I agree with the above post. Jenny McCarthy has made a lot of money from her book about gluten free diet, but there is no empirical research that supports this unless your child has a medically diagnosed issue. Feed him a healthy diet and forget spending all that money on gluten free products. If Risperdal helps him focus, then why not?

Natural does not always mean safer, most herbal and natural remedies have not had any real testing done, in my experience herbal remedies are at best ineffective, and at worst dangerous

I was skeptical initially to medicate him but I talked to his teacher she actually told me that she was on Ritalin herself when she was younger until high school and her situation triggered her to teach special ED. Well! since he started I see a lot of difference in school, I don't get bad reports as I used to get them, he complete his tasks and paying more attention.

I'm NOT a fan of meds, but we found that 3 mg of Intuniv works best for our dghtr. It helps her sleep instead of keeping her up like some of the meds do, and also helps with aggression she has from the Autism issues. She has Autism, ADHD, OCD, Receptive and Expressive Language disorder. We tried other meds after I kept getting bruises from her only as a last resort, but the Intuniv has been a life saver.

I have found that finding out my son's actual metabolic needs (through a biomedical/integrative doctor), and subsequently supplementing these needs (some herbal, some vitamins, some dietary changes) has helped him much more than previous attempts at using meds. I do think that all of our kids are different, so what may work for one kid/family/situation may not work for another. One thing you may want to think about discussing with your doc is Vayaran (can follow link outlining study that this can help kids with attention deficit disorder):

http://www.vayarin.com/
Good luck to you!