Risky Business

A scientifically unproven technique has helped ADHD patients. Should doctors sacrifice ethics if it works?

- Katherine Ellison

DREAMY AND DISTRACTED, MEITAL GUETTA struggled through high school in the small town of Shoham, Israel. Her mind wandered to home décor, clothes, dinner plans— anything but schoolwork. “Teachers would say it was a shame, because I was so smart but I wasn’t trying,” she says. “I was trying.”

When she was 23, a neurologist diagnosed her with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD, and prescribed Ritalin, a stimulant. It helped, but Guetta didn’t like the idea of medicating herself. “I don’t want to feel the need to take something every day to be OK,” she says. “I just want to be OK.”

In 2015, she enrolled in a clinical trial at Ben Gurion University. Doctors put a cap with an electromagnetic coil on her head and administered brief, intense magnetic pulses, generating a mild electrical current deep inside her brain. Unlike electro convulsive therapy, which induces seizures while the patient is under anesthesia, this treatment, known as transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, rarely provokes seizures and is performed while the patient is awake. The treatment was administered to Guetta for half an hour a day, five days a week, for three weeks.