A Message From Our President:
I would like to provide you with a little background information regarding myself and then a brief history of the Brain Power® program.
I have been practicing almost 30 years and have a specialty in neuropsychology. Much of my career has been spent in the field of brain injury rehabilitation, specifically focusing on post acute cognitive rehabilitation with adults and children. I have also spent much of my career performing diagnostic evaluations of children and adults with developmental disorders (i.e. ADHD, learning disabilities, etc.).
Unfortunately, in the early years of my work in post-acute brain injury rehabilitation, we did not have an adequate understanding of the brain and how treatment tasks needed to be structured in order to maximally promote neuroplasticity in the brain. However, over the last 30 years, there has been much research in the area of cognitive skills training concurrent with an increasing understanding of the brain and how it functions. Based on these scientific advances, I was able to identify certain important features which needed to be incorporated into a treatment program for it to be maximally effective.
Some of these features seemed to me to be rather obvious and logical (i.e. frequency and intensity of treatment) while others were less so (i.e. not just learning a skill, but driving it to a level of proficiency that it becomes automatic). Another important factor was the duration of treatment. It takes time to promote meaningful changes in the brain, and I have found that treatment needs to occur on a daily basis for a minimum of 12 weeks to produce significant functional improvement that is seen in the real world.
Of course, in our managed care environment, this level of treatment intensity and duration is very difficult to acquire authorization for. Further, insurance will only pay for the treatment of brain injuries and not developmental disorders. Last, it was often logistically difficult for some families to bring someone in on a daily basis for treatment, even when we developed treatment kits that they could take home and we trained a family member to do some of the treatment.
These limitations motivated me to convert the Brain Power® cognitive skills training program to a computer administered program which can be utilized completely at home with oversight by a qualified professional. I wanted to make this type of treatment more widely available by eliminating the financial and logistical barriers. If treatment is provided for one hour every day, for 12 weeks, the cost is $450 (five dollars per one hour training session).
Also, I had heard that others in the country had been applying these cognitive skills training techniques to individuals with learning disabilities and were obtaining excellent outcomes. Therefore, approximately 5 years ago, I began doing so as well and was amazed at the treatment outcomes. In many cases, we've been successful in completely eliminating processing disorders in children with learning disabilities and they have subsequently gone on to achieve above average grades. Children with more pervasive developmental problems, much like individuals with brain injuries, have shown substantial gains, but not all skills are able to be brought to normal levels because of the greater degree of brain dysfunction.
I also set the Brain Power® program up to maintain a very extensive database that includes information entered by the user (i.e. medical history, psychiatric history, developmental history, and test results from pre-and post training assessments), as well as the outcome of every attempt at a training activity during each training session. This data is available to the practitioner through various screens and reports. However, I am also willing to make the entire database available to those who would want to engage in collaborative research to promote our understanding of how to better treat brain disorders.
I know you will enjoy seeing the positive impact Brain Power® has on patients with mild to moderate brain injuries, learning disabilities, and other cognitive disorders. I certainly have!
