How I actually work up ADHD when I think histamine is a big factor.

I’m so sorry this one is late! My ADD was out of control this week…. kidding. My email got hacked (which is not funny at all), and I have spent the last few days cleaning up the mess, including four hours last night watching my computer get scrubbed instead of writing this article. Ironically, the topic this week is ADHD and it’s late!

On Tuesday I told you my story about the way my brain works when doing laundry, etc., and the medications that went so wrong for me, and one of my boys.

Here is how I see it after living it, and after seeing it in my kids, and my patients, for years. There is not a ton of research on my perspective, but I am ok with that.

We treat ADHD like a dopamine problem, and it definitely has a lot to do with it. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that runs your focus and your drive, and the medications work by raising it. But dopamine is not the only neurotransmitter in that system. Histamine is one too. In your brain, it runs your alertness and your attention, the same way dopamine runs your focus.

And here is what I actually believe. Both can be true at the same time. Too little dopamine and too much histamine, in the same brain, adding up to the same thing we call ADHD. So when all we do is raise dopamine with a stimulant, we are only working on part of it. That is why I look at the histamine too. Not instead of the dopamine story, right alongside it.

I am not telling you every case of ADHD is a histamine issue, and I am not telling you to stop a medication or skip an evaluation. I am telling you what I find when I refuse to stop at the label and look underneath it, in my own family and in the people who come to me. This is exactly how I look deeper to see what is driving it, like everything else in functional medicine.