Our son has been diagnosed with ADHD for the past several years. He is on medication, he has an IEP at school, and sees a therapist every couple of weeks.
My wife has been looking into neurofeedback as a possible additional therapy.
That wikipedia article makes me skeptical of the effectiveness of neurotherapy:
However, I’m trying to be open minded, and would like to hear from any Dopers that have any experience using Neurofeedback for helping to deal with ADHD.
Relying on memory cobwebs, IIRC there was reasonably good evidence for it’s efficacy for bed wetting and circulatory issues in digits (e.g. whatever it’s called when your fingers turn blue.) But this was a while ago when I last looked into it.
I’ve got ADD, or what is now called ADHD (inattentive). Stimulant-based meds work wonders for me.
My mother is a clinical child psychologist who works with a lot of ADHD kids, and she tells parents to get their ADHD kids into an endurance sport to help deal with the symptoms.
If you’re looking for supplemental treatment, exercise is the best thing I’ve found aside from the aforementioned meds. ADHD kids are over-represented in endurance sports, probably because exercise is a form of self-medication.
I grew up racing bicycles, and most of my teammates had been diagnosed with ADD. A few years ago, Greg Lemond (the first American to win the Tour de France) started speaking publicly about how he started riding because it was the only thing that suppressed his ADD symptoms. (My understanding is that he received a formal diagnosis as an adult).
I tried a bunch of different things to deal with my symptoms, but meds and exercise were far and away the most effective. I tried biofeedback (not neurofeedback; I was monitoring my heart rate) and had no luck. I got good at lowering my heart rate, but it didn’t help me concentrate.
No information on neurofeedback, sorry.
Regarding ADHD in general, exercise is definitely a good tool.
My most hyperactive classmate would sometimes get sent to “run a couple times around the yard and come back. Come back, eh! It’s not just ‘leave’, I want you back! And remember I can see the yard from here!” when the teachers saw that he was already bouncing off every wall first thing in the morning. For other kids who were on the hyper side but not as much as that one, the breaks we got through the day were enough.
My father had similar stories about some of his own classmates. I’ve heard other people talk about “running around the yard” as a form of punishment, but in our case it was viewed as a sort of preventive activity: the hyper student would get sent to blow off some steam in an approved way so he wouldn’t blow up in a non-approved way or drive everybody else crazy with the bouncing.
I’ve known several hyperactive people who got even more bouncy when they were low-sugar, that’s something you may need to pay attention to. It may seem like some sort of oxymoron: he needs to eat, so he’s more energetic than usual, really? But yes, really: the low sugar affects the regulatory parts of the brain and those things we have the worst problems regulating get affected first. For those of us who fall into “easily distracted” it’s harder to pay attention, for the bouncy ones it turns them into human-shaped ping-pong balls.
We tried it for a year or more for our daughter; doesn’t seem to have really made any difference that we could tell.