Disconnected Kids: The Groundbreaking Brain Balance Program for Children with Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Neurological Disorders
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Each year, an estimated 1.5 million children-one out of every six-are diagnosed with autism, Asperger's syndrome, ADHD, dyslexia, and obsessive compulsive disorder. Dr. Robert Melillo brings a fundamentally new understanding to the cause of these conditions with his revolutionary Brain Balance Program(tm). It has achieved real, fully documented results that have dramatically improved the quality of life for children and their families in every aspect: behavioral, emotional, academic, and social. Disconnected Kids shows parents how to use this drug-free approach at home, including:
- Fully customizable exercises that target physical, sensory, and academic performance
- A behavior modification plan
- Advice for identifying food sensitivities that play a hidden role
- A follow-up program that helps to ensure lasting results
ISBN-13: 9780399172441
Media Type: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Publication Date: 03-03-2015
Pages: 336
Product Dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.90(d)
Age Range: 18 Years
Series: The Disconnected Kids Series
Dr. Robert Melillo, the creator of Brain Balance Program™, is an internationally known chiropractic neurologist, professor, researcher, and expert in childhood neurological disorders. He has been in private practice since 1985 and opened his first Brain Balance Center™ on Long Island, New York, in 1998. There are now 66 centers across the country, with more opening ocerseas in the coming year. His study, “Autism Spectrum Disorder as a Functional Disconnection Syndrome – a Model for Rehabilitation” will be published in The International Journal of Neuroscience later this year. Dr. Melillo is president of the Foundation for Cognitive Neuroscience and executive director of the F.R. Carrick Institute for Clinical Ergonomics, Rehabilitation and Applied Neurosciences, a non-profit university-based brain research center dedicated to researching methods and products to assist victims of brain injury, chronic pain, and other neurological and neuro-behavioral challenges. He lives in Rockville Centre, New York, with his wife and three children.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I dedicate this book first and foremost to my wife, Carolyn, and my children, Robby, Ellie, and Ty—I love you all, you are my life’s true inspiration and the foundation of all I am and all I do. Second, to my parents, Catherine and Joseph, for all their love and support. Third, to my sister, Susan, and my brother, Domenic, and all of their families: Bill, Susan, Billy, Jeffrey, Katie, Colleen, Joey, Alexandra, Olivia, and Nick. You all have played a role in this accomplishment, and I love you all. I would like to thank Janet Groschel and Gerry Leisman for their professional inspiration and support, and Debora Yost for all her help, advice, expertise, and patience. Last but not least, I would like to thank my agent, Carol Mann, and her staff, and all those in my Brain Balance family, especially my nephew and partner, Billy Fowler. You have all helped greatly in the development of this book, the Brain Balance Program, and the Brain Balance Achievement Centers. A special thanks to Denise Festa, who started me on this journey all those years ago. INTRODUCTION Stopping the Worst Childhood Epidemic of Our Time ■ I keep on picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff. I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That’s all I’d do all day. I’d just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it’s crazy, but that’s the only thing I’d really like to be. —J. D. SALINGER, THE CATCHER IN THE RYE ■ We live in a world and a time of great contradiction. On the one hand, we are experiencing unprecedented advances in technology. The world’s information is literally at our fingertips. We can access high-tech entertainment on a giant screen in a flash. We can communicate with anyone anywhere in the world with a smartphone. Yet at the same time, we are experiencing an alarming escalation in the number of children who cannot fully function in this world because they don’t have fully functioning brains. Today, there are some 21 million children who have been diagnosed with severe attention, behavioral, or learning problems. Every day thousands more are being diagnosed with ADHD, autism spectrum disorder, dyslexia, Tourette syndrome, obsessive compulsive disorder, bipolar disorder, or other frightening conditions that confirm that something is not right in the brain. This is an unprecedented phenomenon and the most important health issue of our time. Just a generation ago, autism was considered a rare disorder that was diagnosed in about 1 out of every 10,000 children born in the United States. Six years ago, when I first published Disconnected Kids, 1 out of 150 children was being diagnosed with autism. Today, the rate of children being diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder is 1 in 68, including 1 out of every 42 boys. Other conditions are skyrocketing at a similar rate. ADHD is now considered the most common childhood health problem of any kind worldwide and the most common childhood mental issue, with kids as young as three years old being prescribed Ritalin or Adderall. These statistics are making headline news everywhere almost daily, yet no one is explaining why. Why is this happening? How can we stop it? What can we do about it? When I first started researching neurobehavioral disorders back in the nineties as a parent of a child with ADHD and as a neurology expert, I was very frustrated by the lack of good, accurate information that could explain what was happening in a child’s brain. When I asked professionals, I got vague answers about chemical imbalances and genetics and little else. When I read books, I found that they all said the same things. They reviewed the symptoms and then related a number of case histories and examples. They talked about basic treatment with medications. They said these conditions were mostly genetic and couldn’t be cured. That was about it. They never clearly stated what the actual problem was and how it produced the symptoms of ADHD, autism, dyslexia, and other disorders. In fact, they were even unclear as to what the actual symptoms of these disorders are. I began to realize that the lack of real concrete answers was due to the fact that they didn’t have real facts as to what these problems are and what is causing them. I could find no single, established neurological theory that was accepted and used in the scientific or educational community. What I did know and could clearly see was that the problem was increasing dramatically. It was obvious to me that whatever we were doing was not working. Einstein once said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. After a while I realized that the reason I was having difficulty finding an answer was because there is not a single answer. Childhood neurological dysfunctions share many features in common and are often referred to as learning disabilities or behavioral disorders, implying that the primary symptoms affect only behavior and that the rest of development proceeds smoothly and without incident. This is not the case. Each disorder is complex and often involves every system of the body. Science, however, doesn’t take a whole body approach to seeking a solution. It has been searching for a solution by focusing on what appears to be the major issue. With ADHD, they say it’s an attention problem or impulsiveness. Dyslexia is a reading problem. Autism is a socialization and communication problem. No one has been looking at the other issues these children have—problems that could help provide clues to the underlying cause. But I did, and I could see that they involve every system in the body, not just the brain. That’s how the Brain Balance Program was born. These disorders may manifest with different symptoms but they are really one and the same problem: a brain imbalance. There is even a name for it—Functional Disconnection Syndrome, meaning areas in the brain, especially the two hemispheres of the brain, are not electrically balanced, or synchronized. This electrical imbalance interferes with the ability of the two hemispheres to share and integrate information, meaning the brain cannot function as a whole. The result is that a child with a brain imbalance has normal or even unusually good skills associated with the higher-functioning area or side of the brain, and unusually bad skills associated with the underactive area or side of the brain. The problem seems to come about because one side of the brain is maturing at a faster rate than the other. As the child develops, this imbalance becomes more significant and the two hemispheres can never fully function as one. The brain is functionally disconnected. Fix the disconnect—that is, get the immature side of the brain to catch up to the other side—and the symptoms go away. So does the disorder. This is what the Brain Balance Program does and why it is so revolutionary. Despite the program’s success and all the scientific studies proving how and why it works, most professionals have not changed. They are still approaching and treating each of these conditions as a single condition—and they are content to only treat the symptoms, instead of arresting the problem. I have found that most of these children have a combination of many different symptoms that include sensory, motor, cognitive, academic, emotional, and immune challenges, as well as dietary and digestive problems. As I said, they involve basically every system of the body. The Brain Balance Program addresses all these symptoms by stimulating the slow side of the brain without affecting the other side through a series of sensory-motor and sensory-academic exercises that address the symptoms of the individual child along with dietary, nutritional, and behavioral changes. It gets the two sides to integrate and start working as a whole. There is no other program like it in the world. Unfortunately, most parents of children with developmental neurobehavioral disorders do not have a good understanding of the nature of their child’s dysfunction. They do not understand what is wrong with their children and why they are behaving the way they do. They are also led to believe that there is no solution to the problem. The best fix, they are told, is through medication that will mask the symptoms but not make them go away. I have been working with children who are labeled with these disorders since 1994 without drugs or other medical interventions and I know all symptoms can be resolved. ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, and even autism, among others, can become a thing of the past. Parents and teachers need to know not only that this is possible but that they can make it happen themselves. This is why I wrote this book. Disconnected Kids not only offers a clear understanding of what is going on in the brains of children today, but also gives parents and teachers the power to correct it on their own. Disconnected Kids is based on the same principles of the Brain Balance Program that are being used in the Brain Balance Achievement Centers that can now be found in more than eighty cities around the country. When I first published Disconnected Kids,in 2009, just a little over 1,000 youngsters had successfully experienced the program. Today, that number tops 20,000. It is the most successful and comprehensive program available anywhere today. It is the only truly holistic approach to the brain, and the only one that addresses all the symptoms that are troubling these children. Disconnected Kids is the culmination of my research and what I hope to be the catalyst to stopping this epidemic that is threatening the mental health of children around the world. It is intended to provide a clear understanding as to what is going on inside the brains and bodies of the children who are victims to this epidemic. It is also intended to empower everyone involved in the lives of these children to do something about it. Since Disconnected Kids first came out, there has been a lot of remarkable research conducted around the world as to what is causing this epidemic rise in childhood neurological disorders. Most of it points to our environment—the way we choose to live our lives and the toxins and chemicals that surround and bombard us daily—as the primary force behind the epidemic rise in these conditions. Understanding these causes, which I discuss in this new revision, is not only important in helping to correct the problem, but it also gives us insight into how we can stop it. There is no more important social issue today. There is no greater problem that threatens the future of our country and our world than what is happening to the developing brains of our children. I have seen this problem coming, and I have created a program that will stop it. I believe that raising awareness through Disconnected Kids and giving parents real tools to take immediate action is the quickest way to make an impact now, before it is too late. PART ■ 1 DIFFERENT SYMPTOMS, ONE PROBLEM Understanding the Minds of Disconnected Kids ■ My teacher asked if anyone in the class ever heard of autism, so I raised my hand and said, “I have because I used to have autism.” My teacher said, “That can’t be because nobody used to have autism; you have autism.” Then I stood up and explained to everybody about Brain Balance and how it made my autism go away. —BECKY, AGE TWELVE ■ A generation ago, you could go a lifetime and never cross paths with a child with autism. Today, it’s rare if you don’t know one, or know someone who knows someone who has an autistic child. Fifty years ago, a hyperactive and disruptive child was viewed as a “discipline” problem. Today, attention deficit/hyperactive disorder, commonly called ADHD, is the most prevalent childhood problem throughout the world. Fifteen years ago, most parents had never even heard of Asperger’s syndrome, bipolar disorder, or oppositional defiant disorder. Today, it is in the consciousness of most every parent of a school-age child. Childhood neurological disorders—mostly described as behavioral, social, or academic dysfunctions—are rising so sharply that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has declared the problem a “major health threat.” That is putting it mildly. According to the CDC, one out of every four or five children born today will be diagnosed with some type of behavior or learning disability before the age of eight. I believe the startling rise in these disorders is, in fact, the most serious threat to the health and well-being of our children that this country has ever faced and one that has been increasing in epidemic proportions. Consider: Autism, which fifteen years ago was considered a rare disorder, is considered rare no longer. It affects 1 out of every 68 children, up from 1 in 88, or 29 percent, in just two years. In 2007, the nationwide rate was 1 in 150. And it strikes more than four times as many boys as it does girls. In the United States, 1 in every 42 baby boys born today will be diagnosed with autism before the age of three. In girls, it’s 1 in 189. According to one sixteen-year study, the number of males diagnosed with autism quadrupled and the number of females increased sevenfold over the last fifteen years. ADHD is 10 times more common today than it was a generation ago. And it is expected to increase at a rate of 15 to 20 percent a year.The CDC points to studies showing that 11 percent of kids, or 1 out of 9 children and 1 in 5 high school boys, have been diagnosed with the condition, up from 7.8 percent in 2002. During an eight-year period ending in 2012, about 2 million children were diagnosed with ADHD, an increase of 42 percent during that time. Of those kids, 60 to 70 percent have been given at least one other diagnosis—something that is becoming more common with all of these conditions. For an approximate 30 percent of kids, ADHD will follow them into adulthood, when they are likely to experience other psychiatric disorders. One in every five students, or 15 to 20 percent of the school population, has a language-based learning disability. Dyslexia is the most common type. It is estimated that 38 percent of fourth graders have “below basic” reading skills. Another 7 percent struggle so hard with math there’s even a name for it—dyscalculia—and it’s considered a neurological disorder. Other disorders are increasing at the same rate. “Recent increases in reported autism diagnoses might not be unique among childhood neuropsychiatric disorders and might be part of a more widespread epidemiologic phenomenon,” Danish researchers were already reporting in 2007. This study focused on an increase in Tourette syndrome, oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), as well as ADHD. ADHD medications are the most commonly prescribed drugs for children. Doctors in the United States prescribe more drugs for ADHD than the rest of the world combined. The drugs are so commonplace they are even being dispensed for children as young as age three.Doctors write an estimated 20 million prescriptions every year for Ritalin alone. And this estimate is considered conservative. According to the CDC, nearly 70 percent of children with ADHD are on medication, even though it has severe side effects and its long-term consequences on the developing mind are still unknown. One study tracking the impact of ADHD medication found they offer no improvement on academic performance in the long term. Most recently, researchers from Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found a direct link between taking ADHD stimulant medications and obesity, saying that the drugs might be resetting biological properties and appetite parameters that could have lifelong effects. One in every four children in special education has Tourette syndrome. In fact, doctors believe that this condition, characterized by uncontrolled verbal or muscle tics, is 50 to 75 percent more prevalent than once believed. Today, children are twice as likely to receive medical attention for a mental health issue than they were fifteen years ago. The rate of mental health diagnoses among adults, however, has stayed relatively stable, although many believe the next epidemic wave will be adults with behavioral issues that were never dealt with when they were children. ADHD is now believed to affect 20 percent of the adult population. It, too, is on the rise. And the conditions that most commonly bring children to the emergency room are behavioral, anxiety, mood, and developmental disorders. Today’s kids are spending an estimated seven and a half hours a day staring at smartphones and tablets. And, studies are revealing, when they are playing with these gadgets, their brains are not processing information in a healthy way. It is now common to see two-year-olds or even younger with a smartphone or iPad in their hands as a substitute babysitter. Even though parents instinctively know that this is wrong, they are just following the crowd and often give their children unrestricted access to such media. These statistics are staggering, to say the least. Yet here is a fact even more disturbing than the epidemic rise in the unhealthy mental state of our children: The methods that doctors, psychologists, and behavior specialists use to diagnose and treat these conditions have not changed in more than fifty years. What’s going on? Or more to the point, what’s going wrong? There are, in fact, several things going wrong: But psychiatric drugs don’t cure the problem; they only disguise the symptoms. So, parents are advised, talk to the school, talk to your child’s teacher. See a psychologist. Be loving, understanding, and patient. Learn coping techniques to manage the problem because, they are warned, neurobehavioral and neuroacademic dysfunctions can get better but they will never disappear. But I can tell you that they can disappear. They do disappear and I have the fully documented proof on thousands of children to prove it. It’s called the Brain Balance Program, a revolutionary nonmedical approach that effectively corrects the underlying problem common to the entire spectrum of seemingly disparate childhood neurological dysfunctions. NEW DISCOVERY IN BRAIN SCIENCE: FUNCTIONAL DISCONNECTION SYNDROME The Brain Balance Program is based on our clinically proven findings that the way your child’s brain functions today is not necessarily the way that it has to function for the rest of his or her life. We have found that many children can recover from disorders such as autism, ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, dyslexia, and others when their unique developmental needs are met and the underlying causes of these disorders are addressed. Even children with the severest forms of these disorders have the capacity to improve behaviorally and academically and learn skills that will enrich their quality of life. Neuroscience has long understood that in order for the human brain to function wholly, large areas of the brain as well as the left and right hemispheres continuously use electrical impulses to communicate. This is essential because each hemisphere performs different functions that allow us to react to the world in which we live. More recent research, however, shows that when the two sides of the brain do not mature at the same rate, the electrical impulses between the two sides get out of balance and interfere with communication. Proof now exists that this communication problem is responsible for a myriad of behavioral, social, and learning difficulties. Though medicine has traditionally classified these children as having a distinct disorder as defined by a set of symptoms—most notably autism, ADHD, Asperger’s syndrome, and dyslexia, among others—new advances in evaluative capabilities and diagnostic imaging show striking similarities in the brains of children with these conditions. We can now see that virtually all of the conditions that adversely affect behavior and learning are actually related to one problem—an imbalance of electrical activity between areas of the brain, especially the right and the left hemispheres of the brain. There is even a name for it: Functional Disconnection Syndrome (FDS). When you look deeply enough, you can find that children with these disorders share a number of symptoms. They are not coincidental. They are all signs of FDS, and they differ only in terms of the side of the brain that’s out of balance and the severity of that imbalance. The concept of a disconnection syndrome actually dates back to the end of the nineteenth century when scientists became aware that certain neurological conditions are the result of a communication problem between the left and the right hemispheres of the brain rather than an injury to one specific area. They found that this disconnect caused specific symptoms, like the kind we are seeing today. However, a functional disconnect is not the result of an injury to the brain. To me, this said that if the brain is not injured, then the disconnect can be fixed. In order for the brain to function normally, the activities in the right and the left hemispheres must work in harmony, much like a concert orchestra. When a certain function can’t stay in rhythm, it can throw the entire hemisphere off key, so the other side tries to tune it out. This can cause disharmony to such a degree that the two sides can no longer effectively share and integrate information. The brain becomes functionally disconnected. A child with a slow-developing left brain, for example, will have different academic problems and display different behaviors than a child with a slow-developing right brain. He may not be able to read words or be able to stay focused on reading. A child with a right brain dysfunction may not look at you when speaking because the brain’s ability to read body language is out of balance. The symptoms are different but the problem is the same—FDS. There are dozens of other examples, but in its most simplistic explanation, this is why your child does not appear “normal.” In fact, when parents first bring this problem to the attention of a doctor or other professional, they often say that their child “seems disconnected.” And they are exactly on the mark. ■ Disconnected Kids Are Different ■ CHILDREN with Functional Disconnection Syndrome are different from other children because they feel different than other children. They are disconnected from their bodies. Most children with FDS do not feel their own bodies very well. They have no sense of themselves in space or a sense of feeling grounded. They appear clumsy and uncoordinated and have poor timing and rhythm. They have poor or abnormal muscle tone, which is displayed through poor posture and/or an awkward gait. Their eye movement is not like other children’s. They may appear to be gazing into outer space or one eye may lack normal movement (what we call lazy eye). They are disconnected from their senses. Most children with FDS do not fully experience all five senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell—which teach normal children to relate to and interact within the world. Many of these children cannot use more than one sense at a time. When they are forced to use multiple senses together, they become overwhelmed. They become easily distracted by anything they see, hear, or feel, which makes it impossible for them to focus. As a result, they become like slaves to their own environment. They are socially and emotionally disconnected. Children who can’t feel their own body movement cannot intuit the connection between movement and feelings. They can’t interpret facial expressions or the tones in a voice that tell them what another person is thinking. Where others express emotion, they may remain stone-faced. This leads to social and emotional disconnection from others, making it very hard or even impossible to develop friendship or relationships with others.■ You see, these children seem different from typical children because they are different. They are different because they feel different. Children with FDS don’t physically feel the same, or think the same, as other children. They feel disconnected from their bodies and their senses. Some can’t feel their bodies at all or don’t have a sense of themselves in space. They feel disconnected socially and emotionally. This disconnect is played out through what you see as unusual or disturbing behavior, ranging from impulsive actions and emotional outbursts to an inability to focus and social isolation. Children with FDS have many traits in common. They often appear clumsy, have poor muscle tone, and may have an odd habit of tilting the head to one side or another. They may not like to be touched, or may be sensitive to certain sounds or smells. They get sick a lot because their immune systems are out of kilter and most are picky eaters because their digestive systems aren’t functioning properly. The individual behavioral symptoms and learning problems that a child displays, however, depend on how the imbalance in the brain is manifesting. Our clinical research during the last fifteen years has found that, most often, there are three types of disconnect that can result in the symptoms of FDS: In addition to the anecdotal evidence of the thousands of kids who have gone through Brain Balance, dozens of scientific studies conducted over the last few years by me and my colleagues, as well as others, support the validity of the Brain Balance Program. In 2009, shortly after the publication of the original Disconnected Kids, my colleagues and I opened the nonprofit Children’s Autism Hope Project, which is dedicated to studying children with neurological disorders and publishing the outcomes from various programs and treatments, including Brain Balance. Since then, my colleague Gerry Leisman, MD, PhD, and I have published more than a dozen studies and written chapters for at least a half dozen professional textbooks on FDS and how it relates to autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and myriad other children’s neurological conditions. One of our first studies, published in the International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health, followed sixty randomly selected kids who were enrolled in Brain Balance after being independently diagnosed with ADHD. The children went through our three-month multimodal program focused on stimulating the right side of the brain. At the end of the study, all the kids enrolled in the program showed improvement in more than one area of deficiency, and 85 percent showed statistically significant improvement in multiple deficit areas. Approximately 60 percent of them improved a minimum of two grade levels in various academic measures, and 35 percent improved four grade levels or better. Most impressive, 82 percent of them were no longer considered ADHD based on standardized testing criteria. A subsequent follow-up study on more than 150 kids conducted in 2013 compared children with ADHD who went through the three-month Brain Balance Program to kids with the same handicap who did not go through the program. Dr. Leisman, who led the study, found that all the children in the treatment group “yielded significant improvement of greater than two years in all grade levels except in mathematical reasoning.” They also displayed “a significant improvement” in behavior, according to assessment testing, and a lessening of hyperactivity symptoms. The nontreated kids remained virtually the same. In 2010, I presented a paper to the European Society of Pediatric Research demonstrating that a functional disconnect exists in children with autism by comparing brain scans that measured electrical brain activity in both children with autism and typical children. We found that the electrical activity in the right hemisphere of the brain was significantly reduced relative to the left in the autistic children, but wasRead an Excerpt
DISCONNECTED KIDS
For the parents of a child with a behavior, social, and/or learning disorder, the diagnosis can be devastating. Typically, parents are told that there is no known cause for their child’s problem—that, most likely, it is genetic, which makes them feel even worse. But the final blow comes with the prognosis: There is no cure. For some children, parents are told, the symptoms may subside over the years; but on the other hand, they could also get worse. At best, the condition can be controlled with medications—psychiatric drugs, they will eventually learn, with a laundry list of side effects for which long-term consequences are still unknown.
WHAT THE EVIDENCE SHOWS