Disclaimer: This content is for educational purposes only and does not constitute medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare provider before making changes to your health regimen.
A teacher says she thinks your kid has ADHD. You get a ten minute appointment, maybe thirty minutes of questionnaires, and you walk out with a prescription. Nobody looked at his brain. Nobody drew blood. Nobody checked his zinc, his sleep, his gut, or whether he can actually process what he hears in a noisy classroom.
That's the part that gets me. I sat down with Dr. Stephanie Rimka, a chiropractor and board certified neurofeedback provider who maps brains for a living, and she put it about as bluntly as a person can: "They don't measure anything."
So before you accept a diagnosis that's going to follow your child for twenty years, I want you to understand what else produces the exact same behavior. Because in my practice, attention problems are almost always a symptom sitting on top of something measurable.
What is ADHD, actually, if nobody's measuring it?
Here's the thing most parents never get told. Attention deficit is a real, physical, visible pattern. Dr. Rimka can see it on a brain map, and she says there are at least thirteen subtypes.
The pattern is under arousal. Too many slow waves (theta, sometimes delta or alpha) sitting in the prefrontal cortex, which is the executive function part of the brain, the part that's supposed to be running fast.
Slow waves aren't bad. They're where imagination lives, where you write a book or dream up a speech, where long term memory gets laid down. The problem is location. Sleepy waves in the front of the brain during third period math.
So the body does what a smart body does. It makes the kid fidget, tap, talk, and climb, because that's how you stay awake. Same thing you do driving home at midnight: windows down, music up, somebody please talk to me. The kid isn't defiant. He's fighting to stay conscious.
Why does this get missed so often?
Because the diagnosis is subjective, and anyone can look like they have ADHD on a bad day.
Dr. Rimka gave me a number I keep thinking about. At least half the people who walk into her office with an ADHD label have an auditory processing disorder instead. Another forty percent have anxiety, which is over arousal, the opposite problem on the brain map. Same behavior in a classroom. Completely different physiology.
Think about what that means. If you treat over arousal with a stimulant, you're pouring gas on a fire. And nobody checked which one it was. As Dr. Rimka said, if you're going to medicate a child, shouldn't you at least know whether the brain is running too slow or too fast?
I'm not anti-medication. I'm anti-guessing. Conventional pediatrics is good at a lot of things, and this isn't one of them. A statistic came up in our conversation that sums up the drift: a 66 percent jump in antidepressant use in children between 2016 and 2022.
So what's actually driving the under arousal?
This is where my work and Dr. Rimka's work overlap, and it's the question I want you sitting with. Under arousal has causes. It doesn't fall out of the sky.
Her list, in her own words: is it ADHD, or is it zinc deficiency? Is it ADHD, or is it mold illness? Is it ADHD, or is it oxalate poisoning?
In my practice I'd add the usual suspects I chase every week: heavy metals like lead, chronic infections including Lyme and the coinfections that ride along with it, parasites, gut inflammation, histamine and mast cell activation, methylation imbalances, and blood sugar swings that leave a kid flat by ten in the morning.
Then there's the obvious one nobody wants to say out loud. Sleep. Fifth graders are up until midnight doing homework. That's not a neurodevelopmental disorder. That's a kid who needs to go to bed and go play.
And screens. Dr. Rimka's team ran live EEGs on about twenty five kids while they played different games. Minecraft spiked theta waves harder than anything else she'd seen. They'd show parents the brain at rest, then during a show, then during the game, and the slow waves would take over. She'd point at the screen and tell them that's the pattern getting labeled ADHD.
The brain reads fast flickering images as a danger signal and protects itself by slowing down. We are manufacturing this.
What does this look like in your house?
It rarely shows up as one tidy symptom. The kid who can't sit still in class is often the same kid who wets the bed, because bedwetting and attention problems come from the same under arousal. He's not making enough of the brain wave that holds sleep together.
He might sleep badly, wake up groggy, and then be wired at 9pm. He might be fine one on one and fall apart in a loud room, which points straight at auditory processing, not attention. He might do beautifully on Saturday at the lake and terribly on Tuesday in a fluorescent classroom.
You've probably been told he's just like this. That it's genetic, it's his personality, it's something to manage forever. I want to push back gently on that. Yes, families share structure, and brains run in families. But Dr. Rimka's view, and mine, is that you clear things out so your kids don't carry it. Patterns aren't destiny.
A real case from my own practice
Two cases stay with me, and neither one started as an attention problem.
The first was a client who had recovered from everything we'd been chasing, and was still depressed. I couldn't find a physiologic reason. Labs looked fine. The root causes were handled. Dr. Rimka explained what I'd been seeing: the original illness built a twelve lane highway on that brain pattern, and once you clear the cause, the highway is still there. Meanwhile the road to joy is a dirt path. The brain keeps taking the easy route out of habit. It has to be shown a different turn, over and over, until it decides to build a new road, because brains love efficiency.
The second was a mast cell case, and it was a desperation accident on my part. This person was on a feeding tube. Couldn't eat food, couldn't tolerate medications or supplements, reacted to thirty seconds of red light. I had nothing left to put inside their body, so I tried calming them from the outside with a sound, light, and color device and blue glasses.
We started with two minutes. Two. Then we worked up over eight sessions in one week, going at whatever pace their body allowed. By the end of that week they could tolerate supplements, they could eat twenty five more foods, and they had the least anxiety they could remember having.
What I recommend if you're in this spot
Get objective data before you accept a label. Ask for a brain map, an EEG, and real bloodwork. Zinc, iron, B vitamins, fatty acids, thyroid, blood sugar. If nobody measured it, nobody knows.
Rule out the terrain issues I see constantly: mold exposure, lead and other metals, chronic infection, gut inflammation, oxalates. A brain running through that kind of inflammation can't make new patterns well, and there's no sense draining a system that's already underwater.
Fix the boring foundations first. Sleep, food, fats. Dr. Rimka won't train a starving brain. She compares neurofeedback to CrossFit for the brain, and she's right that you need the bricks and mortar in place before you ask it to do hard work. I think of it as physical therapy for the brain.
Then consider neurofeedback with someone genuinely trained. Start at bcia.org or isnr.org.
The part I want you to hold onto
If you've been told your child is just like this, or that you're just like this, and you've quietly suspected that something physical is going on underneath, you weren't wrong for wondering.
Attention problems have causes. Those causes are measurable. And a diagnosis handed to you in ten minutes, with no test and no image and no lab, is a guess wearing a lab coat.
Dr. Rimka said something I haven't stopped thinking about: in her world, you don't just manage ADHD, anxiety, and insomnia, you go after what's underneath them. That's the kind of question I want you asking the provider who's actually making the call.
If your kid got an ADHD label, what did the appointment actually look like? Did anyone run a single test, check a nutrient level, ask about sleep or screens or mold in the house? I'd love to hear what you were told, and what you've since figured out on your own. Your story helps the next parent sitting in that office.
This blog post is intended for informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The information shared here reflects Dr. Jaban's clinical perspectives and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.