Dr. Melillo has recently published an excellent book called Disconnected Kids. His website has a couple of wonderful videos on the right side of his website. I strongly encourage parents to make an effort to watch the second one, Dr. Melillo on Everyday with Marcus and Lisa. Dr. Melillo covers key aspects of brain imbalance on this video. As you watch the first video, KCAL9 Features Brain Balance, you will notice that part of the brain balance program seems to implement Interactive Metronome. At IM Focused, brain balance has for years been a focus of IM training in addition to connecting various pathways and improving the timing and synchrony of the neuronal activity in each pathway.
I encourage parents to use Dr. Melillo's book as a home guide for some tasks to continue and expand intervention at home. It truly takes a village to help our children recover. This is a great resource. Check it out.
On a side note, by understanding that each neuronal pathway is significant and important helps you to understand why continued IM continues to help with academic and social challenges. As you observe, our child will quite often show dramatic improvement in15 sessions in the most basic of neuronal pathways as well as very predictable functional gains, but you can easily observe other parts of the brain that are not as well connected. You can ask me to do a few higher level tasks with your child if you want to see where they are at in those. Working those more challenging pathways, balancing the hemispheres more, and working to improve communication between hemispheres continues to produce more functional gain. 15 sessions is also what research is based on... an arbitary number... not chosen for any other reason than by that time, you are seeing some great functional gains. Offering IM training in groups set at that 15 session number standardizes training and saves the parents money which eventually allows for MORE IM training if needed. The basic format of IM is not a beginning or an end of IM. Each child is different and needs different amounts of intervention. I hoping understanding the principals of the brain balance program might help you understand that better.
