Non Med Options for ADD Treatment: Learning Breakthrough

The Non Medical Treatments for ADD: Learning Breakthrough Program Highlights

Several posts past I brought up the subject of using different interventions for ADD/ADHD that may be considered controversial, but nevertheless bring benefit to individuals/families who have worked with them. With the rush of everyday experience in my office I simply had to throw in some useful tips in the posts between, and today am back to the business of Non-Med interventions.

The brain is cooking on many burners simultaneously.

With the sea of ADD/ADHD present in our children/schools, adults/workplaces and relationships/homes we have so much information to review from etiologies [causes], to treatments, to school applications, to medical interventions.

In many of my posts [from the very outset of CorePsychBlog in Nov 06] I have registered my positive and negative observations [and at times pounded the table] regarding some of the unbelievably counterproductive medical interventions overlooked by some of the academic/pharmaceutical community. [Drug interactions, metabolic pathways, etc]

Think about it: the FDA, pharmaceutical companies, and research/academic community who review medication effectiveness control the interventions for ADD. It's as if the only acceptable interventions must come from the multiple pens of physicians and pharmaceutical companies, and the standard of care is determined by that group.

But other interventions can be helpful, even though proven consistency is not there. [See the next post for abuse/misuse of interventions by providers. -No wonder managed care is mad.]

Think of this proven parallel: would you only give meds to a suicidal patient, and consider not placing them in some kind of therapy, psychotherapy, CBT, family counseling, etc? Easy answer: no way!

All agree: complicated presentations such as ADD need more comprehensive treatment strategies.

But only recently have the studies shown that meds and additional therapy significantly improve outcomes. Now we find ourselves on this new edge of learning-what-works-even-though it-doesn't-work-exactly-the-same-way for every client.

Thus the previous post about the cerebellum. Learning Breakthrough at first looks like a cerebellar strategy, but may ultimately prove to be the edge of a different understanding of new therapies for ADD/ADHD.

Run over to that URL at Learning Breakthrough, and when you do, consider this interesting possibility when you read about their easy and low cost intervention system: The brain is like a hologram.

Pribram has written, "What the data suggest is that there exists in the cortex, a multidimensional holographic-like process serving as an attractor or set point toward which muscular contractions operate to achieve a specified environmental result. The specification has to be based on prior experience (of the species or the individual) and stored in holographic-like form. Activation of the store involves patterns of muscular contractions (guided by basal ganglia, cerebellar, brain stem and spinal cord) whose sequential operations need only to satisfy the ‘target' encoded in the image of achievement much as the patterns of sequential operations of heating and cooling must meet the setpoint of the thermostat." Wikipedia

Said a different way:

Holographic concepts involve dynamic synergistic connections throughout the object in question, not just the apparent focus of the one area [e.g. prefrontal cortex, or cerebellum]. Said more simply: cerebellar therapeutic activities for ADD such as Learning Breakthrough may create a significant effect on the rest of the brain. The diversity of effect at this moment may not be specifically measurable, but anecdotally something positive is going on.

See this post on Learning Breakthrough by my friend Steve Borsch on his very interesting blog.

And just a bit more on holographic effects from Paul Pietsch on The Hologramic Mind :

To and fro, rise and fall, up and down, over and under, in and out, tick and tock, round and round, and so on… Cycles. Periodicities. Recurrences. Undulations. Corrugations. Oscillations. Vibrations. Round-trip excursions along a continuum, like the rise, fall, and return of the contour of a wavelet, the revolutions of a wheel, the journey of a piston, the hands of a clock. These are all analogs of waves.

Do we really mean that pendular motion is a symbolic expression of the rotations of a clock's hands? No. The motion of one translates into continuous displacements of the other. Is the ride on a roller coaster an allegorical reference to the course of the tracks? Of course not. The conduct of the one issues directly from the character of the other, to borrow a phrase from a John Dewey title. And why would we suppose that a pendulum or a tuning fork could scribe a wave? The answer is that the same logic prevails in all periodic events, patterns, circumstances, conditions, motions, surfaces, and so forth.

As one of my neuroscience colleagues often says: "This is some very interesting stuff!"