Brain Gym

I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan. It’s re-packaged NACD from what I can tell.

My daughter did 1 session. I felt like the instructor was trying to pull the wool over my eyes. She even tried to tell me that Brain Gym “cures” LDs (a REAL red flag) and I could stop ALL tutoring and OT (LMB and SI OT) and just do Brain Gym. When I looked her in the eye and said, “So you are telling me I can stop ALL my private remediatiion and do Brain Gym only and she’ll be cured?” She then recanted her story and said that maybe I should just add Brain Gym on to what we were already doing. I said, “Then how will I know WHICH therapy really worked or if Brain Gym is just piggy-backing on to my other therapies?” She didn’t have an answer.

The clincher was when my then 8 year old daughter said when asked what she thought about it. She replied, “Mom, do you think that Doctor could have just been trying to ‘trick our minds’?” That sealed it for me.

It is the “new” thing. Personally I think sticking to the old tried and true remediations are a surer bet. Sorry to be so negative. JMHO.

I tried teaching some of the exercises from the manual after attending a conference in which Brain Gym was one of the topics. I don’t know if it made any difference. The students loved it, but after the novelty wore off some of them didn’t want to do the exercises anymore. I just really used them as transition activities to give the students a break from all that decoding and encoding but that was before I got trained in the Lindamood Bell programs. Now I don’t use the brain gym anymore.

Hi, Chava,

Brain Gym comes up once in a while in the parenting forum. Most people are not impressed.

Barb

Chava,

The best way to evaluate a particular program or treatment is to look for properly conducted research showing positive, measurable results. As parents and human beings, we are naturally drawn to the personal experiences of others, but those experiences are not the best measure of the effectiveness of a treatment.

Anecdotal evidence, as a research scientist would call it, tends to be unreliable because it is based solely on a person’s subjective feeling about the success or failure of a particular treatment. It is a natural human trait, for example, to reject or ignore things that are not consistent with our belief about the effectiveness of a treatment and to highlight or emphasize those things which seem consistent with what we believe in. Also, life is not a controlled experiment and usually multiple things are being done at the same time to help a child. For example, a child participating in Brain Gym may also be receiving tutoring, special education services, occupational therapy or vision therapy. He may have just experienced brain growth or a sudden developmental spurt. He may be eating better. He is getting a lot of personal attention in Brain Gym. Which of these things is responsible for the improvement? If he had gotten personal chess tutor or taken one-on-one swimming lessons would he be showing similar improvement? Is the improvement really just the result of that one-on-one work? How much the the child believe in the treatment (placebo effect)? Good research accounts for these factors.

When you start looking at the research, ask yourself these things, among others: Is it a double blind study? How many children participated? (A study of 25 children, for example, is too small a sample size to provide much insight.) What question was actually being researched? How long did the study last? Who paid for the study? Where was it conducted? Does the researcher declare the treatment a cure? (That one is a HUGE red flag.) What questions remain unanwered? In the end, unbiased research is your best source of information. Remember, that person doing the Brain Gym presentation may have had something to sell.

You might find that there is very little research on a particular treatment. That doesn’t mean the treatment doesn’t work. It just means that you can’t be sure it will be helpful for your child because it hasn’t yet been shown to be helpful for most children. With the cost of some of these interventions, that is important information. If monetary or time concerns mean that you need to choose between different options and can’t simply undertake them all, you will probably want to go with the treatment that has the best basis in research.

I hope this helps.

Andrea

Exactly what I meant by “piggy backing” on other therapies.

[quote=”Leah-FL”]Exactly what I meant by “piggy backing” on other therapies.[/quote]

Yes, that was what brought the whole idea to mind for me.

Andrea