on changes in focus and distraction. While some neurofeedback providers claim this is a one-and-done learned skill, no studies back it up, and most anecdotal evidence on neurofeedback suggests the effect is more like physical exercise for fitness—once you stop exercising, fitness declines. A comparison of neurofeedback and Fast ForWord here.
• Nutrition. Two diet-related strategies exist. One is so-called elimination diets, as recommended by Dr. Eugene Arnold and others, where foods are eliminated from the diet of an ADD child, looking for signs of improvement.  Arguably, avoiding sugar is part of this approach. Second, there are a growing number of dietary additions, omega-3 in fish oil being the most famous, being recommended to help improve focus.
• Meditation and focus exercises. Meditation or “mindful awareness” — as put forward by the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center and others — improves your ability to control your attention. In other words, it teaches you to pay attention to paying attention. This is a tough skill to teach children but has had some success with adult ADHD.

Controlling ADHD symptoms with no medicine to change daily behavior can be successful short-term; the remedies, natural or medical, are only helpful while they are being used. There is no clear evidence of lasting impacts.

Also, most natural approaches—exercise and meditation—require significant effort from your child that may not match the long-term reward because the gains are temporary.

Gemm Learning provides cognitive training programs for ADHD using software, not medication. 

Treatments for ADHD Without Meds: Addressing Root Causes

There are ways to help a child with ADHD without drugs that aim to resolve ADHD once and for all. These include learning software, sensory exercises, and brain training.

No doubt, treating the cause of ADD in children is somewhat speculative, mainly because pinpointing the exact source of difficulty is complicated. However, if the ADD remedy is successful, it has a lifetime impact — no more taking drugs or doing exercises –surely worth taking a chance on.

All children with ADHD should be tested for nutritional allergies and remedies. Beyond that, your choice of remedies depends mainly on the suspected cause – more on the causes of ADHD here – and that is best detected using non-ADHD-related symptoms:

• Sensory integration issues that cause ADHD. If your child has hand-to-eye co-ordination, balance, or spatial issues (e.g., gets lost on a sports field), sensory integration issues likely underlie the ADD. Many children benefit from support here, which is why Occupational Therapy (OT) is popular and helpful.In terms of professional ADHD therapies, your best choices here are Interactive Metronome, occupational therapy (including Brain Gym), the Brain Balance Centers, or possibly Learning Breakthrough (Balametrics), which uses balance board-based exercises. The challenge with the latter two physical exercise-based natural remedies for ADD is that all take a long time to have any effect, 9 months or more.
  • Gemm Learning has experimented extensively with balance-based protocols without much success. This is partly because the exercises must be done precisely, as they rely on crossing your child’s midline and difficult cognitive-loading exercises, e.g., juggling while on a balance board.
  • Exercises to try at home. Here are suggestions for exercises that cross the midline you can try.  For a larger variety of sensory integration movement, try these Brain Gym exercises.
• Learning delays that cause ADHD. If your child has had speech issues, processing delays, poor working memory, learning or reading issues, chances are he will not be an engaged learner either in class or when reading or doing homework. This lack of engagement in something that he finds difficult, even tortuous, is often diagnosed as ADD.  The remedy for these ADD-like symptoms is to tackle the underlying learning difficulty, and in this regard, the best approaches are treatments that take advantage of neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire. Apart from being effective, these therapies for ADD tend to be fast-acting.

Cognitive Training

Leading cognitive training programs that target learning delays include Learning RX, Fast ForWord software, and Cogmed. Gemm Learning is a certified at-home provider of Fast ForWord and Cogmed.

Learning RX is a chain of learning centers that uses intense in-center exercises to improve a wide range of learning skills.

ADHD Programs by Gemm Learning

Gemm Learning provides two programs for ADHD – Fast ForWord and Cogmed – at home with remote oversight.

Fast ForWord software focuses more narrowly on language-based cognitive skills—processing, attention, working memory, and sequencing—to improve reading and learning efficiency.

Since language processing delays are a major source of ADHD symptoms, the program includes specific exercises on attention – building sustained focus, dealing with distractions, and regulating impulsiveness.

Reading comprehension difficulties and inattentiveness often appear together.  Gemm Learning provides cognitive training for reading and attention deficit that addresses both issues in sequence, attention first, then reading comprehension.

Cogmed focuses on working memory to help engagement and focus.

If you are wondering how to help a child with ADHD without drugs, you should investigate cognitive training as a way to remediate the underlying causes of ADHD once and for all. More on our ADHD programs here.

If you are wondering how to help your child with ADHD without drugs and think we could help, find out if we can help your child by scheduling a free 1-on-1 phone consultation.

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth edition: DSM-5. Washington: American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

Evidence-Based Information on the Clinical Use of Neurofeedback for ADHD.  Tais S. Moriyama, Guilherme Polanczyk, […], and Luis A. Rohde