The 'Unritalin Solution'

[daddyrocks]

Is the ‘Unritalin Solution’ half way helpful? I am extremely skeptical of the ‘cure’ claims boasted on the website, but I want to know if the strategies this man has for homework, motivation, organization, etc are at all helpful. Our kids are burning us out and we need some more effective ways of motivating them.

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[kc5jck]

I am no expert, but have tried to educate myself about ADHD over the past couple of years.  I have done this through books, the web, and resources on this site, as well as from personal experience and the experiences of others.  I am biased against claims of cures.

I briefly looked at the Unritalin Solution website and thought that many of his “14 keys” are good suggestions that are known to help with ADHD, such as developing good eating habits, rest, exercise, alleviating stress for example.  Other items seemed like snake oil and voodoo.

Look at his suggestions and use what makes sense and what helps.  I definitely would not buy anything offered on the site.  (Although, I didn’t look to see what he might be selling.  If you don’t need your money, you can leave it here via the “Donate” button above.)  One way to appear credible is to mix in truth with claims and opinion.  The man is apparently not qualified any more than I am to offer advice or cures.  Perhaps less so.

I would say that your best bet is to participate here and ask questions.  (You’re off to a good start.)  This site is here to help, not make money.

The more specific you are with what is going on, the better responses you will get.

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[seabassd]

@kc5jck,

“One way to appear credible is to mix in truth with claims and opinion.”

I love this statement. I can be so naive sometimes. There are so many simple concepts like this that are maybe in my brains databank, but I usually only grasp it as intuition.

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[Patte Rosebank]

@Daddyroccks, there is NO CURE for ADHD. Anyone who tells you there is, is a liar and a con-artist.

ADHD can only be TREATED, and the best treatment is one that involves a combination of counselling/coaching (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and meds.

Despite what the snake-oil salesmen say, meds are NOT “evil”. But they aren’t “magic pills” either. They’re like training wheels on a bike. They’ll help keep you upright, but you still need to learn how to ride that bike!

Some people have such good results with this combination (along with eating properly—including enough protein—and enough physical activity, and sleep) that eventually, they may not need the meds to help keep them on-track. But most ADDers do need meds for the rest of their lives, just as most diabetics need insulin and/or diabetes meds for the rest of their lives.

By all means, set up solid structures of scheduling, exercise, visual records of task assignments & completion, timers & alarms to keep track of time, treatments with legitimate ADHD specialists…

But do NOT waste your time, money, or hopes on any of these “alternative cures for ADHD”.

And remember, every day that you “experiment” with these unproven “alternatives”, your children are suffering. And so are you.

___________________

About that “Donate” button at the top of the page here…

TotallyADD is not officially a “not-for-profit” company, but it isn’t actually *making* profits either.  Everything on the site (except for items in the Shop) is provided totally free for us.

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That’s what the “Donate” button is for. Just click on it and make a little donation, if you can.

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[daddyrocks]

Hi this is K, Daddyrocks wife. First to kc5jck: thank you for focusing on what we really asked about in your answer. We were wondering if an ‘expert’ would recommend the strategies listed on the unritalin website would be actually useful or if the ‘expert’ had any knowledge of said strategies. Daddyrocks and daughter #1 have been diagnosed for the last 8 years and are currently on vyvanse. We have tried every medication (including strattera) and several doctors and 6 counselors in an effort to find improvement. I am at a loss as to how to motivate and encourage both my daughters (the youngest has been diagnosed too)and my husband.

To Larynxa: While I understand your vehemence in your message, as we said, we’re extremely skeptical of the ‘cure’ claims and were looking to see if you thought the strategies and plans laid out would be helpful to follow. Skeptical at our house is our nice way of saying we don’t believe in it. Obviously that didn’t translate here.

Really, I don’t know what to do for them any more. I can’t make them follow the routines I set up or the strategies I encourage or anything. We can’t find any doctors or counselors who have given us any real help. Daddyrocks and daughter #1 ended up on vyvanse (which is the best med so far) because of the research I did, partly from this site. Where can I go for some realy help?

As to the suggestion that if we would like to throw away our money we could give it to totally add… well, my husband and I have been married for 23 years. He and both our daughters have adhd. I have stuggled all those years to help and take care of them while I have had numerous health issues of my own. Money is something we don’t have.

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[daddyrocks]

Sorry, *real help*

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[daddyrocks]

Upon reflection, I am really, really offended by this comment:

And remember, every day that you “experiment” with these unproven “alternatives”, your children are suffering. And so are you.

Nobody, no one has done more suffering than I. I don’t believe in alternatives, I believe in real science. As a type 1 diabetic myself for the last 30 years, I don’t buy into that junk. I have given my life and my health to my husband and my children. Right now at 45 I’m trying to carve a little space for myself by finishing my degree while working full time and taking care of everything and everyone at home. I just wanted to know if the plans and strategies on the unritalin website were useful. I thought if they were something credible I would be willing to spend the requested $20 for the book.
Please….maybe people don’t elaborate in their posts in an effort of anonymity. K

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[kc5jck]

Hi K, Daddyrocks wife.  I went back to the Unritalin site and looked around it some more.  I have found that the best weapon to combat ADHD is education.  The Unritalin site had a lot of articles and links.  It seemed to contain a bit of everything about ADHD from the well established facts to the bizarre.

After a couple of years of personal research, I have developed a mental filter of sorts to sort out, hopefully, the good information from the bad.  Part of the problem is that since ADHD has only recently begun to be understood, there is still a lot of myth and well intentioned, but bad information floating around, even among the “professionals.”  Which is why you may have been through all the medications, counselors, and doctors with little results.  Its difficult to find the magic combination of the right medication and the correct dosage that will work.

The members of the site understand your frustrations.  There are thousands of us here that have been through it.  You must feel that at times you are not only doing everything, but doing it while carrying your husband and two daughters on your back.  It will get better, but it may get worse before it does so.

I get a sense that your doctors and counselors are not as informed about ADHD as you need.  Next to finding some which specialize in ADHD, I suggest that you look at the books offered in this sites store.  We all have ADD here so I doubt that anyone has really read any of them cover to cover, much less remembered what we read, but “Experts we trust recommend them” and Rick has a good nose for sniffing out experts.

Strategies are not like easily adopted bad habits.  You can’t do the once and expect them to stick.  Agree on those you think will help, and stay on top of your family until they get ingrained with their behavior.

Well, I’m starting to lose my focus here, but wanted to say that we’re not trying to be dismissive or offensive here in our responses, though they at times come across that way.  There are many “cures” offered and we don’t like to see people being preyed upon.  That includes some of the ads for ADHD herbs, brain training, etc. you see pop up on your screen courtesy of “AdChoices.”  These are not sanctioned or recommended by the site.

It’s good to have you as members.

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[dithl]

Hi, I just want to pull a couple points to comment on, because to me, it speaks to the difficulty of managing ADHD,

@K, Daddyrocks wife, you said, “I can’t make them follow the routines I set up or the strategies I encourage or anything.”

@kc5jck responded with “Strategies are not like easily adopted bad habits. You can’t do the once and expect them to stick. Agree on those you think will help, and stay on top of your family until they get ingrained with their behavior.”

I have been “doing” ADD for 8 years now…and have probably tried easily over a hundred different strategies. Everything from hanging my keys on a big fob on a hook beside the front door (worked!) to making several different versions of chore lists (um…still in progress) to using “Leechblock” to limit my time on-line (did NOT work for me, too easy to sabotage…)

My strategy “fail” count is much, MUCH higher than my strategy “success” count. If I was to roughly estimate, probably at least 20 attempts per success. However, overall, I consider that I’m managing ADHD well. Sometimes I give up for awhile on a certain attribute I am trying to manage (e.g,. my sleep schedule is totally out of whack right now, which is fine because I don’t have a lot of demands at the moment).

Some strategies are easy, and a perfect fit right away.

Some strategies don’t work right away, but with a little tweaking and persistence, they become routines that just fade into the background and make everyone’s life easier.

Some strategies just don’t work for the individual. Give it up, move on, cross your fingers that you will find something to help with the problem you’re targeting.

It can be hard to distinguish between those last two. How long do you stick with a strategy until you decide it just doesn’t work? Two weeks? Longer? Add to that the fact that once novelty wears off, motivation to stick with the strategy plummets.

So…I guess my point here is that “strategy management” is a life-long experimental process. Some stick, some don’t. New situations will create the need for trying out new strategies. And part of the nature of ADD is that we will abandon some that maybe could have worked. And at times fail to observe when they are working, or not working. Sometimes we just don’t want to try. Until a crisis hits us in the face.

I am not even going to try to imagine what it’s like from the outside…especially with three in the house. I don’t know if any of this helps, but thought I would try to add perspective from the inside…

And I agree — it’s good to have you as members. And you *totally* rock for working on your degree 🙂

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[daddyrocks]

K here: Thank to dithl and kc5jck for your kind and encouraging comments. I keep trying and trying and trying everything. The common denominator seems to be a “will to power”, to borrow and improperly use an old fashioned psych term, on the part of my adhd family. Right now I’d be happy if I could get the girls to brush their teeth and wear deoderant everyday! Nag, remind, nag, remind. That what I do. I just want to move on so much. I am so burned out from reminding everyone to accomplish the basic life skill tasks everyday. My husband is always 100% supportive, all the while knowing he is part of the problem too.

Still, I feel attacked by Larynxa. I feel like s/he just read the first sentence of our original post and then went on a tangent. Really, I know that that supplement junk doesn’t work, hence the ‘extremely skeptical’ statement in my first post. Supplements or the like isn’t what we were after at all, and we thought we’d made that obvious. We understood that Larynxa is supposed to be the expert. I sure hope if this person is in the health care field they don’t talk to their clients like that. This, to me and my husband, is a crying shame. People are looking for help, and I could think of many, many ways a caution (or even a passionate rant) about supplements could have been expressed much more politely. Especially with us, who weren’t looking to drop medication use anyway. In any case, it’s a mute point, since Larynxa is obviously not going to try to correct his/her mistake and apologize. This particular experience is similar to all our dealings with the experts – I am reminded of the time the therapist, who was supposed to specialize in behaviour modification – told my husband that he must just do what he’s supposed to. How that help a man with adhd I’ll never know.

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[Scattybird]

@K (daddy rocks) – hi and welcome to the site.  Thanks for bringing up the Unritalin site. I had never heard of it before so I will have a read and then maybe be able to comment on your original question.  It might be useful, but in reality there are relatively few useful sites out there. Additude sometimes has some useful articles. On saying that, the way to find out more is to read everything.  I do get skeptical if money has to be parted with unless I am buying a book or a DVD.

It sounds like you are really frazzled.  I have ADD – I do not live with someone with ADD (apart from myself) so I have no idea how to motivate someone. But from my personal experience I only started to try to implement strategies once I admitted to myself that I needed to do something to change the way I lived.  I found a book called ‘ADD Friendly Ways to Organise Your Life’ and that had such simple strategies in it that I decided to try to follow them. Making a strategy into a habit is key…..but also trying too many at once is impossible. One at a time….

Maybe your children have not reached that point yet? …but they will.

However, even with simple strategies I slipped too easily. I found out that there have to be consequences for me to get sufficient motivation to implement a strategy and stick to it. How one develops that motivation for someone else I really don’t know.  Everyone is different which complicates things. But consequences and accountability are two words that crop up over and over.  The consequence of not using deodorant is to lose friends?

I haven’t read all the comments in this thread yet….I bent my glasses and reading gives me a headache at the moment……must book an opticians appointment…..

However, I did glean that you were offended by one of the posts. Please don’t be. We all have ADD here and as you know along with that comes some passion, sometimes we speak (or write) before we think and often we go off on a tangent during the answers. None of us here is an ‘expert’ in the medical sense except for Dr J.  We are just a community of people who share our experiences. Sometimes we get it right and other times we get it wrong. Subtlety isn’t always a strong point for an ADDer. Certainly my passion for certain things has gained me some annoying nicknames at work…..yet I am always right! 🙂  All the people who have contributed to this thread are good hearted and mean well so please don’t take offence…..sometimes we just get carried away by what’s in our heads.

I will read the Unritalin site with interest and see what it’s about.

 

 

 

 

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[Scattybird]

PS – second attempt at the PS! I looked up the guy who does the Unritalin stuff. He seems to be recognised by the WHO, but as a chiropractor. He was a Mr not a Dr in 2007 so it would be interesting to see where he got his postgraduate qualifications from and when. If he is genuine then it is worth a shot surely?  He has clearly branched out from being a chiropractor.  I must go to bed now before I start to hyperfocus on the connection between neurology, chiropractic stuff and ADD and be up all night, although a quick Google search shows that chiropractic neurology is a sub speciality of chiropractic practice.  If this guy is genuine then maybe his website and strategies are worth consideration.  He claims to have published papers and a search of Google Scholar shows that to be right….for example he has a literature review and other stuff…see:

http://adhdwellnessexpert.s3.amazonaws.com/Library%20Vault/Dyslexia.pdf

Will have a look at his site tomorrow…but the signs are that this guy might be genuine….

DR YANNICK PAULI
Doctor of Chiropractic with specialty postgraduate training in pediatrics, chiropractic functional neurology and functional medicine.

Dr Yannick Pauli is a chiropractor with postgraduate training in pediatrics, functional neurology and functional medicine. He is the Director of the Centre Wellness NeuroFit in Lausanne Switzerland. He specialises in the care of children with ADHD, learning disorders and autistic spectrum. He is the creator of “Brain Potential”, a brain-based neurological rehabilitation program that help children overcome ADHD and other neurological disorders naturally. He also runs Unritalin Solution website, an educational website based on his “14 Keys to Overcoming ADHD Naturally”. Dr Pauli has published research on chiropractic and ADHD and dyslexia. Dr Yannick Pauli can be contacted on 0041 21 646 52 38.

Chiropractic Doctor – Chiropractic Functional Neurology – Functional Medicine, Switzerland

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[kc5jck]

K – I know you feel burned out with your constant reminding, but keep in mind that a poor working memory is common with ADHD.  This can affect some to the extent that they often forget what they were saying or get distracted in mid-sentence.  They compensate in conversations by learning how to act as if they are listening and by synthesizing parts of a conversation they missed, . . . or forgot.  This may explain some baffling conversations you have had.

I find it hard to remember a list of more than three things unless I consciously make an effort to do so.  Its not something I can do in passing.  So while your constantly reminding may seem like nagging, it is probably needed to get the task done.  We see it as normal.

I find I must immediately do what is asked, otherwise I will forget.  Don’t ask your family to do something to be done at a later time.  They will forget, unless you remind them when the time comes or perhaps write it down.

Formulate the “basic life skills” into a step by step routine and march them through it until learned.  Make part of the routine to check a “to do” list that you prepare.  Remind them to check the list.

Doing all this will leave you exhausted and fray your nerves.  (Its part of the getting worse before it gets better.)  Good luck, keep us posted.

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[daddyrocks]

Thanks for putting all this effort in on our behalf everybody! What I’m always looking for is new and creative ways to get the message across to the gang. Our eldest daughter is 12. I knew she had adhd in the womb. She was unbearably restless. As an infant, nothing held her attention for more than 1 second. Seriously. Our child psychologist said when she was 2 1/2 :”Look at her, she can’t even play she’s so distracted.” I’ve been using a consistent routine right from day 1. She has never responded. Neither has my husband. I started using charts when she was 2. I started with the pictures that could be moved from one side of the page to the other (velcro tabs) when complete. She had 3 items, and I was with her every step of the way. We’d do 1 item at a time. You’d think after 10 years of the same routine, morning and night, with me spoon feeding one or two activities at a time, she would remember to do it herself? Clearly I expect too much! My husband has similar issues. When the kids came along he went from shifts to days only. I planned supper for 5:30. At it’s on the table, same time, everyday. Everyday for 8 years he’s asked what time supper is. Everyday, the same response. Until I finally said I wasn’t going to answer that question any more since I’m sure if he thought for a moment he’d figure it out. He doesn’t ask anymore.

I love my husband and girls. Obviously, they have excellent qualities. They are the most interesting, intelligent, creative people I know. They have the biggest hearts imaginable. This is a sticking point for me, this taking over their own life management. I’m here to help. Always have been. And I am well educated about working memory, poor shift, and all the other executive functions. If they don’t become responsible for their own bodies, I’m going to be phoning them every morning and night asking if they washed and brushed their teeth. So not cool.

Last night, our eldest daughter admitted that every time she showers, except when I do the random checks to make sure she’s washing, she’s just letting the water run on her. And she’s not brushing her teeth at all! I always ask her (she always says she has) and I check her mouth and insist she hasn’t. She is suitably mortified with herself. But, I am skeptical that she feels bad enough about lying to motivate her to do what she has to do.

I am, frankly, at a loss. I thought medication would help to remove the ‘I don’t care’ self talk. But we’ve been doing meds for her for 4 years. At what point do they take over? I walk them through everything. I don’t over do the instructions. I am naturally consistent and organized, so I have always run the household that way. Why, why, why? I can’t spend the hour in the morning and hour and a half at night getting them ready for their day and bedtime. I don’t watch tv, I don’t listen to music, I don’t play any instruments anymore. I don’t do anything but work, clean, and mind them.

I’m nothing special. I make mistakes. I fail every single day. I know life is difficult. I don’t want perfection. I just want to have a family that doesn’t need constant reminding over daily, necessary things.

I try to talk to them about taking over their responsibilities. Yes, somethimes I’m yelling. But, sometimes I’m calm and sincere. Then all they do is feel bad about themselves. They never get that they don’t have to feel bad, they just have to do it. I always say that I don’t want them to feel bad about themselves. Just follow the charts. I always remind them. It would be simple! Care for your body, eat and drink when hungry and thirsty – we have a routine for that too. I help with homework, keep in contact with teachers to keep on track and make sure we’re not missing anything, I always make sure they get a couple hours of exercise a day (all free play, they hate organized activities). They have an excellent bedtime routine to get enough sleep, when they’d comply. They’re very fit and healthy. And they’re nice kids. Their teachers always say so. They’re not disruptive in class. They have good manners.

I wish things would get better, because I’m pretty sure we’ve been stuck in the ‘worse’ part for years.

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[Scattybird]

K/daddyrocks  – I wish I could give you the answers you want but sadly I cannot.

But what resonates with me in your last post is your description of your actions and those of your 12 year old daughter. It triggered a memory of me at 12 and my poor Mother trying to ensure that I tidied my bedroom, got to school on time, brushed my teeth, had a shower…….. it sounds familiar. At that time I did not know I had ADD and neither did she. I was just a ‘dreamer’ and a bit ‘eccentric’.  Despite that we had fun.

So my point? Well I finally matured – later than my peers, but it happened.  I am very careful about personal hygiene now, although at 12 I probably had similar views to your daughter. Most children rebel about that sort of thing but they grow up and it all sorts itself out.  Whilst I remember my Mother trying desperately to encourage me to live as she wanted me to do so, I believe the key influence was how SHE behaved and lived. Her constant example finally sunk into my consciousness and as an adult I know what is expected, what to do and how to live.

Maybe you should think about doing an experiment – just for a week initially. Why not stop what you call ‘nagging’ and just let them all get on with it. Run the house as usual, i.e. dinner at 5.30 etc. but just force yourself not to be stressed when they don’t behave as you think they should. Try it for a week. It won’t matter if your daughter doesn’t brush her teeth for a week. If nothing else, you will give yourself some space and it sounds like you need and deserve that.  If you are anything like my Mother was you will be horrified at this suggestion …….but food for thought maybe?

 

 

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