What to Do About Your

WHAT TO DO ABOUT YOUR BRAIN-INJURHD CHILD or Your Brain-damaged,

Mentally Retarded, Mentally Deficient, Cerebral-palsied, Epileptic, Artistic, Athetoid, Hyperactive, Attention Deficit Disordered, Developmentally Delayed, Down's Child

WORKS BY THE AUTHOR

the Gentle Revolution Series:

WHAT TO DO ABOUT YOUR BRAIN-INJURED CHILD

HOW TO TEACH YOUR BABY TO READ

HOW TO MULTIPLY YOUR BABY'S INTELLIGENCE

HOW TO GIVE YOUR BABY ENCYCLOPEDIC KNOWLEDGE

HOW TO TEACH YOUR BABY MATH

HOW TO TEACH YOUR BABY TO BE PHYSICALLY

SUPERB THE UNIVERSAI MULTIPLICATION INTELLIGENCE

Children 's Book.

NOSE IS NOT TOES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

There are four groups of people without whom there would have been no book and, for that matter, no Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. They have my love and respect which go far beyond the book; they make me the most fortunate of men. I list them with love.

The Staff of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential

The Kids

The Parents

My Family

In regard to the first edition, I thank beyond measure Dr. Raymundo Veras and Dan and Margaret Melcher who made me tackle it again for the ninth time. For the illustrations, I am indebted to David Melton, father, artist, and author who made it easy by understanding it all. For the research, I am indebted to my assistant, Greta Erdtmann. For the preparation, I thank Vicki Thornber. The endless manuscript changes were made efficiently and cheerfully by Irma Kieslich, Cathy Ruhling, and Sherry Russock. The original version was instigated and carried out by Lindley Boyer.

For the 30th anniversary edition, I am indebted to the very capable team that undertook the task of updating the book: my daughter Janet; my son Douglas, and Susan Aisen. In addition Dr. Mihai Dimancescu, Dr. Denise Malkowitz, and Dr. Coralee Thompson contributed invaluable advice for which I am very grateful. I thank Dr. Ralph Pelligra for writing the Foreword for the book. The Institutes editor. Janet Gauger, deserves special mention for the many hours of love and care she put into this new edition and without which it would never have been completed.

FOREWORD

This book is a precious gift for thousands of brain injured children who drift perilously on a sea of ignorance and misunderstanding tor beleaguered parents who desperately seek guidance and refuse to give in or give up and for medical professionals who can find within its pages scientifically sound and intellectually satisfying answers to a difficult and perplexing clinical problem.

It is not a medical text in the classic sense nor has it been sane titled on the holy altar of the prospective double blind controlled clinical study. But like all seminal scientific discoveries it uncovers fundamental receptively simple truths that have been obscured and subverted by prevailing dogma.

Glenn Doman and his team anticipated by several decades the discoveries of modern neuroscience-that the human brain has remarkable abilities for self repair (neuroplasticity) and regeneration (neurogenesis) that the brain is easily accessible and modify able by intense sensory stimulation that the protean symptoms of brain injury are just symptoms and that treatment should be directed at their cause the injured brain itself.

Glenn Doman looks at the commonplace and sees the profound. He looks at the floor and sees not a floor but a landscape of opportunity for the developing infant. He looks at human mobility and sees not just a mode of locomotion but a key to unraveling the complexity of a pathological process. He questions the obvious "What is normal" -and asks provocatively, "Who is not brain injured". He extracts scientific truths from insights and observations and not content with theoretical explanations alone he incorporates them into a practical and meaningful manual for parents.

I was deeply honored when Glenn Doman asked me to write the Foreword to the 30th Anniversary Edition of this rare literary and scientific gem, but I would not have agreed had I felt unqualified to do so. I have worked side by side with Glenn and the staff of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential for more than a quarter of a century.

Under Glenn's direction as senior researcher, we have conducted research programs that validate the basic premises put forth in this book, particularly those regarding respiratory and oxygen availability programs. I have been a researcher for many years and know well the gratifying feeling of publishing the results of good research. But there is nothing to compare to the intellectual and emotional excitement of seeing scientific premise come to life-to see a formerly paralyzed child doing handstands and other gymnastic feats, or to see a presumed "mentally retarded" child reading and comprehending above the level of his chronological peers. Even today there are still children who fail to progress, but the work set in motion by this book continues and the results improve steadily.

For all its science and innovation, this is a moving story of human dedication and devotion. It is told with warmth and honest directness by a decorated war hero whose battlefield has changed but whose cause has not. Tyranny and the threat to human dignity come in many forms, but none so devastating as the innocent child who is imprisoned in his own body, labeled with false deficiencies, and often warehoused and forgotten. Glenn Doman, a scientist, humanitarian, and tireless warrior has given us a battle plan-a fighting chance for the brain-injured child. He provides an end to false despair and a beginning for hope.

-RALPH PELLIGRA

CHIEF MEDICAL OFFICER

NASAAMFS RESEARCH CENTER, MOFFETT FIELD, CALIFORNIA, USA

CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

OF THE INSTITUTES FOR THE ACHIEVEMENT OF HUMAN POTENTIAL

PREFACE

This book by Glenn Doman is in many ways a very bad book. Upon my sober reflection, I see it to be the least good book of major importance I have ever read. However, perhaps this is so because I have not read many so-important books in my lifetime of reading. It is not so important to all people alive, but only of major importance to the parents of children.

This is not a bad book because to read it is difficult, for truth dictates that I report that it is very easy to read. Glenn Doman does not address himself to professionals but writes only for the parents, whom he so admires and respects. This makes it a marvelously easy book to read.

This is not a bad book because it is unexciting. His descriptions of the early discoveries of "the team," such as those which revealed the importance of the Floor to hurt children and normal infants, the reader will find exciting.

This book is not bad because it is not emotionally moving. The reader may find himself enraptured even to tears while reading the chapter on motivation, as I found myself moved.

I find this in many ways to be a bad book, because having started a New Age, he tells us so little about it in a doctrinal sense.

Glenn Doman gives us only the slightest glimpse into the years of unrelenting work through the brightness of days and the darkness of nights. It is a heroic story of a group of people who would in no case accept defeat and most especially when they were defeated.

This book tells us nothing of the years upon years of exploration into the lives of children all over the world. Glenn Doman does not tell of his expeditions and explorations into the wildest areas of the world, and they were many. He went so that he and his beloved "team" could see with their own eyes, while living with children, what no child expert had ever seen before since the beginning of time. He docs not tell us how they have lived with children in more than fifty different countries, from the most highly sophisticated to the most wild. They have circled the globe at the Equator and lived with the great Masai in Africa and with the very small Bushmen in the Kalahari Desert in Africa. They have wandered over Africa, living with many tribes, and through the Middle East, the Holy Land and Asia. It was sometimes not very safe. It has almost always been uncomfortable. I know this because sometimes I have been privileged to be with them.

I remember a day, deep in the Xingu Territory of my own Brasil, where live the people who will one day come to the Stone Age, but who were not there yet by a long time. On this day, when the Brazilian Air Force had left us eight hundred miles from the nearest road and had flown away, we had marched for many hours toward a tribe called Kalapolo. The temperature was very high and there were clouds of biting mosquitos. I remember looking at Glenn Doman, Dr. Bob, and Dr. Thomas. Their blood, from thousands of mosquito bites, joined with their perspiration to run down their bodies in rivulets, making of them a sight most fearful. They did not complain as they pushed through the tall jungle grass to see children and childbirth and child-rearing practices no child expert had ever seen before. Delacato and I, being more dark complexioned, suffered little from these nasty little creatures. But I have suffered elsewhere, having been with them to the Arctic to live with and study Eskimo children. The Arctic at 56 below zero F is not the natural place for a Brazilian from Ceara. Of these storybook adventures. the book tells nothing.

Nor does this book tell us about the vicious attacks and terrible libels of fearful and jealous societies which the staff had to endure and fight off during the pioneering years. These unworthy enemies retarded for some years the work of the group, while they were developing the doctrines, the philosophy, and the techniques which would give new lives to thousands of children and their families, not only in their own country, but here in Brazil and in other countries in South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Although they have collected the fruits of victory, their continuing struggle for new knowledge and techniques give them no time to enjoy them. They have only tasted them. Of all this, the book tells us almost nothing.

This incomplete book tells us nothing of the worldwide search, in the beauty of their enthusiasm, for a single piece of the puzzle as to why it was that a certain group among the children, called athetoids, were failing to learn to walk even after years of treatment. It does not tell us of the brilliant deductions that led to the discovery of brachiation [using gravity to straighten rather than bend the body by using arms to swing from rung to rung on an overhead ladder] as a solution to the problems of those children and many others. In fact, it does not tell us of brachiation itself as the most important advance in treatment in twenty-five years, which has added an entire new dimension to the world of brain-injured children.

For everything this book says, there are a hundred things of importance it does not say. For every story it tells, there are a thousand stories it does not tell.

It is these things which make me say that in many ways it is a very bad book.

In contrast, I am forced to say that if this book told all the marvelous stories of the "team" and the rich, glorious days of The Institutes, which are worth telling, it would be a grand library instead of a small book.

I can't say that Glenn Doman knows more about children than any man alive, because I don't know every man alive, but I can say that he has done more about children than any man alive. I can say as well that he knows more about children-little ones and big ones-hurt ones and average ones-civilized ones and primitive ones-poor ones and rich ones-and how to make hurt ones well and well ones weller than any man I have ever read about or heard about or met. I know of no other person or group of persons who knew about all those kinds of children except him and the people he has taught.

Yet, Glenn Doman believes that every mother in the world knows more about her child than he does. Not only does his mouth say it and his heart feel it, but his brain knows it and he believes it.

He believes some unusual things for a professional. He believes in parents. He believes in children. He believes parents are the answer to children's problems, while everybody else believes they are the problem. It is easy to understand why he makes unhappy all professional organizations which earn their money from brain- injured children. He believes in fixing the children. Worse, he believes that parents can fix the children better than professional people. He teaches parents how to fix their children, not because to do so makes it economically feasible-although it does-but instead because he is sure that parents get better results than does any professional, including himself. This book does say these things.

He exists within a philosophical base very different from what we have formed through the example of our predecessors.

Most of all, he believes in results, and this book is the first book in history, to my knowledge, which tells how to treat brain-injured children, why to treat brain-injured children, and most precisely what happened to a group of brain-injured children when they were so treated.

It is not only appropriate but also typical that he should write the first book in history which gives results of treating brain-injured children by a particular method in a straightforward, easy-to-read way. No other book in history has done that. Moreover, no precise results have ever been given of any treatment of brain-injured children before, with one exception. In 1960 an article appeared in the Journal of the A.M.A. on the treatment of brain-injured children with precise results. The reader may not be surprised to learn that Glenn Doman and his staff wrote that article also.

When we sum up this book we find that this is a book about brain-injured children and their parents. It tells why brain-injured children should be treated. It tells how the human brain can be treated and it tells exactly what happens to brain-injured children when you do it.

It is true to say that it is the worst such book ever written. But we must remember it is also true to say that it is the best such book ever written. The reason for this is that it is the only such book to be written.

It is very good for children-I think-that when it was finally written it was written by the man who knows more about the subject than any other man.

I think perhaps, in the beginning, the people who make books will not like it so much. Perhaps as well the people who are paid to criticize books will not like it so well. And, as I said earlier, in many ways it is a bad book.

But I believe that many parents will find within this not-so-perfect book the knowledge and the courage they need to make their severely brain-injured children well without any further help.

I believe that many thousands of parents of the brain-injured, brain-damaged, mentally retarded, mentally deficient, cerebral-palsied, epileptic, autistic children will find their own child within the pages of this book and will also find inside it the confirmation of their own heart's belief that he must have his chance to be free and will find the road to get the help they need to give their child that chance.

I believe this book will be the first true hammer in striking down the horrible institutions in which the brain-injured children of the world have been cruelly and unjustly confined.

-Raymundo Veras, M.D. President Emeritus

The World Organization for Human Potential Rio de Janeiro, Brasil

1. BRAIN-INJURED CHILDREN TODAY

Periodically one hundred people will arrive at The Institutes tor the Achievement of Human Potential in Philadelphia for one week.

They will have nothing in common except that all are the parents of brain injured children.

They will be mothers and fathers who have in common the refusal to believe that their hurt child cannot be helped.

It is a typical group the families will come from the four corners of the Americas and from Europe Africa Asia Australia or the Middle East.