Child Brain Injury Recovery
Is Treatment Really Possible?

Is child brain injury recovery really possible? Can you effectively treat the brain and make your child better?

Throughout special-needs-hope.com, we have emphasized that although it is important to understand your child's diagnosis and prognosis, the main point is that your child has a brain injury.

Regardless of the cause or diagnosis, your child's brain is damaged. And through effective therapy, brain injury recovery is possible.

But, in order to facilitate brain injury recover and make your child better, you must treat the brain injury itself, not the symptoms.

Traditional therapies often will focus on the symptoms. If your child can't straighten her left arm, no amount of stretching it will allow her full use of that arm. However, if you can somehow 'fix' or 'bypass' the brain injury that is telling her arm to be tight, then she will begin to use that arm more and better.

But, how do you treat the brain? How did we help our son along the path of brain injury recovery?

Our Story

After the initial cerebral palsy diagnosis for our son at 4 months old, we had no hope. He had a severe brain injury. We wanted to help him, so we started down the traditional therapy approach: stretching … moving … surrounding our son with buttons and lights and buzzers, etc.

Not only did he not improve, he continually worsened. This was not the path to brain injury recovery.

When our son was 18 months old, a family friend recommended a book to us: What To Do About Your Brain-Injured Child, by Glenn Doman. This book changed our life.

The first thing you need to do to help your child is read this book.

Even after reading the book and hearing stories about how parents can make their brain-injured child better with common sense parent-driven therapies, we couldn't believe it could help our son.

After all, we were told by several doctors that there was no hope for him to do anything, ever. He was blind, immobile, insensate, and continually crying - all due to a severe brain injury. Brain injury recovery was not a possibility.

Desperate, we traveled to Philadelphia and attended the What To Do About Your Brain Injured Child course offered by The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (The Institutes), which was founded by Glenn Doman in 1955.

During that week we heard miraculous stories of how parents were able to work with their children at home to effectively treat a child brain injury. Their kids improved. Some of the kids even got well (equal or better in all areas to their peers). Almost all learned to read. The vast majority of the cortically blind kids gained their sight.

We were fortunate that we were able to promptly join the intensive treatment program at The Institutes. We were in that program for over 4 years, traveling to Philadelphia every six months. Our son continually improved.

Our son stopped crying, our son gained his vision, our son learned to read, our son gained sensation. Thanks to Glenn Doman and the people at The Institutes, we got our son back.

We weren't the only ones. We met many families who were able to help their children through the Institutes program. We also learned what they did to be successful.

But, physically our son really didn't improve during this time.

We found Advanced Biomechanical Rehabilitation (ABR) in Montreal, Canada. Through a fascinating passive technique discovered by Leonid Blyum, our son's physical structure is now improving. We continue to attend the ABR sessions every three months to learn the targeted technique recommended for our son. He is not yet mobile, but he is gaining head control, decreasing his extension, vocalizing better, eating better, and improving in many small, yet critically important, areas.

Our son has come a long way. We have learned a lot. We still have a long journey ahead, but we are on a path to wellness. How far we get is in God's hands, but we are aiming high.

Lessons Learned

Brain injury recovery is possible.

Treat the brain injury, not the symptoms. Traditional therapies do little to treat the brain. They are primarily attempting to treat the symptoms.

Treating your child with drugs, surgery, or injections is not aiding with brain injury recovery. These things treat, or more correctly, mask the symptoms (and often not very well). They don't treat the brain to make your child better.

Parent-driven therapies exist that allow you to help your child. But, don't expect your doctors to suggest or even endorse them. These therapies are not in the mainstream. But, they treat the underlying problems, not the symptoms.

The sooner you start with these types of therapies, the easier they are and the quicker you will see results. Even with older special needs children, you will see results, but the brain damage has had longer to affect the body. Thus the brain damage is harder to reverse, and brain injury recovery more difficult. But you can still help your older child.

Bottom Line

Our son has been given back to us. He is happy and healthy. He is brilliant and can communicate to us. But, it wasn't easy. It took effort and energy. It took time and money.

If you are able to enroll in the IAHP intensive care program or the ABR program, then please do. Of course there are no guarantees, but they are the experts, and they can probably help your child too.

If you are not able to be part of their intensive programs, for whatever reason, then hopefully the information we present in this site will be helpful.

Over the next few days, weeks, and months, we will be updating this site to include much of the information that we learned, what we did, and how we helped our son, plus new information as well. If you would like to stay updated on our journey, please sign up for our monthly e-zine, Finding Hope.

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