This Is My Brain in Love - I. W. Gregorio Page 0,80
has gotten better, but he still makes too many unforced errors. So, I got up and did a two AM search on natural remedies for ADHD.
The first time I ever googled medical advice for a tennis injury, my mom (1) shot me the hairy eyeball and (2) delivered a lecture on fake medical news and how to detect it. She gave me her log-in to an online resource that doctors use when they need to look up reliable information on treatments. She took me to her medical school’s library site so I could see how many freaking different publications there are and understand why a few of them are like rock stars (the New England Journal of Medicine and Nature) whereas others are more like garage bands.
She then gave me a miniseries of talks with episodes on concepts like peer review (essentially, your frenemies get to gleefully tear apart your research before you can publish it), double-blind randomized controlled trials (the best and most scientific way to compare two treatments), and of course, conflicts of interest (because, news flash, scientists who are paid by pharmaceutical companies tend to unconsciously favor those companies’ drugs).
My mother gave me these fact-checking tools to show me how complicated the search for medical truth can be. I was taught in school that science is objective, but she wanted to illustrate that scientific research isn’t always perfect, which means that the conclusions that people draw from it can be flawed, too.
It was a frightening realization, and one that explained why my mother has always hated taking any medications. When she comes home with her neck and shoulders aching from standing over an operating table, she just warms up a heating pad and waves off my dad’s offer of ibuprofen, muttering about wanting to protect her kidney and how she doesn’t want to get an ulcer. She chastises my nne nne, too, for the metric ton of dietary supplements she consumes every year. “You are just wasting your money,” she says. “Most of those pills are essentially expensive placebos!”
Of all the things that my mother has tried to teach me about the ins and outs of medical research, I’ve found the idea of the placebo effect to be the most fascinating. I’d known for years that the mind has far more control over the body than most people realize. So, it came as no surprise that, to a certain extent, people can sometimes think themselves better, and that taking a sugar pill can improve everything from chronic pain to an overactive bladder to someone’s perception of how bad their asthma is.
The next morning before work, I go to our drugstore and get some fish oil tablets. The evidence, my mother would tell you, is not convincing that omega-3 fatty acids can help prevent ADHD symptoms any more than, say, eating a fiber gummy.
That does make it a pretty perfect placebo, though.
And oh, hey, placebos have been shown to improve ADHD symptoms at about 50 percent of the level that actual drugs have. With none of the risks.
A couple of years ago, the sisters at St. Agnes started talking about Ritalin abuse in their health lectures, and there were the occasional rumors of kids stockpiling them to give away at the kind of exclusive parties that I wasn’t invited to and would probably have hated in the first place. We’ve all seen those ads for ADHD drugs that end with a dulcet-toned voice-over artist rattling off twenty side effects in as reassuring a tone as possible. But I’ve also seen how they turned around my cousin Lonnie when he started meds in eighth grade. One year at the family Thanksgiving dinner he broke three wineglasses on two separate occasions and left in screaming tears at the end of the night; the next he was like a mini-adult. Was it maturity or was it the drugs?
The problem is, on a case-by-case level, there’s no way to really know. So, the people who don’t have access to their parents’ medical journals can only go by their cousin’s story, or their friend’s mother’s nephew’s, or by a glossy magazine’s human-interest story about celebrity X’s recovery from stimulant addiction.
Still, I’m desperate. So for our next study session I bring snacks that are free of food dye and print out a five-minute mindfulness/yoga plan to do before the study session. I filch a Days-of-the-Week pillbox from our medicine cabinet to repackage the fish oil tablets as a “traditional Italian concentration enhancer” that boosts