Hi all,

I just joined this site today, and have been taking Adderall 20mg 2x a day for about 3 years now. I'm 26 years old and had previously been on Ritalin since I was 9. Adderall seems to work great for me, but one of my side effects has been tachycardia (rapid heart rate).

I saw a cardiologist today, and he thinks it is definately being caused by the Adderall. We are going to try some Toprol to bring my heart rate down, but I'm wondering if something other than adderall may work better. I switched from Ritalin because it wasn't really effective anymore.

I heard about Strattera, and have mixed feelings about if it would really work for me - besides some of the side-effects also include rapid heartbeat.

I saw an advertisement for "Attend" from Vaxa, and it seems a little "too good to be true", so I was wondering if anyone has any experience with it or has even heard of it?

Thanks,
Alan

I have always thought it was a scam, but I could be wrong.

General rule is, if it worked it would be accepted by the medical community.

I am skeptical of the stuff. There a many herbals and homeopathics packed in there, with unspecified amounts. Some of the ingredients can have side-effects you should be aware of. One should be very well informed of any supplement they wish to take, but trying to research all of these ingredients would be an exhausting effort. And, if you had an effect that you didn't like, you would not be able to isolate the specific ingredient you should then avoid in the future. Just not a good idea IMHO.

Thanks... That's kinda what I was thinking too... Just wanted to see if anyone heard of it.

Attend is basically a mixture of vitamins. It might help a little (or it might not), but it won't really approach the level of benefit you are presently getting. If it worked at all, doctors would prescribe it a lot. I've not heard of any doctor presctribing it to anyone, ever.

Me :D

Tried it myself - I figured that with the miniscule concentrations of ingredients, it wouldn't do much harm, if any. It did nothing at all. Don't waste your money.

Aside from taking a multivitamin daily i wouldnt put much faith in any sort of "supplement". Although i do think dr amen uses L-tyrosine for certain subtypes of ADD but thats in conjunction with more typical treatments (stimulants).

Attend is basically a mixture of vitamins. It might help a little (or it might not), but it won't really approach the level of benefit you are presently getting. If it worked at all, doctors would prescribe it a lot. I've not heard of any doctor presctribing it to anyone, ever.

Me :D

Western doctors don't prescribe vitamins and supplements - which don't require a prescription and their manufacturers aren't pushing them at doctors the way pharmaceutical companies do their 'drug of the month'.

But Asian doctors do prescribe a lot of herbal supplements and have been doing so for much longer than Western doctors have been prescribing drugs.

Asian doctors? What are you talking about?

Japanese doctors invented methamphetamine and prescribed it so heavily it completely destroyed the country during/after ww2.

I have a similar problem (PSVT), but in my case my doctor doesn't think I should stop the Adderall because of all the good effects it's had (plus I was having tachycardia before starting it, just nto quite as much). He prescribed cardizem to take when I'm having symptoms, but is urging me to have a cardiac ablation to fix it once and for all. Not sure if you'd be eligible for that, but it might be something to look into.

I took Strattera and did not get any rapid heartbeat, but I didn't get any benefit either.

From my blog, Myomancy:

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ADD / ADHD Natural Remedies: Part 3 (http://www.myomancy.com/2006/07/add_adhd_natura_2.html#more)


Part three of this look at natural remedies for ADD / ADHD is on Vaxa's (http://www.vaxa.com/)Attend (http://www.vaxa.com/636.cfm). This is sold through a web site called No More ADD (http://www.vaxa.com/636.cfm) and is a classic long-copy advert. If the product is as good as the marketing then we won't need Ritalin for much longer.

So what herbs are in Attend? Vaxa list the fifty or so ingredients (http://www.vaxa.com/ingredients.cfm?ID=636) and provides a hyperlink for an explanation of each one. Browsing through the list, I spot Hypothalamus (http://www.vaxa.com/ingredients.cfm?ID=636). As this is part of the brain it strikes me as an unusual ingredient for a herbal remedy. The extra information on this ingredient says it is an animal product (but not which animal it comes from) and claims it is an appetite suppressant. Why you want an appetite suppressant, especially one from an unknown animal's brain, in a herbal remedy for ADD / ADHD, I don't know.

Of course, the actual ingredients do not matter much because this is a homeopathic remedy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeopathy) where each ingredient is diluted many hundred or thousands of times. In fact, according to science and common-sense, a homeopathic remedy is just water. Wikipedia sums it up best:

...homeopathy defies the laws of chemistry by claiming efficacy for high dilutions of substances, at times to a point where it is unlikely that even a molecule of the original ingredient is present.There is no evidence that Vaxa's Attend will work. There is no known scientific reason why it could work. Any improvements people get from this effect can be ascribed to the Placebo Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo_effect), the regression fallacy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regression_fallacy) and/or the Forer effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect).

In these articles on natural remedies for ADD / ADHD, none of the three treatments have offered any evidence that they work. Listol (http://www.myomancy.com/2006/07/add_adhd_natura.html) does at least include ingredients that have a reasonable connection to ADD / ADHD. Neither Attend or Focus ADDult (http://www.myomancy.com/2006/07/add_adhd_natura_1.html) has any meaningful evidence to explain their ingredient list let alone their supposed benefits.

I tried the route with herbals and homeopathics. It was just a waste of time and money.

hich don't require a prescription and their manufacturers aren't pushing them at doctors the way pharmaceutical companies do their 'drug of the month'.

Pens. They give out pens. Also calendars sometimes, or notepads. We have a wide range of various pharmacrap sitting around throughout our office. Along with my CMS Medlearn pens, I think I have two or three for different drugs, but I couldn't honestly tell you what they're for. My secretary has a calendar from some other drug company, and again, don't know what it is. The name of a drug is fairly meaningless anyways. The only way they'd sway us (and presumably physicians as well) is with a full PI sheet showing pharmacodynamics, pharmacokinetics, contraindications, etc. I mean, c'mon, you've read the stuff I've written about supplements and other treatments that don't provide any clinical info, I'd do the same for any pharmaceutical that did the same thing.

You make it sound like they're giving out cash in briefcases in parking lots at midnight like they did during Watergate. The only organization that hands out millions of dollars to docs is the federal government, and they call it Medicare.


But Asian doctors do prescribe a lot of herbal supplements and have been doing so for much longer than Western doctors have been prescribing drugs.
Asia is a very big continent. I highly doubt that developed 1st World countries like South Korea or Japan do this to a large extent. Other countries might, but are you really arguing that I'd be happier with the Cambodian health plan? Also, understand that the various Asian cultures are not interchangeable. Many of them have fought countless wars against each other over the past few centuries

(note: just about everyone hates Japan; China is fairly well tolerated, and Chinese living abroad are often fairly rich; Burma is a ****hole, mostly due to their government; Thailand is proud of their fierce independence; Indonesia is made up of so many different cultures and languages that it has only been held together by strong-armed leadership, etc. Oh, and you've got Buddhism, Shintaoism, Confucianism, Taoism, Hinduism, and Islam all coexisting in various mixes in various countries...it's not always a good idea to consider Asia as a monolithic entity...even splitting it up into northeast, southeast, and central Asia/Persia doesn't work overly well).


Also, it should be mentioned that many of the medications in the modern pharmacopoeia are derived from plant or other natural origin. The difference is that there is evidence for their efficacy and the active ingredients have been identified, synthesized, sometimes modified to make them safer or more effective, and produced in a pure form of known dose. The reason physicians don't like prescribing raw plant matter is because there is no way of knowing precisely how much of the main ingredient they contain (it can vary wildly, depending on the plant), bioavailability is usually bad, meaning that little of the active ingredient will be absorbed, and often there is so little in the plant itself that you'd have to eat pounds of it to get an effect. Plus you never know what other chemicals might be in there as well.

The first "modern" medicines were crude plant extracts, apothecaries taking plants and removing the active ingredient using various solutions. They did this because they recognized the limitations of raw plant material on its own. The evolution from apothecaries to pharmacies has involved a long series of advances in purity, safety, and knowledge.