More Than Medicine
More Than Medicine
Finding Focus: Natural ADHD Treatment That Works
Dr. Robert Jackson and his daughter Hannah Miller dive deep into a revolutionary approach to ADHD treatment that's changing lives without the typical medication side effects. They explore Dr. James Greenblatt's book "Finally Focused," which presents an 11-step "Plus-Minus Plan" developed over 30 years of clinical practice.
What makes this approach remarkable isn't that it rejects medication entirely—Dr. Greenblatt still prescribes ADHD medications for many patients. Rather, it's his bold guarantee: follow his protocol completely, and ADHD medications will work without causing harmful side effects. This natural treatment plan addresses underlying biological imbalances that contribute to ADHD symptoms, creating a foundation for healthier brain function.
The conversation reveals surprising findings about ADHD treatment. Most children with ADHD are magnesium deficient, which when supplemented alongside vitamin B6 can dramatically improve symptoms. "Nutritional lithium" at tiny doses (10-30mg) works wonders for many patients. The gut microbiome plays a crucial role too—many children develop ADHD symptoms following repeated antibiotic treatments that disrupt beneficial gut bacteria.
Hannah shares her personal perspective as a parent of children with ADHD, offering practical insights about implementing these approaches at home. She appreciates Dr. Greenblatt's realistic expectations for parents—you don't need to eliminate every gram of sugar, just make reasonable improvements. The book provides specific dosages, recommended brands, and action plans that make implementation straightforward.
The discussion also covers essential ADHD fundamentals: its genetic nature, how symptoms differ between boys and girls, why children are frequently socially excluded, and the critical understanding that many ADHD brains naturally "catch up" around age eight, potentially eliminating the need for intervention.
Whether you're parenting a child with ADHD or struggling with symptoms yourself as an adult, this episode offers hope through evidence-based natural approaches that complement or potentially replace conventional medication. The same strategies that help children can transform adult ADHD management too. Ready to discover a better way to address ADHD? This conversation could change everything.
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Welcome to More Than Medicine, where Jesus is more than enough for the ills that plague our culture and our country. Hosted by author and physician, dr Robert Jackson, and his wife Carlotta and daughter Hannah Miller. So listen up, because the doctor is in.
Dr. Jackson:Welcome to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, dr Robert Jackson, bringing to you biblical insights and stories from the country doctor's rusty, dusty scrapbook. Well, today I have as my guest Hannah Miller, my lovely daughter, and we're going to discuss with you a book that she read and immediately said to me Dad, you've got to read this, and the book is finally focused. By Dr James Greenblatt, md. Ms Hannah, welcome to More Than Medicine. Tell my listeners a little bit about this book.
Hannah Miller:Okay. So this book is a natural treatment plan for ADHD, and if you buy the book or you look it up on Amazon, the very front cover is going to say it's a plan for ADHD that restores attention, minimizes hyperactivity and helps eliminate drug side effects. And so he has what he calls an 11-step plan, he calls it the plus minus plan and he goes through and you start at step one.
Hannah Miller:No, basically you know a supplement or a bacteria or something along the toxin something like that that you're either going to minus from the body or a mineral, a supplement, vitamin or a myriad of things, and we're going to get into those that you're going to plus to the body and you're going to add to the body.
Hannah Miller:So that's why he calls it the plus minus plan. I found it fascinating and he makes a very big guarantee at the very end. You get through the whole book and you would think, and one of the reasons that I found his approach fascinating was because, as a parent, he was able to. First of all, because, as a parent, he was able to first of all communicate to me Like I'm a regular person I'm not a medical doctor and there's a lot of times I pick up books like this and it's hard to wrap your brain around some of the medical lingo that happens and he was able to communicate very clearly, very succinctly, and I was able to, just as a layperson understand, and even as a medical doctor, I was able to just as a lay person understand, and even as a medical doctor, I was able to understand, and so and I.
Hannah Miller:Another thing, though, that I would say, too, that was beneficial is that he understood the plight of parents, and by that I mean he knew that some of the things that he recommended he's like look, you can't let sugar, for example. He's like you can't eliminate every bit of sugar out of your child's diet. I'm calling you and asking you to do the best you can. And he said don't make yourself miserable, don't make your child miserable, don't make this a battle that you can't win.
Dr. Jackson:He was very, very reasonable.
Hannah Miller:Yes, I found him to be very reasonable and I appreciated that as a parent who and you know, I've got multiple kids. I've got other people that you know in my home or multiple people in my home that I'm you know we're juggling food and diet and this whole this book isn't strictly diet. There's a lot to it. We'll get to some of that stuff, but I appreciated that. And then, like I said, he makes this big guarantee at the end of the book and it's him, you know. You think he's got this 11-step plan and it's all kind of a natural treatment plan and you would think that he's anti-medication and that he's anti-doing some of the typical medications that you hear associated with ADHD, like Ritalin, adderall and those kinds of things. Those are the two that are most common most common and you think that he's anti that.
Hannah Miller:But he gets. He gets through the 11 steps. And then the next chapter is I actually, for most of my patients, do diagnose or prescribe a medication. But his guarantee is is that if you go through his whole 11 step plan, the big bad side effects that your child will typically experience as a result of taking some of these medications either will, they will not have any. He said they will not have any side effects if you go through this. And you know. And he says, I know you think that I just made a typo, but I'm going to repeat it again and put it in bold for you to see that if you follow this 11 step plan, your child will not have the negative side effects associated with most ADHD medications. And of course, his rationale there is he and he says two things If you go through the 11 step plan and then if you get, when you're it is time to prescribe medication, you work with your doctor.
Hannah Miller:And he says it doesn't matter how old or how big your child is. He said when you take your child into a doctor's office, usually the and they're going to prescribe an adhd medication. He said typically the process is. Oh well, I know another eight-year-old who is a such and such weight and this amount, this milligram amount, is what works. Worked for them. So I'm just going to prescribe the same amount. And he said it doesn't work that way and I learned a long time ago it doesn't work that way. And so I learned a long time ago it doesn't work that way. And so what you need to do is start off with the very smallest amount possible and, in every two to four weeks, incrementally increase at the smallest dosage amount possible until you reach a dosage that is working for your child and has no side effects. And he said if you do those two things, follow the 11-step plan and do the medication prescription. That way, he guaranteed that you will not see any of the side effects.
Dr. Jackson:And that's a big guarantee. And it is a big guarantee.
Hannah Miller:But just for some background, this guy's a medical doctor. He also or he's an MD, but he worked with these children for a decade and then realized some things, and then for the last 20 years so in totality 30 years of practice for 20 years of that, he's been utilizing this natural treatment plan and seen a lot of success, and so that's when he wrote this book. He published it in 2017, so it's about eight years old now.
Dr. Jackson:And I'll be honest, I wish I had seen this book 30 years ago because it has been very eye-opening. And reading through the book I realized he's got a lot of wisdom because he says a lot of things that I have seen in my own medical practice for 40 years. Says a lot of things that I have seen in my own medical practice for 40 years and and I realized that he's he's really owned to some things that I wish I had known a long time ago.
Hannah Miller:And so the reason you know, I'm not a medical person, obviously. And so I said, dad, I need you to read this book because this seems all very reasonable to me. But what do I know? He could be lying from page one all the way to page 200, and I wouldn't know. So I said you read this book, no this guy's got it going on.
Dr. Jackson:He knows his stuff and he quotes in every chapter medical research from all over the world United Kingdom, australia, germany, united States. He's quoting valid research for every one of the points that he makes in every chapter. He's not just quoting from his own medical practice, even though he has illustrations of patients that he's treated in his own practice which is anecdotal but still valid. He quotes medical research of hundreds of children treated with magnesium, vitamin B6, or various other modalities that he mentions in each successive chapter, and I find that fascinating. You got some questions for me. Go ahead.
Hannah Miller:I do and we're going to. So we've kind of laid the groundwork here for the book and then, before we dive in any more to the book and discuss it more, I want to ask you just a few questions to kind of bring us all on the same page regarding ADHD and have a little bit more of a generic conversation about ADHD and kind of the standard of treatment, that kind of thing. And then we'll go back into this book because I want to talk about some of the different recommendations that he has and how he goes about doing that in the book and why it's so easy to implement and that kind of thing. But I think before we really get into that, it would be to our benefit to kind of get a base, you know a foundation here regarding ADHD. So so the very first question is what is ADHD?
Dr. Jackson:Well, you know, almost all folks nowadays can recognize an ADHD child. I mean, if you teach Sunday school with little children or if you go to the mall and you see a parent with a child that's just unmanageable then you recognize an ADHD child. That child is inattentive, he's impulsive, he has a difficult time controlling his behavior, he tends to be intrusive. He or she tends to be intrusive and you know you'll be talking and that child can't stop himself from saying mama, mama, mama, mama. You know, and he's constantly intruding on the conversation or somebody's space that has poor social cues, bullying another child, and you know that that child talks too loud, talks too much, and but then in a classroom setting that child is like a little squirrel. His, his attention is everywhere, but on his paperwork, on his classwork, he's flipping a pencil, he's throwing an eraser, he's getting out of his desk or he's falling out of his desk you know, you know and he or she just cannot control their, their, their body, and so that's an attention deficit hyperactive child.
Dr. Jackson:Now, is that child BAD or ADD?
Hannah Miller:That's one of my questions. Is ADHD a function of a lack of discipline?
Dr. Jackson:The answer is yes and no. And you know I have patients that come into my office and it's obvious immediately that there is a discipline issue in their household. The mother cannot control the child, doesn't even try to control the child or discipline their child. But then again, some children, their impulse control is so wildly out of control that no amount of discipline is helpful. And you know I'm a strong disciplinarian in my household but I had two ADD boys in my family, in my family, and no amount of discipline was able to manage their inattentiveness or their hyperactivity. And I was not a bad dad and they were not bad boys, they were just hyperactive and inattentive. And you remember your two brothers and you know I was a good, strong disciplinarian but they were not BAD, they were just ADD. And you know, no matter how much discipline was applied, they were unable to manage their hyperactivity and their inattention.
Hannah Miller:And so typically at the younger ages, yeah, and then the other thing that I did find interesting in this book, though, was the talking about children as they, as they grow older, and that there are certain things biologically, that in ADHD children, that they're just parts of the brain that are just a little slower to mature essentially and he talks about that in one of the very early chapters of the book, essentially and he talks about that in one of the very early chapters of the book. And, but he, he, but he says a lot of those children catch up and plateau by age eight.
Hannah Miller:Exactly, and so he and so I look at a lot of young children and I see it all the time. I'm in multiple groups of parents who are on on the Internet on forums that have children with ADHD. I'm, I am one, I'm a parent with multiple children with ADHD, and so and that's why I picked up this book it was recommended in one of these groups and but I see a lot of these parents who have two and three and four year olds that they've had diagnosed with ADHD. They're on medication already. A lot of them are already because they're in know, preschool, k4, k5, very early. But according to this doctor and his material, a lot of those things would just, if you just give it time but it would improve naturally maturity with maturity.
Hannah Miller:These kids just tend to be behind by a couple of years their peers, and so I would caution parents who maybe you're looking at your very young child and I had one. I had a child at two and three. We all knew at two and three years old. We all knew now she wasn't in a public school setting so we were able to put off any kind of medication. We've been able to not have to do a medication at this point so far, but I you know it was all very it was clear to all of us and I I would caution you if you do have one and you have a child that is in public school um, that if you put them, put them on a medication to get them through those first few years around age eight, you may want to consider bringing them off to see if their body had and give them some time to see if their body could have possibly begun to self-regulate on its own and have them caught up Just with maturity.
Dr. Jackson:Yeah, now, the other factor is this ADHD is genetic. I have two brothers that had ADHD, now I had two sons that are ADHD, and now I have grandchildren that are ADHD.
Hannah Miller:And it's on my husband's side of the family as well very strongly.
Hannah Miller:A lot of the same behaviors that I see in our two children with it, and I will say this too ADHD does manifest differently a lot of times in boys and girls versus girls. I have one child both of mine are girls and my one child hers manifests very much like girls, typically, does just very verbose talking constantly, has a hard time picking up on some of those social cues when in conversation, and then a lot of anxiety, and that tends to go right in hand with most girls that have ADHD. Now my other girl child has the hyperactive and the inattentive really, but she's just the busy bee you know, can't sit still booming and ringing around, just jumping off the furniture and has a really hard time focusing during school, those kind of behaviors that we typically associate with ADHD and boy behavior. So it can look a little bit different in different children and I know that there's neither of my children have had anger issues, but there typically is some anger associated with ADHD and that kind of thing.
Hannah Miller:And a lot of times it's because of their difficulties fitting in socially and they get frustrated with themselves and they get very angry with themselves and that kind of thing, and the other thing that's unfortunate is kids with ADHD end up being socially excluded.
Dr. Jackson:Many times their peers recognize their irritability or their anger or their inability to adapt socially and they become excluded socially and they don't pick up on social cues. Oftentimes when they're in a group they don't. Things go over their head and so their peers sometimes think they're a little daffy and they're not unintelligent. They just they're so inattentive that they don't pick up on things in a group and so they end up being excluded by the group. And that's unfortunate for an intelligent child to be excluded by the group and a lot of times too, those kinds of behaviors will, they figure it out.
Hannah Miller:But again, they're a few years behind their peers, and so they have a little bit of a harder time, and one of my children that's ADHD. She found her kind of group amongst a little bit younger kids and then she was able to flourish with them, and now she's kind of passed a lot of that stuff because she's kind of hitting that magic age where she's starting to overcome a lot of it, and and then we've started to implement some of this book and then it's totally different and now she's not being excluded like she was or she was never really excluded, but she I did see other children having a hard time with her because of her inability to kind of conform to social cues. So how do you diagnose? That's. My next question, though, is how do you diagnose?
Dr. Jackson:ADHD. There's no Medicaid, there's no lab test for ADHD. I have patients ask me all that all the time. There's no lab test. You have to diagnose it by what the patients tell you if they're adults, or what the parents tell you, or what the teachers tell you, and so, and and there are these tests that are on the internet where you can answer about 20 different tests and does your child do this?
Dr. Jackson:do they do that and so? And you can send these 20 question tests to the school teacher a lot of times and they'll answer the test and if they have enough positives on the test, the questionnaire. Rather, that'll help you diagnose. But usually I can ask parents, and sometimes the child, the appropriate questions and I can diagnose them pretty quickly and then the next question is well, how do you treat them?
Hannah Miller:Yeah, that was my. You know, that is what is standard treatment.
Dr. Jackson:And you know, for most physicians it's medication, prescription medication, which is either Adderall or methylphenidate, which is Ritalin, and you know I hate putting children on prescription medicine. Their parents hate putting their children on prescription medicine. Children hate taking prescription medicine. So what's the alternative to that? Well, that brings us to the book. That's right, and the book is entitled Finally Focused. It's by Dr James Greenblatt MD. Focused it's by Dr James Greenblatt MD, and I encourage our listeners to get a copy of that and begin to read it, because he recommends a series of alternatives that I find to be fascinating, and the very first one in the book is just supplemental magnesium.
Hannah Miller:Which a lot of people, if they've begun any kind of research regarding ADHD. That one is. I see a lot of parents implementing they're already doing that. That are already doing magnesium, but they don't do the second part of what he recommends in this book. And do you remember what that one was? Which?
Dr. Jackson:is supplemented with vitamin B6.
Hannah Miller:That's right.
Dr. Jackson:And if you do the, we'll back up one step. He says that in his years of treating ADHD in children he's a pediatric psychiatrist, by the way that he finds that over 60% of children are deficient in magnesium which I was surprised by that, I'll be honest in magnesium, which I was surprised by that, I'll be honest. So a standard part of his protocol is to do a magnesium level on children and he finds a majority of them are deficient in magnesium. So he automatically starts children on magnesium with vitamin B6. The magnesium without B6 often is insufficient.
Hannah Miller:The B6 helps the body absorb it better Helps absorb the magnesium.
Dr. Jackson:In the book he tells you exactly what type of magnesium he recommends.
Hannah Miller:That was one of the things I loved about his book. At the very end of every chapter he's got a little box and it's a step-by-step action plan for healing ADHD. It's step one, step two. He tells exactly why you would need it. If your child is displaying these kind of behaviors, this might be a good option for them. He has specific brands that he recommends throughout the chapter. He has dosages in there in that action plan at the end of each chapter. If your child is, you know it weighs this much. This is how much I recommend. And, of course, throughout the book he encourages you to be working with your, your child's medical doctor, pediatrician for this. You know he's not telling you to go off on your own now. None of this stuff is prescription so you can get it all over the counter if if you want to.
Hannah Miller:But he has various chapters where he recommends a test and he says you should take. Have your child's medical doctor, family physician, do this test on your child and these are the results that you're looking for. And he'll say most medical doctors think that if it's above such and such that it's fine. But I'm going to tell you that if your child has ADHD and it's above it needs to be above this number, not the number that they're looking for, because there's a little bit actually more room in there. And so he's got all that kind of information and at the end of every single chapter he gives basically a synopsis of the chapter. So that way, as I'm implementing this in our own family, I don't have to reread the chapter every time we're ready to move to the next step. I just flip to the back and I say, okay, what's? We've already done chapters one, two and three. We're on chapter four. What's his action plan here? And so I've.
Dr. Jackson:I've found it to be very user friendly yep, yep, all right, now we can run out of time before we get far. But I want to mention one more that I thought was fascinating. He calls it nutritional lithium, and that whole chapter was to me, intriguing. Now I treat adults with bipolar disorder in my office with prescription strength lithium 300 milligrams two to three times per day, and lithium's been around for a long time. It's sort of fallen a little bit out of vogue because you have to do blood levels and there are other newer medicines that work really well, but I still use lithium.
Dr. Jackson:I've been in practice 43 years and I still like to use a lot of the older medications. Well, he talks about nutritional lithium, which is using 10, 20, or 30 milligrams of lithium for children. Well, he also recommends it for adults, believe it or not, and he has found that if you do blood levels on children, that many of them are deficient in lithium and that you can give them lithium at nutritional levels and that it improves their ADHD symptoms dramatically. Now, I didn't know this, but do you remember that 7-Up the?
Dr. Jackson:drink way back when used to have lithium in it and 7-Up used to be promoted as a mood stabilizer. Now it doesn't have lithium in it anymore, but when it first came on the market, 7-up had nutritional doses of lithium in it. I had no idea there used to be healing what's the word? I'm looking for Springs. There you go, healing springs in Georgia and other parts of the United States where people would go and buy bottled water. Those healing springs had lithium in them and those bottled waters were sold all over the United States and in fact they were known for healing depression and mood disorders and people would sell water from those healing springs. And it turns out those healing springs were high in lithium. Well, guess what? You can give your children low doses of nutritional lithium. Well, that's just one thing that he recommends in his book Magnesium low-dose nutritional lithium. Are there another ones?
Hannah Miller:There's, you know, adding protein, minusing sugar, sweetened beverages, adding protein. That's something that we implemented two years ago and saw a huge difference in particularly one of our children that hated any kind of protein, any kind of protein. It was such a battle to get her to eat protein and that is very typical of ADHD kids. They want to live on carbs man.
Hannah Miller:They love sugar and carbs, they love sugar and carbs, and so that was one and that's one he talks about in his book. Again, he's very reasonable about it, he you know, but he and setting expectations for parents. He talks about omega-3s and there's some other ones. Well, that's copper, removing copper, adding zinc, and he talks about probiotics, which was a fascinating chapter for me, because one of my children has ADHD, and he talks about basically this gut microbiome. That is an overproduction in children with, oftentimes in children with ADHD. That is an overproduction in children with, oftentimes in children with ADHD.
Dr. Jackson:But it's because they end up taking antibiotics a lot during their childhood, and the antibiotics kill the good bacteria in their GI tract and they'll end up with the overgrowth of bad bacteria. And what does it do? The bad bacteria in your gut, which is called the, the second brain, causes a negative feedback on your brain and that affects their behavior in the chapter, the story he told in that chapter, which was chapter five.
Hannah Miller:It at the beginning of the chapter. It was like reading about my own child and then he gets into talking about why this child was acting that way and that imbalance or overproduction of that bacteria because of antibiotics. And then I flash back to this. It happens to be my child that had open heart surgery, that had a massive infection and had antibiotics pumped right into her heart via a PICC line, you know, and I'm just pumping all that stuff through her body and she was prone to infections, had a lot of ear infections and all this kind of stuff. She's been on lots of antibiotics and it was just like this light bulb and it was about that chapter that I just said.
Hannah Miller:This guy's legit because I've seen this in my own household, and so it was. I really appreciated that, and that was one of those things too, too, though, that I think kind of started to work itself out in her. She's now 10 or 11 and she got older and her body started to kind of balance out some of those things on its own, and uh, so we're just kind of helping it along at this point. The only other thing I would say and I would caution you know, most all of our listeners are probably believers, and in in chapter 11, he has the plus of what he calls mindfulness and improving attention one breath at a time, and that chapter he gets a little bit into some new age, a little bit of new age kind of stuff.
Hannah Miller:But for us as believers.
Hannah Miller:We understand, you know, the concept of meditating and meditating on the word of God and meditating and memorizing and the value of, you know, not emptying our place, and you need to meditate and just kind of take, get rid of all of the noises around you and focus on the Lord, focus on his word and get a lot of the distractions out of the way.
Hannah Miller:And so we see value in those things. And so, while he kind of takes a Eastern mystic, new Age approach to it not overly so, not overly so there's not any kind of religious jargon in there, but he does kind of come at it from that angle I would say there's still value in what he's trying to teach. He's just trying to teach something that's really biblical, but from an anti-biblical perspective. So I would say I wouldn't throw that chapter out. I would say that that's. We just approach it from an actual biblical perspective. And you know, and one of those things is, you know, learning to be aware of what's going on around you, focusing on one thing, focusing on your breath, your breathing, and basically kind of trying to train your mind to focus on things, simplify, leave other things out, and so, anyway, I did want to put in that kind of caution about that chapter, though that's a good caveat.
Hannah Miller:Yeah, with it, but everything else was very reasonable.
Dr. Jackson:Our time is up, ms Hannah, and we do want to recommend this book to you. I'm going to give you the title again. It's finally focused. It's by Dr James Greenblatt, md. He's a psychiatrist, and I want to say before I finish, I want to say this when I'm treating ADHD children in my office, I often have parents who will look at me and say, dr Jackson, I've had these same symptoms that my child has all of my life.
Dr. Jackson:Could I have ADHD? And I'll look at them and say, yeah, you can. Parents often have the same symptoms as their children and vice versa. Parents often have the same symptoms as their children and vice versa, and I'll end up treating the parents for the exact same symptoms that their children are being treated for and I'll end up treating them with the same medicine. But here's the interesting thing the same things that Dr Greenblatt recommends for the children works for the adults, and so if you're an adult out there that's being treated with Ritalin or Adderall, I would recommend you read this book, because these non-medical therapies that work for children will also work for you as an adult.
Hannah Miller:And then you may not see some of the side effects, or he guarantees that you won't see the side effects that you might already be seeing if you're taking those medications, and the reason being is that those medications are your body. They're responding the same as your your body already does with the adhd, and so if you get all those things balanced out, then the medication is able to just work and your lack of diet and some of the facial tics or whatever your side effects might be, he guarantees, will be gone. Yeah.
Dr. Jackson:And on top of that, you may not need as much medicine, or you may not need the medicine at all. That's right. So that's a very intriguing thought. Yes, and my adult patients. They don't like taking Adderall and Ritalin any more than their children do. There's a stigma attached to it. And on top of that, they don't like going to the doctor every three months to get a refill for a controlled drug.
Dr. Jackson:You see, yeah, all right, you're listening to More Than Medicine. I'm your host, dr Robert Jackson. My guest today is my lovely daughter, ms Hannah Miller. We'll be back again next week and until then, may the Lord bless you real good.
Speaker 1:Thank you for listening to this edition of More Than Medicine. For more information about the Jackson Family Ministry, dr Jackson's books, or to schedule a speaking engagement, go to their Facebook page, instagram or their webpage at jacksonfamilyministrycom. This podcast is produced by Bob Slone Audio Production at bobslone. com.
