Treating ADHD

HI
I was diagnosed with ADD at age 35. I started taking either Dexedrine or adderall as needed depending on what was going on that day, but last year I was diagnosed with high blood pressure, so I started straterra but that makes me sleepy and feel sick for a couple hours at first. Anything else I can do, medication is so helpful for me.

Ellen

I do not wish to give anyone medical advice, so take this with a huge grain of salt but i will tell you my experience.
My 7 year old daughter was 'diagnosed' with ADHD by her school. I want to make it clear up front that I have the utmost respect and admiration for the staff at her school and for all the hard work they've done with my daughter. They identified a very real problem in that she was just not able to adjust to or function well in a structured environment like a class room. She would wander around the room, interrupt during lessons, make noises that distracted the other students ands so on. Contrary to what many say is the typical response by school officials when faced with a child like this, the school did not automatically request that we put her on meds. Instead the formed a committee consisting of myself and my wife, her teacher, the school psychologist, the principle, an occupational therapist and an advanced academics teacher (since she showed sings of being academically ahead of her age group) and others. They worked very hard at finding strategies to help my daughter adjust to the structure of a school day but at the end of the year, it was mutually decided that she was still not able to control her impullsivity enough to be able to function in school.
We were quickly running out of options for her. Of course she had been given the standard tests and we had taken her to a pediatrician but we still didn't have a consensus on exactly what was going on with her, the school psychologist said she was convinced that she had ADHD but the pediatrician said otherwise and her advanced academics teacher was giving us info on how very bright kids are often misdiagnosed with ADHD.
Then (and this is the part I can not fully endorse) the school psychologist told us about a homeopathies practitioner she had knew about who had seen some of her other patients and who had had very good results. The Psychologist said she knew nothing about homeopathy or how it worked but that she could not deny the changes she had seen in some of her patients.

OK, I said.

Listen, I',m a skeptic. What little I've read about homeopathy gives me no reason to believe there's anything to it. If you read the description of how the remedies are supposed to work it sounds more like sympathetic magic than science.

But anyway, to cut this down to a reasonable level, we took her to the homeopath (because reading about the side effects of meds scared the bejebus out of me and we were looking for any alternative). We had very good results, almost immediately. Her teacher says she is better able to focus, is more productive in class and does not need constant reminders to stay on task. She doesn't make inappropriate noises of seem to need tactile stimulation (like shaking her head to watch her hair swing back and forth). We are also working with her diet, trying to give her much less heavily processed food, cutting down on sugars and simple carbohydrates and giving her foods that will give her sustained, even amounts of energy through out the day. Of course i think that diet has a great deal to do with the changes we've seen in her but since we saw such immediate results I can't discount the effects of the homeopathic remedy.

I don't know how or why it worked, it doesn't make sense to me that it should, but I can't argue with the results.