ADHD and Placebos
Research Shows ADHD Patients Improve Using Placebos
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), is widely treated in both children and adults by prescribing drugs like Adderall, Ritalin and Vyvanse. Yet Takeda, the company that sells the drug Vyvanse states that “the exact way these medications work is not known”. Meanwhile researchers around the world are uncovering evidence that placebos can be just as effective as drugs for both children and adults.
A 2003 study by James Bodfish, PhD, showed that he was able to steadily reduce the dosage of drug by adding a placebo to each patient’s treatment. Dr. Bodfish was motivated to study the use of placebos because ADHD drugs have serious short- and long-term side effects, while placebos have no side effects. He discovered that reducing the drug dose without placebo treatment lowered the number of side effects, but did not help improve ADHD. However, when a placebo was added, the treatment became more effective without triggering side effects from the medicine.
In 2018 the Journal of Child Neurology published similar results in a more recent study, and even came to the conclusion that “Short-term placebo response should be accounted for in children with ADHD”, since neither the drug manufacturer, nor the physician are able to show that the medicine itself is more effective than placebo.
The Journal of Attention Disorders examined this same issue in 2017. They studied teenagers who were using ADHD medication to learn whether or not those patients would notice the difference between their regular drug prescription and a placebo that looked like their prescribed drug. None of the teens were able to notice any difference between placebo treatments and their normal drug treatment.
The use of placebo to treat ADHD patients, regardless of the patients age, has been proven effective in study after study. Clinical research by Adrian Sandler, MD suggested that placebos were so effective that combining placebo with a smaller dose of ADHD medicine should be considered a new treatment for ADHD, and adopted for general use by physicians.
The use of placebo to treat ADHD patients, regardless of the patients age, has been proven effective in study after study.