The Rehabilitation Center-IAHP
Dr. Fay lived in Chestnut Hill, a suburb of Philadelphia. He opened a private practice in the beautiful building of Norwood. He hired my father as his physical therapist. Dr. Fay’s patients ranged across the full spectrum of neurological issues. Children with cerebral palsy, adults with traumatic injuries, all these people managed to find their way to the famous and innovative Dr. Fay. He would evaluate the patient and then tell my father what he wanted in terms of treatment. My father would determine the treatment and then teach the family exactly how to do it.
This was a marvelous learning experience for my father. He and Fay began to think in terms of how to grow the injured brain. They left behind the conventional treatment of physical, occupational, speech, and drug therapy. They were treating the cause of the neurogical problem, the injured brain. They were not attempting to treat the symptoms. They knew from previous experience that the conventional methods do not work.
As their results began to spread far and wide, the practice grew until they were treating their maximum number of patients. At this point, my father began to think in terms of founding an organization on his own in order to fill the demand.
Glenn Doman in the office.
He began to look for properties. Eventually he sold his house in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, and found a matching donation. This permitted him to buy a beautiful campus which had been the palatial home of one of Chestnut Hill’s wealthiest families. All told, I believe he paid $80,000 for the property and improvements that he required.
He founded a new 503(c) non-profit, tax-exempt organization and called it The Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia. His plan was to expand and have rehabilitation centers at New York, Washington, and all over the US. The organization opened on May 9th, 1955. I was two years old. Little did I know that exactly 26 years later, to the day, I would marry Rosalind Doman.
Dr. Fay was the Chief Medical Consultant and my uncle, Robert Doman, was the Medical Director. Uncle Bob was one of the first MDs specialized in physiatry. This specialty is all about solving the mobility and motor issues of human beings. My uncle’s expertise went hand in hand with my father’s training in physical therapy. My father had created a successful private practice in physical therapy and received awards for his excellence. For example, the Physical Therapy Society of Pennsylvania recognized him as the physical therapist of the year.
The Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia was the first rehabilitation center in the state of Pennsylvania. The state previously had no guidelines or qualifications for this new kind of organization. So, they asked my father to help them lay out the clinical requirements for a rehabilitation center.
Glenn Doman
However, my father found himself not using physical therapy but actually abandoning it for the brain-based treatments that he and Fay developed. The first of these was patterning. People with brain injuries that affected the motor areas of the brain very often could not move in a cross pattern or at best, in a very poor cross pattern. In the 1930s at Temple University Medical School, Dr. Fay first had the idea to have therapists passively move the head, arms, and legs of the patient in a good quality cross pattern. This provided tactile information to the brain about how it felt to move. By providing high frequency patterning throughout the day for short periods such as five minutes, the brain would recover cross pattern ability. This treatment proved highly effective and led to many different kinds of patterning over the years. It requires no effort on the part of the child. The parents and adults do all the work and the child’s brain soaks up the information. The results led to children beginning to crawl on their tummies independently, then progress to pushing up on their hands and knees and creeping as a means of transportation.
My father was particularly intrigued by the children labeled with cerebral palsy. These children are plagued by uncontrolled and often chaotic movements of their head, torso, hands, and legs. Their bodies may be very tight, making it difficult for them to bend their arms and legs at all. Despite these very significant motor problems, my father was amazed how intelligent these children are. Because they look so bad to the average adult, often these children were misunderstood and disrespected. For example, professionals would talk about these children as if they were not in the same room. “Johnny looks unresponsive and is obviously immobile. Obviously, he’s not understanding.” More often than not Johnny was understanding 100%. He was offended about what was being said about him. Neuroscientists have since demonstrated that even some people in comas understand everything that is being said around them.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, my father began to teach the parents of these children how to teach their child to read. These children caught on amazingly quickly. Three-year-olds could read homemade books. Five-year-old profoundly cerebral palsied injured children could read better than nine-year-olds. This proved that children with brain injuries could not only be average but could be well above average. This changed my father’s whole outlook and philosophy. Children with brain injuries no longer should have average as their objective, but instead to be well above average. In time, he learned that the potential for these children was not just intellectual, but could be physical, social, and physiologically above age level by a considerable margin.
Glenn Doman
By the early 1960s, all the conventional methods in my father’s work had been left by the side of the road. They had been replaced by sensory programs to develop the visual, auditory, and tactile parts of the brain. Motor programs had been created to develop mobility and manual competence. A new era for people with brain injuries had arrived. My father announced to the board of directors that he wanted to change the name of the organization from The Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia to The Institutes for the Achievements of Human Potential. In 1964, this name was radically different than anything ever having to do with the human condition and brain injury. The idea that human potential could be achieved was completely new. Even the words “human potential” were unheard of. On the west coast the term “human potential” began to appear referring to awareness and self-understanding. But that was all.
The board of directors were not thrilled. Moreover, my father decided to throw out all the requirements of a rehabilitation center. He wanted nothing to do with the past. The past had little to show in the way of results for people with brain injuries. The Institutes for the Achievements of Human Potential met a dramatic shift in philosophy, objective, and the future.
Written by: Douglas Doman