I cannot find the reference now, but there was a university clinical trial published earlier this year which compared ambien with melatonin in a double-blind crossover trial in adults. The results were that $2-per-pill ambien and $3-per-90-pill-bottle of melatonin both yielded an average of 30 minutes more sleep. That this was done in a crossover trial is important. Such a study has half the people take each drug for a while, then they switch. So in the same people, melatonin was equivalent to ambien. Won't see that in an ambien ad, but likely will see it soon in insurance companies refusing to waste their customers' money on ambien, except for the rare cases of people who don't respond to cheaper treatments.

I'm following this because my child... well, details would be too much information ... but suffice to say that my little one has made astounding progress since the neurologist recommended melatonin 1 hour before bedtime. The neurologist said to try that before we talked about ritalin. We were never going to talk about ritalin, anyway, so it's a good thing the melatonin works. $2.97 per bottle, Rite-Aid brand on drugstore.com for AAdvantage miles, to boot.