Alternative therapies for brain disorders seeing success

Brain Balance Center owners Eric and Tamara Eslich help Ricky Heilbron, 9, who has ADD and Asperger's syndrome, with the monkey bars. Mike Holobeck, a sensory-motor coach at the Golden center, looks on. (RJ Sangosti, The Denver Post)

than $5,000, typically isn't covered by insurance. Ricky's dad, Mike Heilbron, said his son's outbursts are less frequent, his reading has improved and he is less of a "space-invader" since he started the therapy.
Basically rewiring brain
"By bombarding his brain for an hour, three times a week, . . . we can basically rewire the brain," said Tamara Eslich, a former chiropractor who, along with her husband, Eric, opened Colorado's first Brain Balance in December. "We are going to find the underlying problem."
Brain Balance now has more than 20 sites across the country.
Another franchise for kids with autism and learning disabilities, LearningRx Brain Training Centers, has 70 sites, including four in Colorado.
Founder Ken Gibson, a former pediatric optometrist, said kids with autism-spectrum disorder often have trouble blending sounds, which makes reading difficult. His therapy focuses on lengthening attention span, short-term memory and speed.
Rapid-fire addition
For a maximum of about $10,000 for a seven-month program, kids at LearningRx sit through demanding sessions doing exercises such as adding numbers in their head as a tutor spouts them in rapid fire.
"It's like a physical workout, but it's mental," Gibson said.
He said the methods of the competition — the right-brain- versus-left-brain therapies at Brain Balance — are based on literature.
"There's not a whole lot of science in that area," Gibson said. "We try to follow a method that is more science-based."
The "brain training" that happens at LearningRx can boost kids' IQs by 15 points and improve reading ability by four years, he said.
With the flood of expensive, alternative therapies — from horseback riding to sensory stimulation — parents of autistic children should use caution before enrolling, said Dr. Robin Gabriels, a psychologist and founder of Children's Hospital's Neuropsychiatric Special Care Program in Aurora.
Choosing the right therapy for an autistic child depends largely on the severity of the child's disorder, Gabriels said.
"There is no one treatment that we can name and say that is the one you need to use," she said.
"When parents come to me and they say, 'Should I try this new expensive diet or this vitamin therapy?' and they really don't have a lot of financial resources, I say, 'Start with what you know works,' " said Gibson, who uses "social stories" accompanied by pictures that teach kids who don't read social cues on how to behave.
Some therapies for sale aren't necessarily based on widely accepted science, Gibson said. For example, she said, autistic children don't necessarily have a right-brain delay.
"We know it's a neurological disorder, but we don't know a specific brain site that has been identified," she said. "That hasn't been done yet.