By Douglas Doman

Any person who has a loved one who an adult with a brain injury needs to read What To Do About Your Brain-Injured Child by my father, Glenn Doman. Some families are put off by the title with the word “child”. However, in the first chapters of the book, my father explains that his work began with adults who had suffered brain injuries, particularly those who had a stroke. Every word of the book applies to adults with brain injuries, strokes, traumatic injuries such as motor vehicle accidents, and Parkinson’s. Do not hesitate to read the book if you have an adult family member who has had one of these injuries. Age is not important.

As a child growing up on the campus of my father’s institute, I was surrounded by adult patients who were brain injured. These were older adults who were successful business people and healthcare professionals. The majority had suffered strokes, but there were others who had been injured as a result of mishaps in surgery or another accident. My father was the Director and Chief of Therapy. My mother, Katie Doman, was the Head Nurse. They both worked all the time. But as a small child, I was allowed to be with them while they were working. The patients were happy to have a child to play with. They spoiled me and I loved to be with them. We lived in an apartment in the main building, just thirty feet from the Nurses Station. As a result, I cannot remember a time when I was not surrounded by brain-injured people.

My father’s pioneering work, along with his mentor and genius, Dr. Temple Fay, was decades in advance of everyone else in the field. They were the first to insist that the diagnosis was brain-injury. Their objective was to teach the world to understand that the problem was in the brain. The only way to resolve the problem was to directly treat the brain. All the other diagnoses such as cerebral palsy, mental retardation, autism, were based on symptoms of the root cause.

Many adults who came to them with brain-injury had the lost ability to walk, talk, read, and write regained these functions. Some returned to their jobs and regular life. This was unheard of and astounding in the 1950s and 60s. As word got out of my father’s success with adults, parents with children with brain-injury began to make appointments. I remember when we had our first children’s ward. I was jealous my parents were spending more time with those children than with me.

By the early 1960s, the number of children became overwhelming. My father realized that his facility, the Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia, was not able to handle the greatly increased number of patients. After a great deal of thought and planning, he converted the organization to an out-patient organization. This permitted his team to see many children, which then became his focus. At the time, he lectured broadly to therapists and professional groups and he expected they would continue his work with adults and strokes. Unfortunately, they did not. Since then, we have seen more than 30,000 families from more than 100 countries around the world. We have continued to see adults during this time. My father’s most famous patient was Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy family. He was the father of a President, Attorney General, and Senator. He had had a devastating stroke. He lost the ability to walk, talk, and was a hemiplegic on the right side of the body. He did remarkably well in the short period of time that he was on the Doman Method® program.

Another famous adult was Shinichi Fukunaga. He was the most famous horse jockey in Japan. He had won more than one million dollars every year for many years. During a race, he was forced off his horse and his head was stepped on by another horse. He was comatose as a result of a profound brain injury. Shinichi’s wife and father-in-law did our program with Shinichi. When I first met him in Japan he was completely immobile and barely conscious. He was on the floor and his small children were running around him saying, “Daddy you’re drooling. Daddy, you’re drooling.”

Eventually, after we had gotten him out of a coma and understanding everything through hearing and seeing, they brought him to the United States. With him came a TV crew from NHK, The Japanese National Broadcasting Company. I was a young staff member working in the mobility department. My father assigned me to be totally responsible for Fukunaga and his progress. All brain-injuries are unique, no two are exactly the same.

In most cases, the symptoms are completely different. There are a host of variables. The actual human being with the injury has a unique personality. The family assisting is also unique and another variable. For this reason, we cannot make a prognosis. After 60 years and thousands of cases and experience, we can make goals for three and six month periods. These goals are often ambitious. Families are often shocked by them and then overjoyed when they actually accomplish them on time.

My father was on camera being interviewed by the NHK. I was there as well with the Fukunaga family. Shinichi was totally immobile, they had sat him in a chair, but he had to constantly be watched so he would not fall out of the chair. The interviewer asked my father “Where do you think Shinichi will be a year from now with the results of your program?” She was asking for a prognosis and I was waiting for my father’s usual explanation. Instead, he said, “I expect him to be taking independent steps of walking.” I tried to constrain myself. He had just given a prognosis which he never did. I was shocked that he was expecting me to get this immobile man crawling, creeping, standing, and starting to take independent steps in a year. I thought he had gone mad. Worse, he had now said it to the nation of Japan. For the rest of the interview, I heard nothing. I only thought of how I was supposed to make this happen.

The Fukunaga family turned out to be a fabulous, strong, intelligent, and very determined family. During that year I remember seeing Mrs. Fukunaga, a small Japanese woman, put her arms around her husband's chest and picked him up and carried him up a flight of stairs! I was totally astounded. Her father was Shinichi’s horse trainer. He was an expert at making horse athletes and the best in Japan. He used his training experience to coach Shinichi physically on my program. Within a year Shinichi had full understanding, was reading, had words of language, had crawled, crept, stood, and was starting to take independent steps.

I asked my father how he knew that Shinichi could get such fabulous results. His answer was experience with hundreds of adults. He added that adults who had been totally well still have brain cells with information about mobility and walking despite a profound brain injury. I also realized that Shinichi himself was a first-class athlete and embraced hard physical labor like the champion he was.

The Doman International Institute has adults on our program and we are happy to accept adults of any age. We have young adults in their 20s and 30s and we have seen grandparents with strokes. In all cases, what is necessary is a strong family support system to help the brain-injured adult. Do not hesitate to contact our US Representative, Colleen Hudson at +1 814 232 8668 or by email at info@domaninternational.org. Make sure to also read What To Do About Your Brain-Injured Child as soon as possible.
As a child growing up on the campus of my father’s institute, I was surrounded by adult patients who were brain injured. These were older adults who were successful business people and healthcare professionals. The majority had suffered strokes, but there were others who had been injured as a result of mishaps in surgery or another accident. My father was the Director and Chief of Therapy. My mother, Katie Doman, was the Head Nurse. They both worked all the time. But as a small child, I was allowed to be with them while they were working. The patients were happy to have a child to play with. They spoiled me and I loved to be with them. We lived in an apartment in the main building, just thirty feet from the Nurses Station. As a result, I cannot remember a time when I was not surrounded by brain-injured people.