We received a message in IG asking about Brain Balance and how their company claims to “cure” ADHD.
We thought this was interesting, so we wanted to talk about it!
There are many things that we don’t say we’re “curing” because it’s not something like a cold, or a broken bone.
Often the challenges or diagnoses we work with are biological or neurological and lifelong. There aren’t ‘cures.'
When a person or company tells a parent they’re going to ‘cure’ certain things, that should cause skepticism, especially in our line of work!
As occupational therapy assistants, our goal is to help our clients live their life as fullyand as independently as possible. We provide modifications or adaptations to their current lifestyle and work on underlying skills to help improve their daily functioning.
We received a message in IG asking about Brain Balance and how their company claims to “cure” ADHD.
We thought this was interesting, so we wanted to talk about it!
There are many things that we don’t say we’re “curing” because it’s not something like a cold, or a broken bone.
Often the challenges or diagnoses we work with are biological or neurological and lifelong. There aren’t ‘cures.'
When a person or company tells a parent they’re going to ‘cure’ certain things, that should cause skepticism, especially in our line of work!
As occupational therapy assistants, our goal is to help our clients live their life as fullyand as independently as possible. We provide modifications or adaptations to their current lifestyle and work on underlying skills to help improve their daily functioning.
So overall, we just wanted to talk about this and just remind you that if somebody does claim to cure ADHD or to cure, SPD, or whatever it is to just maybe be a little skeptical, ask more questions. I think that we don't have to believe somebody, just because they have more education than we do or they specialize in a certain area. That doesn't mean they have all the answers. They might be very knowledgeable and helpful. But if they're claiming to cure something, we want to be a little bit skeptical.
Rachel:
I'm Rachel.
Jessica:
And I'm Jessica. And this is All Things Sensory by Harkla.
Rachel:
We are both certified occupational therapy assistants and together with Harkla, we are on a mission to empower parents, therapists and educators to help raise confident and strong children of all abilities.
Jessica:
On this podcast, we chat about all things sensory, diving into special needs, occupational therapy, parenting, self care, overall health and wellness and so much more.
Rachel:
We're here to provide raw, honest and fun strategies, ideas and information for parents, therapists and educators as well as other professionals to implement into daily life.
Jessica:
Thank you so much for joining us.
Rachel:
Happy OT month! It is April and we are so excited to celebrate this year. Because we have three like kind of brand new courses that we are bundling together to give you a huge discount on all of your AOTA CEUs, for like 10 years, basically.
Jessica:
So if you are an OT practitioner, and you're celebrating OT month this April, we want to give you our OT month bundle, which includes our primitive reflex digital course, our sensory diet digital course, and our infant and toddler development digital course. All three courses bundled together, you get them for 25% off. So the price bundling them together would be almost $1,000. We're giving it to you for less than$700 when you purchase the bundle between now and April 14 at midnight.
Rachel:
Yes, so you will get the three different courses for a
discount:
primitive reflexes, sensory diets infant and toddler sensory development and you'll get all of those for a discount. If you maybe have taken one of them already or maybe you don't want to take all of them, you can get 20% off one or two of these courses. If you add it to your cart, you'll get 20% off. So it's just overall it's a great sale. We just really wanted to bundle all of these courses together because we just wanted to celebrate now that we have AOTA CEUs, which just makes everything better.
Jessica:
Plus each course comes with a physical workbook, which is probably the coolest part of the course, besides all the cool information you learn. But that workbook is so incredible to have whether you're in the schools or in the clinic setting or doing in home therapy, or private pay whatever you're doing. Those workbooks are just so great to have with you at all times.
Rachel:
The feedback that we've gotten from people having those workbooks in the clinic setting or the school setting has been really helpful. So we just wanted to share this with you. Check it out. We'll put all of the links in the show notes for you to check out and without further ado, we're gonna jump into today's episode. Hey there, welcome back to All Things Sensory by Harkla. Glad we're so happy to have you. We always are. We appreciate all of you listening right now. Thank you for being here. I'm Rachel.
Jessica:
And I'm Jessica.
Rachel:
I'm the congested one but that's okay. We are both certified occupational therapy assistants with a background in pediatrics. We've been therapists for like nine years? 10 years? '24. 10. Wow, we're old!
Jessica:
We're so old!
Rachel:
Old.
Jessica:
10 years.
Rachel:
Oh, man. That's wild.
Jessica:
It is wild.
Rachel:
But we're here today. We are here today and we are going to bring you an amazing episode talking about why we don't say we quote unquote cure things.
Jessica:
We got a message in Instagram from a parent, who asked about Brain Balance. Because Brain Balance claims to cure ADHD and I just thought this was so interesting that this big huge company was claiming to cure ADHD. And I feel like some of it is marketing. You know, they want to market their program. But I just think that's so interesting that they want to that they're claiming to cure things like ADHD and I feel like it's so...it's just false.
Rachel:
Yeah.
Jessica:
I just don't like it.
Rachel:
Well, what's interesting too, is like we do so much reflex integration, right? That's a big part of our area of expertise and what we're passionate about. And we hear a lot of success stories about people telling us the positive things that they've seen and heard from integrating primitive reflexes. You can go back and listen to our other episodes about it. But that doesn't mean that we're going to take that information and just because we hear someone who said their child isn't exhibiting ADHD symptoms anymore, we're not gonna go and say, we integrated these primitive reflexes. We cured their ADHD. Like we just, it's such a taboo word to say cure unless we're like curing cancer.
Jessica:
Sure. Yeah, you can cure things like cancer, or you can fix a broken bone. You can these types of things. But oftentimes, in our area of occupational therapy, we often work with children who have diagnoses or challenges that are biological or neurological and life long, right? It's not that we are curing something like ADHD; instead, we are providing them with the tools to improve their daily life. Because if something is neurological or biological in your body, it's the way you were born. It's not like you're gonna cure it. It might change throughout your life, like ADHD does change throughout an individual's life. It looks different in childhood than it looks like in adulthood, that doesn't mean it was cured.
Rachel:
I just think that whatever a person, like a professional or company tells a parent or a caregiver, that they're going to cure something, it should cause skepticism and it should cause like, a red flag to like, go up in the air. And be like, well, that's interesting, like, why would you say that? I always want to, like, take my kids to brain balance and just like...
Jessica:
We've talked about that before.
Rachel:
Yeah, I just like see what the experience is because a lot of people rave about it. A lot of people love it. But also, we've had a lot of people come to OT after going to Brain Balance, telling us that they said that they're going to cure these things. Then they come to OT and they're like, like, it was helpful, but it was a lot of money as well.
Jessica:
It didn't help us in our daily life overall. I think we could also throw sensory processing disorder in here as something that we'll never claim to cure. Sensory Processing Disorder is something that has happened and the connection from your brain to your body. There's a disconnect there, the wires across, there's a traffic jam, which causes your nervous system to be dysregulated. And for you to struggle to process certain types of input, or seek out certain types of input to the point where it negatively affects your day. And it's not something that's necessarily going to be cured. But there are definitely things you can do to help manage the challenges that arise.
Rachel:
Ideally, with sensory processing disorder, we learn how to grow into it; instead, of how to grow out of it and we learn to manage it and we learn to adapt, and we learn coping strategies.
Jessica:
And I was just thinking to on a course that I took about ADHD, they said something similar to that of like, grow into your ADHD in the sense of identify your strengths.
Rachel:
Yes.
Jessica:
Because as people with ADHD are often gonna be super, super good in a couple of areas. They are really strong in XY and Z. But on the flip side, they really, really significantly struggle in these other areas on the other side, and so they need to lean into their strengths andoutsource the challenges. Especially in adulthood, right?
Rachel:
Yeah.
Jessica:
Like outsource the fact that you can't organize your mail.
Rachel:
No, I was just thinking about a kid like how genius a kid would be like with ADHD who's like outsourcing their handwriting for like a book report. Be like, all tell you what to write, but you write it, you know? Like, the kids are probably going to be like geniuses here soon be able to outsource their things. Like, Oh, I'm not really good at cleaning my room so I'm gonna outsource that
Jessica:
to my sibling.
Rachel:
Yeah, I'll pay you! Honestly, no, but you guys know, like, a year ago, I went through the ADHD diagnosis process and it was it's just been like so eye opening as an adult that as a professional like, hone in on your strengths. Let's teach these kiddos, what they're good at. Let them focus on that and I'm not saying like don't do the things that we're not cut out. But like, it's helpful to know like, we're really creative. We're not that organized. But that's okay. We don't have to be good at it all.
Jessica:
No, you shouldn't be good at it.
Rachel:
We need to try it all. We don't have to be good at it all.
Jessica:
So overall, we just wanted to talk about this and just remind you that if somebody does claim to cure ADHD or to cure, SPD, or whatever it is to just maybe be a little skeptical, ask more questions. I think that we don't have to believe somebody, just because they have more education than we do or they specialize in a certain area, that doesn't mean they have all of the answers. They might be very knowledgeable and helpful. But if they're claiming to cure something, we want to be a little bit skeptical. And then instead of as therapists, instead of saying something like, we're going to help you cure your child's ADHD, we'll say things like, look, ADHD comes with certain challenges. We're gonna identify your child's challenges. We're also going to identify their strengths. And then we're going to provide you and your child with strategies to help in those challenging areas.
Rachel:
Exactly. With anxiety, we're going to give you
Jessica:
And we want to provide resources and lifelong strategies to help alleviate the anxiety or we're going to provide you with sensory strategies or activities to help manage that over responsivity that can be associated with anxiety. We're not going to cure anxiety. We're not going to just give you a pill to say, Here you go. Now on with it. We're going to give you the strategies to understand how your brain works, understand how your child's brain works, and then move on from there. strategies to help manage things that come up later in life. Especially with our ADHD children in their young childhood, we see these certain symptoms that pop up. So we want to have the strategies for that. But then in their teenage years, it's going to look a little different, and they're going to have different challenges. So we want to provide strategies for that and then we want to give them the strategies as they enter young adulthood because their ADHD is going to look different in that part of their life as well. So as OTs and OTAs, that's really what we need to be doing with our clients and our clients families is the education piece. Hey, this is neurological, biological, whichever one you're dealing with, and we're not going to try to cure it. We're going to give you the tools and the strategies to get through your day a little bit easier.
Rachel:
Really, we're just wholesome. We're a wholesome professional,
Jessica:
A professional would never categorize us as wholesome.
Rachel:
Well, I mean, as OT as a profession, I just feel like, we want to support our clients.
Jessica:
We're holistic.
Rachel:
But we're also wholesome. I hope so.
Jessica:
Is that what you meant?
Rachel:
No. Oh, yes, that's what I meant. Like, we're just good people and we care and we do. We aren't just like scammy. We're not just going to be like, young take our course and cure everything. Like, I don't know, we're just, we're wholesome, we're trustworthy. I hope that vibe comes across. If this is your first episode that you're listening to, and you're like, Why are these people talking?
Jessica:
Why are they blabbing on? Okay, let's wrap it up. If you enjoyed this episode of us just talking about a topic.
Rachel:
We talk in all of our episodes.
Jessica:
I know but like, did we even get anything helpful in this episode?
Rachel:
No
Jessica:
I hope so. If you listen to this episode, and you want to start a conversation, send us a message on Instagram. We're at all things sensory podcast. Take a screenshot and share it on your stories and tag us, let people know you're listening to us. Let us know your thoughts. Do you think that we are right or wrong? Do you agree or disagree? Are you somewhere in the middle? We'd love to hear your thoughts.
Rachel:
And then if you feel inclined and you want to leave a review, we'd love that. We love all of your reviews. The good the bad, the ugly, but we mostly love the good ones.
Jessica:
I like the bad ones too, because they make me laugh.
Rachel:
They make me laugh too. Yes.
Jessica:
We can't make everyone happy. That's okay.
Rachel:
That is. But we can make each other happy.
Jessica:
Oh, we need to end this now.
Rachel:
Okay, the cold is kicking in the congestion is messing with my brain.
Jessica:
Getting a little loopy.
Rachel:
We've gotta go. We love you. Okay, bye. Thank you so much for listening to All Things Sensory by Harkla.
Jessica:
If you want more information on anything mentioned in the show, head over to Harkla.co/podcast to get the shownotes.
Rachel:
If you have any follow up questions, the best place to ask those is in the comments on the show notes or message us on our Instagram account, which is at Harkla_family or at all things sensory podcast. If you just search Harkla, you'll find us there.
Jessica:
Like we mentioned before our podcast listeners get 10% off their first order at Harkla. Whether it's for one of our digital courses or one of our sensory swings, the discount code sensory, will get you 10% off.
Rachel:
Head to Harkla.co/sensory to use that discount code right now.
Jessica:
We are so excited to work together to help create confident kids all over the world. While we make every effort to share correct information we're still learning.
Rachel:
We will double check all of our facts, but realize that medicine is a constantly changing science and art.
Jessica:
One doctor or therapist may have a different way of doing things from another.
Rachel:
We are simply presenting our views and opinions on how to address common sensory challenges, health related difficulties, and what we have found to be beneficial that will be as evidence based as possible.
Jessica:
By listening to this podcast you agree not to use this podcast as medical advice to treat any medical condition in either yourself or your child.
Rachel:
Consult your child's pediatrician or therapist for any medical issues that he or she may be having.
Jessica:
This entire disclaimer also applies to any guests or contributors to the podcast.