Riding is My Ritalin

Adam Leibovitz is conducting a startling, risky and groundbreaking experiment that could transform the way doctors treat ADHD: He's pedaling his bicycle

By Bruce Barcott

One evening in the late autumn of 1997, Jeff and Lori Leibovitz arrived at Skiles Test Elementary School in Indianapolis for a meeting with their son Adam's first-grade teacher. The Leibovitzes were upbeat. First-grade conferences are typically full of wonderful reports about children's wonderful progress in learning to read and write. But the Leibovitzes walked into Adam's classroom that night to find the assistant principal sitting with Adam's teacher. The assistant principal did most of the talking. She told them their son showed classic signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD: He had trouble sitting still in class; his focus pinballed around the room; his hands were a whirl of perpetual motion. Adam's teacher had taken to giving him rubber bands to occupy his busy fingers.

Jeff and Lori listened in shock. Adam was a rambunctious kid, but his behavior didn't strike them as unusual. Adam's ADHD wasn't extreme or debilitating, the assistant principal told the Leibovitzes. But that wasn't necessarily a good thing. The boy's condition was acute enough to cause learning problems but mild enough that he'd likely slip through the system's safety net for special-needs students.

"It was a horror story," Lori recalls. "Here was our oldest child, just starting school, and we're told that he's always going to struggle with this. They said he'd fall through the cracks and would never amount to anything. It was earthshaking."

At the time, ADHD diagnoses were exploding across the United States. From 1990 to 1998 the number of children and adults identified as having the disorder shot up from 900,000 to nearly five million. Jeff and Lori came home that night and plunged into the research. Lori read everything she could find and attended local support-group meetings. Most of the advice pointed in one direction: a prescription for amphetamines such as Ritalin. The powerful stimulants (the Food and Drug Administration labels them as Schedule II drugs, the same category as morphine and methamphetamine) have a paradoxical calming effect on the minds of ADHD patients. They're convenient, effective and popular—90 percent of ADHD patients who take them see improvement. Pop a pill; problem solved. Many parents swore by them. Teachers praised them for bringing calm to unruly classrooms.

But the Leibovitzes were reluctant to go that route. They were leery of the side effects, which can include heart palpitations, sleeplessness, dizziness, irritability, headaches and nausea. For the next three years, they opted instead to give Adam and his younger brother plenty of exercise. "We always had a lot of running-around time," Lori says.

Adam became a high-energy kid who was also very bright. By fourth grade, though, the demands of schoolwork began to outrun his ability to keep his ADHD in check. The experience was like having a motion detector wired into his brain. "Every little movement or sound would catch my attention," he says. "If I caught a glimpse of somebody walking past the classroom door, my mind would latch onto that: 'Who's out in the hall? What are they doing out there?'"

His parents worried that he wouldn't keep up. "As he grew older, every year he'd be expected to concentrate a little harder and sit a little longer in his seat," his mother says. "When it came time to do his homework, he'd be rolling around under the table or running into the next room. He'd shout out the answers to us. He always knew the answers. He just couldn't sit still to write them down."

from bicycling.com