Dr. Edward (Ned) Hallowell, ADHD expert and best-selling author, announces making the Learning Breakthrough Program available at the prestigious Hallowell Centers in both Massachusetts and New York.

Dr. Hallowell’s inclusion of Learning Breakthrough’s proven balance and sensory remediation program is a welcome addition to the therapy options offered at his US centers. Learning Breakthrough will be critical to his positive, multidisciplinary, “strength-based” treatment aproach and is being used to help solve the challenges of ADHD, Dyslexia, CAPD as well as other cognitive needs. The program’s value lies in enabling clients to further their developmental and academic objectives as well as social, behavioral and self-esteem ones, which is exactly why it has been so valuable as a complementary treatment in similar clinics for decades.

Interview: Dr. Frank Belgau on How is Neuro Feedback Involved in Learning Breakthrough.

Dr. Belgau describes how neurofeedback is powerfully integrated with Learning Breakthrough’s pendulum ball activities as the brain regulates itself in response to the successful and unsuccessful cycles of working with the pendulum ball. The body reacts through its multisensory balance system to adjust to expected performance conditions. When paired with a precision balance challenge device like the Belgau Balance Board, the activities form a neuroplasticity development tool with unique value to the sensory processing treatment world.

If you’re the parent of a child who’s having trouble learning or behaving in school, you quickly find yourself confronted with a series of difficult choices.

You can do nothing — and watch your child flounder while teachers register their disapproval. Or you can get help, which generally means, first, an expensive and time-consuming evaluation, then more visits with more specialists, intensive tutoring, therapies, perhaps, or, as is often the case with attention issues, drugs.

For many parents — particularly the sorts of parents who are skeptical of mainstream medicine and of the intentions of what one mother once described to me as “the learning-disability industrial complex” — this experience is an exercise in frustration and alienation.

The rest of the article describes some areas of similarity with LBP because of the program’s substantial amount of vision-related activities. The balance and vestibular issues so critical to LBP are not described, but the hurdles that parents face and the ways that treatments are presented to parents, the pressures, etc. will be very strongly identified with by those who have had to walk that road.

Read the complete article on the Times website >>

Guest Blogger

I am asked regularly about my association with certain “alternative” approaches to learning disabilities. I was recently talking about vision therapy with a New York Times reporter who was asking me about skepticism observed in the medical profession regarding the topic. I told her I believe it is important to keep an open mind when it comes to alternative treatments.  Most of these programs do not have the funds to undertake the multi-million dollar prospective studies that are needed to conclusively test these programs.  Nonetheless, many of them, like Learning Breakthrough, have merit and have helped people a great deal.

I offer Learning Breakthrough in my offices as a powerful, approachable and inexpensive treatment that complements our other therapies wonderfully.  I have found it valuable for clients with ADHD as well as dyslexia and other learning differences.  It is not purely vision therapy, but rather an “integrative therapy” that makes use of several different brain systems.  It is designed to get the brain working as an efficient, tight-knit system. Many of the clients who have completed the program have reported such improvements as a reduced or eliminated need for medication; better academic performance; increased organization skills; and heightened executive functioning. I hope you will read into the detailed background information posted on the Learning Breakthrough website to get a better feel for what I’m talking about.

• Sensory-motor Theory

• Neuroplasticity – Sensory Processing

With respect to vision therapy, I told the reporter I believe there is something to it. What the “something” is – is up for grabs, but we are learning more and more about how the vestibular system, visual system and auditory system can all be made to work better together and  improve the treatment of attention deficit, dyslexia and other learning differences.  My own son’s reading problem was helped by his doing vision and vestibular exercises based on the same methods Learning Breakthrough uses which is how I came to gain an appreciation for this particular “alternative” treatment.  This is not hocus-pocus.  The fact that medication is the best researched intervention is due to the fact that the drug companies are the only groups with enough money to fund such expensive research. I referred the reporter, and I would refer you, to the work of Dr. Mel Kaplan, an optometrist in Tarrytown, NY who is, in my estimation, a genius and a true innovator in the field.

But note, developmental optometrists are not the only professionals that understand and apply Learning Breakthrough’s ideas. Occupational therapists, physical and speech therapists, audiologists, education specialists, and physicians have all seen client improvements along the lines of those that I’ve seen.

I tell my patients that I want to use whatever works, as long as it is safe and legal. If we wait for a New England Journal of Medicine article to report on the validation of every treatment, we’ll be waiting a long time. To me, the integrative approach–making use of all the possible tools I have in the toolbox–is the best way to go.

All the best, Ned Hallowell

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MARRIED TO DISTRACTION
Announcing the publication of Dr. Hallowell’s new book, Married to Distraction: Restoring Intimacy and Strengthening Your Marriage in an Age of Interruption. See a preview now! It hits the bookstores March 16, and is available to be ordered on Amazon and other online stores now.