Re: Neurofeedback

[Anonymous]

I put the link up for reference, in case somebody was wondering what the topic was about.

My opinion is my own and I expressed it more directly than the brief mention I saw on the wiki.

I have been watching ADHD news since I first was diagnosed nearly twenty years back and

this idea has stagnated for a long time, only recently getting any professional attention at all.

To get an idea of how long it was, look up “biofeedback” with “ADHD” or “ADD” and you will

find the occasional mentions going on for decades.

It is highly unlikely you will find anybody with first hand experience on using neurofeedback

for ADHD because it has not been tested widely enough to make a case for it and very very

few people were in any properly run study. Nobody has even attempted to pit it against the

known treatments yet, it is likely years away before even starting in that direction and it would

take quite a while to complete such a study against even one drug, let alone half a dozen.

Put simply, it is still just a curiosity which the medical community considers fringe science

and so far is mostly fodder for conspiracy buffs who dislike drug companies. Even if it does

eventually bear fruit, neurofeedback is still in it’s infancy on it’s own (as a subject of basic

research) and putting it together with ADHD will take still more years of rigorous medical

trials before one could even consider it an alternative to established treatments. It is not an

effective treatment because an effective treatment has not been devised from it, being that

it is still a theory which has just begun primary research and is still years away from clinical

development and the fine tuning necessary to shape it into one.

There’s an opinion, just as you wanted. You won’t find much more than opinion because

virtually nobody has any experience, even among the professionals you will meet here.

Feel free to throw together a rig and play around with it, though. The technology itself is

pretty simple and the equipment is amazingly cheap. You can even get kits to turn your

PC into a simple EEG display, the approach I would start with if I was interested, because

watching a galvanometer in motion requires unwavering attention but a PC can show you

a histogram in real time and even store long recordings for later review. If it can work at all

you could probably get yourself to a point where it works for you personally long before any

well-defined plan or procedure works it’s way through labs and regulators. Then, you will

have an opinion with some experience of your own to share.

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