Somebody Created the First Intensives 70 Years Ago, Who?
By Douglas Doman
In the world of special needs children, fads come and go. The last fad was “Integrative Programs”. All over the place, Integrative Programs began to pop up. The idea was that the therapy would be integrated in some way. This was deemed beneficial for the child. The results were not impressive. An Integrative Program became a marketing necessity to increase sales. The Doman Method has been truly integrative for more than 70 years. Our program is holistic. It is integrative because each child receives a cognitive, physical, social, and physiological (nutrition, respiration, and sleep) program. Every aspect of the child is developed.
The newest fad is “Intensives”. These programs work by having parents bring the child to therapy for many hours each day for three weeks or more. The idea is that by intensively concentrating on one thing, like the child’s behavior, you get a better result. It’s intensive for the therapist, and it’s expensive for the parents. It is successful as a business practice. Like Integrative, it is now the “in” marketing plan.
Why is Intensive important? Neuroscientists determined decades ago that the best way to get information into the central nervous system (the brain) is to provide stimuli from the environment with frequency, intensity, and duration. With an injured brain, the injury creates a barrier between the brain and the environment. As a result, the stimuli for the child with brain injury must have much greater frequency, intensity, and duration. When done correctly, the information is stored in the injured brain. There are three principal sensory pathways into the brain: vision, auditory, and tactility. There are a total of five sensory pathways into the brain: vision, auditory, tactility, taste, and smell. Everything that you have learned, everything Einstein learned, was learned through these one-way streets into the brain. For seventy years, the Doman Method has been teaching parents how to grow the sensory pathways into the brain with increased frequency, intensity, and duration.
Three principal motor pathways carry information from the brain to the environment. There are: mobility, language, and manual competence. The motor pathways are entirely dependent on the sensory pathways. Like a computer, the human brain cannot put out information from the brain that has not already been supplied to the brain. Once the sensory information has been provided successfully, then the information can be put out by the brain. This means the ability to walk, run, sing, and talk, and the ability to use the hands effectively and correctly. The key to growing a motor pathway is to provide intensive opportunity for the brain to have the body move, talk, and use the hands. The Doman Method has been intensively developing these motor opportunity programs for more than 70 years.
To summarize, our staff teaches our parents to give the child visual, auditory, and tactile information with increased frequency, intensity, and duration in recognition of the orderly ways the brain grows and develops. In addition, we teach our parents to provide the child with maximum opportunity in the ideal environment to move, communicate, and use their hands. Finally, our parents create the ideal physiological environment in which their child’s brain can grow and develop. This means the best nutritional, respiratory, and sleep programs.
The conventional methods have always had a problem with intensity. For them, intensity means increased labor for the therapist. Increased labor means increased cost. This is why today’s Intensives only last a matter of weeks. The brain works full-time. If one is not intensively developing it, the progress of the injured brain is slow or nonexistent. The Doman Method solved this problem 70 years ago. Glenn Doman, who began his pioneering intensive work then, saw that he and his team could not beat the ability of parents. Parents know their child with brain injury better than anyone else in the world. Don’t let anyone try to tell you otherwise. They are not looking out for you and your child. Parents' love, determination, and energy cannot be equaled by any therapist. Furthermore, Glenn Doman understood that the love, determination, and energy of parents created results all by themselves. By teaching the parents the whys and hows of brain growth and development, the parents could go home and supply an intensity far superior to that which could be found outside the home.
Now, 70 years later, more than 40,000 families from more than 100 countries and 6 continents have done intensive treatment programs with their brain-injured children or adults. Their results have proven the efficacy of a truly intensive program. We have 13 victories that our families work towards: Seeing, Reading, Hearing, Comprehension, Crawling, Creeping, Walking, Running, Talking, Writing, Health, Detoxification from addictive anticonvulsant medications, and Graduation from our Program to Wellness.