Hope Heals? Why Unproven Treatments Seem to 'Work' for Kids

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Oftentimes, within online support groups for parents, questions arise about “treatments” that fall well outside the established evidence base for childhood mental health disorders.

These suggestions frequently include supplements and “natural” fixes—zinc, saffron oil, magnesium—or restrictive diets such as gluten-free, casein-free, or “detox” protocols. Posts also commonly promote pseudoscientific interventions like sensory integration therapy, red light therapy, or homeopathy. Parents recommend them to other parents despite little to no scientific support for their effectiveness.

A typical post might read, “Has anyone tried saffron oil for their child’s ADHD?” Fortunately, most responses from parents are as we would expect: “Didn’t help,” or “Made my son worse.” Given the lack of empirical evidence showing saffron oil has any meaningful effect on attention-deficit/hyperactivity (ADHD) symptoms, these outcomes are unsurprising.

Almost inevitably, however, a few parents respond with statements like, “I tried everything else, and this was the only thing that worked,” or “It was a total game-changer for my child!”

These comments appear just often enough to keep various myths alive. Vulnerable parents—understandably—want relief from the daily chaos that can accompany raising a child with a serious mental health condition and turn to pseudoscientific fixes rather than pursuing established, evidence-based treatments.

This phenomenon, of course, is not unique to psychology or nutrition. Bloodletting was a favored medical treatment in ancient Egypt and Greece, which persisted until the 19th century. Physicians confidently reported that it cured everything from fevers to mental illness—even though we now know that to be scientifically impossible.

So how do we account for this? Why do supplements or inert treatments sometimes appear to produce improvement when there is no scientific reason they should?

Several well-established psychological mechanisms can explain why ineffective treatments can seem convincing.

Confounds in Everyday Life

A confound is an extra variable that becomes tangled up with whatever we are trying to evaluate, resulting in misleading conclusions. In research, confounds are carefully controlled, but in family life, they are unavoidable.

In my work with families, I have learned that small, easily overlooked changes can produce meaningful behavioral and emotional improvements. A lonely child makes a new friend, a stressful school year ends, a parental conflict resolves, sleep improves, and so on. When a child begins a new supplement or alternative treatment around the same time, it is easy to conclude the treatment “worked,” even when unrelated factors were responsible.

Expectancy and the Placebo Effect

When a parent strongly expects an intervention might help, that expectation alone can shape how the parent interacts with their child. They may become more patient, warm, attentive, or hopeful. From a family systems perspective, these changes alone can meaningfully reduce a child’s distress. In other words, improvement may occur alongside the treatment rather than because of it.

Placebo effects are robust in both medicine and mental health, sometimes approaching the magnitude of the active treatment itself. Importantly, placebo effects do not mean symptoms are “imagined.” They reflect real changes driven by belief, expectation, and context rather than by the treatment’s biological mechanism. I strongly suspect this is why parents often report a medication “stopped working” after a while, likely because both the parent and child were responding to an initial expectancy or placebo effect.

Regression to the Mean and the Natural Course of Symptoms

Many childhood mental health symptoms naturally fluctuate over time. Regression to the mean—a statistical principle—tells us that the farther a person’s behavior strays from their typical or baseline behavior, the more likely it is that the behavior will return to baseline. For a child, extreme periods of distress are likely to be followed by more average ones, making it appear as if the intervention was responsible for the change.

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To make matters more complex, fringe interventions are rarely the first thing parents try. By the time they turn to unconventional options, the child is now older, more mature, or benefiting from other changes or experiences that have nothing to do with the new treatment.

Effort Justification and Cognitive Dissonance

When parents invest substantial time, money, and emotional energy into an intervention, the psychological pressure to see it as effective increases. Effort justification and cognitive dissonance push people to resolve the discomfort of “This was expensive and exhausting” by emphasizing perceived gains and minimizing ongoing struggles.

Publicly reporting success further reinforces this belief. Once parents tell others that something worked, it becomes harder to revise that story later.

Confirmation Bias

Confirmation bias leads people to notice and remember information that supports their beliefs while discounting contradictory evidence. Clear, confident narratives—“This worked when nothing else did”—are psychologically powerful, especially after years of frustration.

A Cautionary Example: The Matthews Protocol

In the 1970s, Daniel Matthews, a pediatric neuropsychiatrist at Duke University, developed what became known as the Matthews Protocol. Matthews hypothesized that some children had "limbic seizure-like activity" and proposed an off-label, phased medication regimen involving amantadine followed by oxcarbazepine.

Matthews claimed success rates of 85–90 percent, figures that continue to circulate widely in parent forums. Entire online communities are devoted to promoting the protocol, often for children diagnosed with disruptive mood dysregulation disorder (DMDD).

However, there are no randomized controlled trials or credible empirical studies demonstrating that the Matthews Protocol does anything at all, despite it being around for more than 50 years. Consequently, very few psychiatrists prescribe it.

Furthermore, to date, no psychotropic medication has demonstrated success rates even remotely close to those numbers. For comparison, in large, well-designed studies, antidepressants outperform placebo in only about 15-25 percent of patients with depression, and even then not by very much (Stone et al., 2022).

Recommendations for Parents

We live in an age when expert guidance is often dismissed, yet science remains our most reliable tool for separating fact from fiction.

Most parents lack the time and energy to dig into complicated research when it comes to a new option they read about on social media. Identifying high-quality evidence is difficult, and reading academic papers is daunting—even for many mental health professionals.

Fortunately, there is a practical starting point. Sites like ChatGPT or Perplexity have made it much easier for parents to fact-check the science, or lack of science, behind many of the false claims made on social media. Even a simple query such as, “Is the Matthews Protocol an evidence-based treatment for DMDD?” will tell you pretty much all you need to know.

As always, it is best to get your information from an experienced and licensed mental health practitioner rather than AI or social media.

When it comes to children’s mental health, a healthy dose of skepticism goes a very long way.