Natural Healing of ADHD Using Music

With more than 4 million children (fox news 2011) being diagnosed with ADHD in the United States alone, it’s no wonder that people are seeking alternatives to drugs to treat their kids symptoms.  The natural healing of ADHD using music is an interesting alternative that might just be a lot safer  and a lot more effective than the traditional methods being used.

Recent studies suggest that Ritalin ( a common drug used to treat ADHD) actually is doing more harm than good when it comes to children’s long term ability to focus.

Ritalin Gone Wrong

As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.

Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

Original Article Here

So with such negative attention on the use of drugs to treat ADHD parents are looking for safer more effective alternatives. This is why music therapy is such an interesting idea. Use musical or rhythmic therapy. Interactive metronome therapy uses rhythmic feedback to improve children’s motor control and attention. Children treated with this technique perform exercises to a rhythmic beat while wearing sensors and headphones on their hands and feet.

Natural Healing of ADHD Using Music

Music used to treat ADHD

ADHD does not involve inattention as much it involves poor self-control, which is a failure of some central executive function. The  nature of this central executive  is time.

More specifically, it is the conjecturing of the future that arises out of reconstruction of the past and the goal-directed behaviors that are predicated on these activities. Such activities permit self regulation relative to time.

Time is an integral, inseparable part of the physical world that our will, therefore is  at time’s beck and call and thus that time, timing, and timeliness become important concepts in understanding goal-directed behavior and in determining it.

Musical performances are, of course, exquisitely timed. One of the major theories about our response to music specifically focuses on the way it plays with our expectations, sometimes satisfying them, sometimes not (Meyer 1956). Beyond that, the brain itself necessarily operates in time; its activities must be well-timed or they will fail. Thus, it seemed to me that music might be an activity that the brain uses to adjust and train its own timing so that expectation (of future sounds) and fulfillment (through motor execution of the musical sounds) are properly matched. Original Here

Although ADHD is a newly discovered disorder the natural healing of ADHD using music is a positively exciting idea! More research on this subject would be a welcomed thing for every parent.

Do you have ADHD? I’d love you to share what helps.