[octatrack]

I think a large amount of the ADHD symptoms can be mitigated with lifestyle habits. Proper sleep, moving the body, getting sun, meditating, proper nutrition, managing dopamine disrupting activities (e.g. mindlessly scrolling TikTok or watching porn), etc. all improve ADHD symptoms.

Medication should be the last resort, only for severe cases, or perhaps not used every day so that the brain can recover. 4 day on and 3 days off seem to be a popular dosing schedule by some mindful advocates.

Of course, it’s incredibly difficult to do all the things mentioned above to aid optimal dopamine levels.

The way our society operates, it’s much easier to take the shortcut and pop some amphetamine after you wake up to get your day going.

Exceptions apply to legit, severe cases.

Andrew Huberman has a good podcast about the topic. [0]

[0] https://podcastnotes.org/huberman-lab/episode-37-adhd-how-an...

[Uptrenda]

This is pseudo-science garbage. People with ADHD have an imbalance in the levels of dopamine and norepinephrine in their brain (along with hyper efficient mop-up of dopamine and other abnormalities with norepinephrine.) You can't just wish this away with a little exercise and life-style change. People with ADHD will need to take medication for the rest of their life.

[lultimouomo]

I have no clue whether the proposed lifestyles changes would help a person with ADHD. But the idea that a "chemical imbalance" cannot be influenced by lifestyle changes is a bit crazy. For many people that have an imbalance of sugar in their blood, a diet change will do miracles. Vitamin D imbalance (which is actually a hormone imbalance)? Sun exposure or diet change will be enough for many people.

We all take for granted that lifestyle changes can do actual change to our body, but for some reason the brain often seems exempt from this.

Obviously there are conditions, both psychological and not, where drugs are the best course of action, but lifestyle changes are not "wishing away" any more than trying to drug away an emotional distress due to life conditions.

[octatrack]

I challenge any non-ADHD person to do the following for a week:

* Sleep only 5 hours a day

* Spend 5 hours on TikTok every day

* Eat a diet of mostly processed carbohydrates

* Stay sedentary all day

Let’s see if this person starts showing ADHD symptoms after a week. Should we start medicating them?

I am not saying that there are no _legit_ cases of ADHD when it is indeed genetic or trauma based that cannot be easily fixed by lifestyle changes. There are people who really need the meds. But I am betting that that these people are only a very low percentage of the currently medicated ones.

[irdc]

Med student here. I'm not dismissing the idea that some people are wrongly diagnosed with ADHD, but what you're saying here is the kind of harmful nonsense that's been interfering with appropriate treatment for ADHD for ages.

Psychostimulants for ADHD are universally associated with better outcomes, even in people who appear to manage without them. They reduce depression, anxiety, drug abuse and mortality. Heck, a lot of people with ADHD even sleep better while on them!

Stop meddling in other people's evidence-based medical treatment.

[tacon]

>Psychostimulants for ADHD are universally associated with better outcomes

When someone in the medical field starts talking about universal outcomes in relation to biological entities, my spidey sense goes crazy. As Eric Hoffer so eloquently put it, "We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand."[0] The pharmaceutical industry has strong incentives to emphasize benefits and downplay harm from drugs, especially in the long term effects[1]. That is assuming that the drugs are actually manufactured correctly[2]. And even drugs manufactured correctly can decay on the shelf into carcinogens at a million times the safe limit, and (almost) no one bothers to check[3]. I once sat through a doctor going through how to use the ADHD meds, and my head started to hurt. How to take one type before sleep so it kicks in just as the kid wakes up for school, but another works faster or slower, and on and on. And all of this from doctors (and medical students) who can tell you everything about how great drugs are but spend close to zero time learning about the uses of exercise in improving health outcomes[4].

[0] https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/eric_hoffer_142924

[1] https://www.econtalk.org/jacob-stegenga-on-medical-nihilism/

[2] https://peterattiamd.com/katherineeban/

[3] https://peterattiamd.com/davidlight/

[4] https://www.exerciseismedicine.org/

[irdc]

None of the resources you link specifically address psychostimulants for ADHD. Handwaving and vaguely suggesting one drug is pretty much like all others isn't going to cut it: drugs don't work that way, drugs are _specific_.

The sordid situation around generics manufacturing has no bearing whatsoever on the effectiveness of plain old dexamphetamine or methylphenidate in helping people with ADHD. The FDA approval process doesn't impact how drugs work, just how they're licensed. And just because one single drug contained a carcinogenic ingredient doesn't suddenly mean they all do.

I'll give you one thing though: exercise helps people with ADHD. In addition to psychostimulants.

[y4mi]

They didn't say that it's treatment for ADHD. If you invert their statement you end up with "having bad sleeping habits, [...] causes ADHD symptoms."

Fixing these issues would thus reduce them. It's not quiet as easy to diagnose ADHD as you seem to think, so a lot of people just live unhealthy, which gives them similar symptoms

[hhjinks]

Depression can also be caused by imbalances in the brain's chemistry, and can in many cases be mitigated by lifestyle changes. Why should ADHD be different?