You’ve heard plenty of them. We hear them every day. Here are some stories of frustration to focus.

The child with Borderline Intellectual Function who seemed inattentive since she had a hard time understanding material and instruction in the general classroom—she came to us on medication that blunted her personality to a Zombie-like state with that left her unengaged and listless. We stopped her medication and her teachers were AMAZED at her happy enthusiastic behavior and interest in learning.

The kindergarten student who was ‘on RED light almost every day whose parents were told elsewhere he was too young to diagnose with ADHD and too young to treat. On his second visit he said this to his doctor—"you’re magic!" When asked why he said that he replied, "I always tried to be on GREEN but I stayed RED RED RED but since I came here it’s GREEN GREEN GREEN!

The middle school student who took a low dose of medication that ‘made a night and day difference’ but then over six months had her dose increased twice because it ‘stopped working’. She became irritable and withdrew to her room and her school performance worsened. When she came to see us we took the time to ask, "how did you know the medication stopped working?" The answer was "the teacher told us". But no one knew any specifics. When the parents asked the teacher for specifics about the ‘medication not working’ they were told that her behavior in the cafeteria was a problem. We reduced her dose back to the lowest dose and gave the parents a behavior plan to deal with her antics in the cafeteria. The medication again made a night and day difference.

The high school student who had four sets of psychological/educational testing costing well over $10,000 who had been told by three psychologists that she didn’t have ADHD. She was shutting down because she was tired of 5 days a week tutoring and being laughed at for going to the Resource Classroom every day for extra help and testing. Our testing strongly suggested ADHD and we started her on medication. Three months later she was out of after school tutoring and six months later she went to her last Resource Class. Her teacher told her parents that she had never seen any change as dramatic in over 25 years of teaching.

The college student who had been on a dose of medication that everyone acknowledged changed his personality from outgoing and humorous to quiet and serious. "I take it when I have to because I can’t stay in business school without it." In seven years his doctor had never suggested another medication. One month after we saw him he was dose optimized on a different medication and ‘loved it’.

The adult patient who had tried several anxiety medications but none of them stopped her anxious thoughts of "I can’t stop thinking," she told her doctor, "I am feeling more and more helpless and depressed’. She confided that she was drinking more ‘to help me sleep’. Treating her ADHD stopped the anxious thoughts and improved her self esteem in weeks.

The sixty-five year old patient who always knew he had ADD but didn’t know what to do about it. One month into treatment he told his doctor, ‘over the last two weeks, for the first time in my life I think clearly and can lie down and go to sleep.’