The bottom line for adults with ADHD is: Be a smart health-care consumer, and learn as much as you can about ADHD medication before you start taking it. If your doctor says any of these 10 things, be alert.
There is no “average starting dose.” The choice depends on many factors, including:Those who have taken stimulants in the past might be less response-sensitive than people who have not.Co-existing conditions4. “We’ll increase the dosage to 10 mg in two weeks.”
Many experts and patients report that not enough physicians closely monitor medications used in adults. “It’s critically important to do, but the utter paucity of clinicians doing it is shocking,” says psychologist Stephen Hinshaw, Ph.D., a leading ADHD researcher and professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. “You can’t notice small improvements or side effects without a monitoring sheet.
The potential positive effects of medical treatment for ADHD shouldn’t be oversold, Weiss warns. “It’s true that some symptoms may improve dramatically in days, or even in hours. But it is important to wait to judge the full effect of the medication, because it can take some time for all the data to accrue.”
In evaluating a stimulant’s apparent adverse effect on sleep, it’s important to pay attention to timing. Perhaps sleep problems are caused by the rebound from the medication’s wearing off. In that case, you should try taking the medication earlier in the day, or taking a nap midday while the full dose is in effect. A no-risk trial nap can help to demonstrate that the medication is not causing the sleep disturbance, but rather the ADHD itself, and lack of medication in the rebound period.
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