Natural Treatments For ADHD More Effective Long Term

It’s the difference between treating the underlying causes once and treating the symptoms forever

An interesting post on Scientific American reviews recent study results comparing a medical versus cognitive (natural) treatment to address ADHD.  Here’s a link to the blog:  Not-So-Quick Fix

Here’s an excerpt:

“In a 2011 PLoS ONE paper, Julie Schweitzer and colleagues in the psychiatry and behavioral sciences department and the MIND Institute at the University of California, Davis, showed that children with ADHD show extra activity in brain areas associated with “task-irrelevant” information during working memory tasks (those that depend on one’s ability to hold and focus on information for immediate reasoning and recall), suggesting that they have less efficient cognitive control.

New unpublished results from Schweitzer’s team have shown that cognitive therapy could improve control, again potentially reducing the need for medication to “drown out” extraneous information.”

Here is the author’s bottom line: “Cognitive and behavioral therapies that help young people reduce impulsivity and cultivate good study habits are costlier and take longer to administer, but may be more efficacious over time.”

ADHD Causes Versus Symptoms

Most parents are positively disposed towards programs for ADD or ADHD that target the underlying problem in a natural, cognitive way, but parents of children with attention deficit difficulties are torn between two different needs :

• Short term.  They need to help performance in class and/or with homework. This requires a remedy that works on the symptoms of ADHD, drugs being the favored option.
• Longer term.  The desire is to eventually resolve the underlying difficulty so it does not linger as a lifetime challenge for their child.

The studies described above have a long-term time frame.  They make the case that even though drugs may be a good short-term fix, they are not a long-term solution. Long-term improvements require cognitive therapies that address the underlying learning difficulties that are known to cause ADD and ADHD.

To learn more about the kinds of inattentive ADD and ADHD that are helped by Gemm Learning’s cognitive software call a specialist.