National Units
In the 1950s, my father, Glenn Doman, was creating the founding team for the Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia. His brother, Robert Doman, became the first Medical Director. Dr. Bob was among the first MDs that specialized in physiatry. He had a great sense of humour and he loved kids. At family parties, he enjoyed playing in the pool with all the kids more than anything else. Kids loved him. I did too. But I called him Dr. Needles because he was always the one to give me any necessary shots. I was difficult and would lock myself in the bathroom as soon as I knew that he was visiting us to give me a needle.
My father always said that when times were most difficult uncle Bob was always there to do his best to help solve the problem. He never shied away from defending the program that my father and his team were creating.
Dr. Carl Delacato, a doctor of education, was very important to my father’s work in the 1960s. He was a psychologist. He taught my father about psychology and my father taught him about Child Brain Development, the new field he was creating. The two of them were a very close team, throwing out new ideas and arguing points when necessary. For me, he was uncle Carl. That’s how close our families were.
In the late 1950s, the foundation of the neurological program had been created. Patterning was developed to provide the brains of children who could not walk with information about how it felt to move in a cross pattern. Dr. Fay had first developed patterning in the 1930s at Temple University Medical School. My father took what he learned from Fay and taught parents how they could do patterning at home which made it ten times more effective. Physical therapists patterning a child two or three times a week did not supply the necessary frequency, intensity, and duration necessary to develop the motor pathway into the brain. My father had the idea of teaching patterning to parents so they could provide the required information to actually get progress with a child’s mobility. My father added the floor program. This permitted immobile children, or children who could crawl or creep but not walk to have unlimited opportunity to crawl or creep as average babies do and finally to progress to walking.
Glenn Doman
Because of their brain injury, most brain-injured children do not see, hear, and feel normally. It’s impossible to move, speak, and use your hands correctly if the brain has not yet felt how it feels to move or hear correctly. The early team had developed Sensory Stimulation programs to improve the sensory pathways into the brain. They developed the Motor Opportunity program to permit the brain to respond to this sensory stimulation with mobility, language, and manual competence.
They developed the first program to improve the respiration of immobile and language-delayed children. This program, called The Breathing Enhancement Program, saved lives. The biggest single cause of death among children with severe and profound brain injuries is respiratory infections. Immobile children began to move with this respiratory program, and children who could not talk began to talk.
The results of this rudimentary program were remarkably better than conventional therapy. Many parents reported that speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy had no results with their children. Virtually every child, whether mildly injured or profoundly injured, had been declared hopeless. Many, many parents were told to institutionalize their children for life. This is an abhorrent idea to any parent. And yet to this day, even after more than 65 years, children with brain injuries continue to be institutionalized for life. These insitutions often offer no hope of development or progress. Children are warehoused and often drugged. Drugs like antiepileptics are highly addictive. Some are amphetamines similar to street drugs taken by junkies. Other drugs like Ritalin, can change a child’s personality until they are unrecognizable.
If all that isn’t bad enough, it costs the federal government, state government, and local government of a child with brain injuries hundreds of thousands of dollars a year per child. If the child lives to be 90, it will cost you the taxpayer $18 million. Why not buy each child a yacht with it’s own crew and at least let him see the world with $18 million? No child should ever be incarcerated for life like a criminal. Everyone loses. The parents abhor “putting the child away”. The entire family is affected. Grandparents, aunts, and uncles all know that little Johnny is living all by himself, far away from the family. Everybody feels guilty. It costs a fortune for all levels of government. Governments lose. The taxpayer loses. Yet the practice continues all around the world to this day.
By the early 1960s, my father and the early team were ready to publish their results. They studied the mobility results in a diverse group of non-walking children with brain injuries. The results were vastly superior to anything else being done in the world for children with brain injuries. In September 1963, this study was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. This was the number one medical journal in the United States at that time. The editors of JAMA were so delighted with the results that they shared the study with The New York Times. My father first read the article on the front page of The New York Times.
His little rehabilitation center was overwhelmed with 30,000 requests for information. There was already a long waiting list for appointments before the article was published. The waiting list grew to more than 14 years. That meant, if a mother gave birth to a child with brain injuries today and called today for an appointment, we would see the child when he was 14. This was an impossible situation. The parents were upset by it. They complained to their doctors, “Why didn’t you tell us about this program before?!” Doctors were unhappy due to their patients being unhappy.
In those days, former president Dwight Eisenhower and Jackie Kennedy Onassis wrote sweet letters to my father, asking him to put their friend’s child at the front of the waiting list. My father would never do this despite his great respect and admiration for these celebrities. Some profoundly injured children would die as they waited for an appointment. If my father fooled with the first come, first served appointment policy, then he would be responsible for the deaths of the children waiting. My father said if he didn’t mess with it, then it was God who was making decisions, not him. His refusal to accommodate rich and powerful people did not make him popular. He could not be bought although over the next 50 years, many would attempt it.
In the early 1960s, this success drew many professionals to contact my father to learn what he was doing. As mentioned before, it brought the Kennedy family to our doorstep. In 1964, he changed the name of his non-profit, tax-exempt organization to The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. He left physical therapy, speech therapy, occupational therapy, and drug therapy behind with the old name of his organization–The Rehabilitation Center at Philadelphia. It was the first rehabilation center in the state of Pennsylvania. He had actually helped the state government develop the first requirements to establish rehabilitation centers.
He was compelled by the results to understand that children with brain injuries had huge potential to develop, and even become totally well. Thus the new name of the organization. ‘Human Potential’ was a new phrase. Only a few ‘new age’ type people in California spoke of human potential. When it came to children and adults with brain injuries, my father was the first in the world to talk about their extraordinary potential to get better. My father didn’t say this quietly. He wanted the entire world to know. This became his number one raison d’etre in his life for the next 50 years.
This was not what the professional world wanted to hear. It was what parents wanted to hear. This pulled more and more parents into the Institutes’ work. Simultaneously, it alienated professionals. These professionals had been preaching that children and adults with brain injuries were hopeless. Now there was a guy in Philadelphia saying that they could become totally well. He wasn’t even a medical doctor. He was a lowly physical therapist. But many very bright doctors were impressed and drawn into my father’s work. Apart from the great genius Temple Fay, there was Dr. Evan Thomas. Dr. Thomas had pioneered the use of penicillin to treat syphilis. He wrote the medical text book used to teach doctors in medical school. He was an extraordinary man. Perhaps, he was the most ethical person I have ever met in my life. He was incredibly sweet and gentle. But fierce when it came to character, honesty, and ethics. He was the brother of Norman Thomas, the socialist candidate for President of the United States for decades. When he stopped running for president, the press asked him why. He said between the Democrats and the Republicans, they had stolen the main points of his platform and made laws of them, such as social security.
Dr. Edward LeWinn had been the Chief of Internal Medicine at Einstein Medical School in Philadelphia. He referred one of his patients with a stroke to my father. This was a local person who came to do therapy with my father daily. Dr. LeWinn came to visit his patient and inquired where she was. The receptionist replied that she was downstairs walking as part of her therapy. Dr. LeWinn said that the receptionist was mistaken because his patient could not walk. When he saw how well his patient had done, he was hooked. In the months and years that went by, he became a great friend, mentor, and supporter of my father’s work.
It was clear my father had to make radical changes in order to meet the demands of the families that were coming to him from all over the United States. In the 1960s, the first Europeans and other families from around the world began to clamber to get on to our program. In 1963, when my father published How to Teach Your Baby to Read, his name and reach grew further. He was interviewed by top magazines and television shows.
One of the three existing national television networks decided to do a documentary of the work. My father sent them to a local family whose well seven-year-old son had been hit by a car, almost died, and was in a coma. The parents came to my father and were taught the Coma Arousal Program. Coma is the most profound form of brain injury. My father had taken his Sensory Stimulation program and vastly increased the frequency, intensity, and duration of stimulation to the point that he could get children and adults out of comas. The family enlisted friends and neighbors as volunteers to get the intensive program done with Davey, the child in the coma.
The results were extraordinary. With great love, determination, effort, and hardwork, within two years, Davey was walking and talking again. The film crew followed him and his family around for a month, documenting what was going on. They filmed his ninth birthday party. When it came to blowing out the candles and singing happy birthday, Davey blurted out, “Whatever happened to eight?” The entire room brokedown, including the documentarians. Davey had been blind, deaf, and immobile for much of the beginning of his eighth year. They decided to call the documentary What Ever Happened to Eight? It was hugely popular and viewed by tens of thousands. The documentarians received many awards for their groundbreaking work. This further increased the waiting list.
By the end of the decade, my father had enlisted many of the MDs that had come to him to create clinics all over the United States. By 1968, the number had increased to 21 national units and institutes in Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, and Canada. This meant that children in these states and countries could receive the first rudimentary programs that my father had developed. New programs were being developed rapidly which meant training was difficult over such long distances and quality control, very difficult. From the founding of his institution on May 9th, 1955, my father had worked non-stop and now, was working full-tilt.
In 1968, the first book was written about one of our children. The Milton family from Kansas brought their son Todd to my father. Todd had been diagnosed as learning disabled. This was synonymous with mental retardation. Todd’s family and friends did a great job with his program. Eventually, he went to a regular school with well children of his own age and graduated from our program. His father, David Milton who had been very involved in the program, decided to write a book about Todd and the family’s experience. The book was very well received and sold many, many copies. This furthered the waiting list and sent many children with learning disabilities to the Institutes.
If we could freeze time in 1968, the chances are good that today there would be tens of thousands of children in the United States and hundreds of thousands around the world doing a neurological program of Child Brain Development. In that year, Dr. Thomas and Dr. LeWinn had articles ready to be published in medical journals to further the acceptance of our work among medical doctors. Both had already published the first medical books about The Doman Method and my father’s work. Dr. LeWinn wrote Human Neurological Organization. This pioneering medical book was basically a translation of my father’s book for parents What to Do About Your Brain Injured Child into a professional book for MDs. Dr. Thomas’s book, Brain Injured Children, was published as a companion book to Dr. LeWinn’s book.
Everything changed for the worse in that year. The problem, which exists to this day, was this. If the field of Child Brain Development based on growing the sensory pathways into the brain and the motor pathways providing function from the brain is true and correct, then conventional physical, occupational, speech, and drug therapies designed to treat the symptoms of brain injury are incorrect. These practices are used in the industry that has grown to be responsible for children and adults with brain injuries. This industry is international. This is the treatment for people with brain injuries around the world. This international industry is fueled by billions and billions of dollars, euros, rupees, etc. This money comes from governments and insurance companies. It employs millions around the world.
International industries fueled by billions do not die easily or happily. This was the situation that Glenn Doman and his team faced in 1968. If they were correct and this was the best practice available in the world for people with brain injuries, then the industry needed to radically change from treatments based on symptoms to learning how to grow and develop the brain and teach it to parents. My father knew this was the war that he had created.
Completely innocently, he had gone from medicine with children with brain injuries to education of well babies when he wrote How to Teach Your Baby to Read. In 1963, the idea of teaching a baby (12 to 36 months) to read was considered impossible or very radical. He had proved that it could be done by the thousands of mothers who wrote to him from around the world, reporting the joyousness with which their babies and young children were reading. Inadvertently, he had now challenged the educational industry by proposing that they had ignored the tremendous potential of babies, and he proposed that mothers were the best teachers. Another cardinal sin, mothers, not paid elementary school teachers, could teach their children far better. He learned very quickly that the educational industry like the medical industry was not interested in changing.
In 1968, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Academy of Orthopedics, and the American Academy of Psychiatry, three huge and powerful lobby organizations published a “study” they had done on the work of The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential. Their conclusion was that the program was without merit. Finally, the bear had woken up and realized that it was threatened. The three professional organizations most frightened by the work of the tiny institutes banded together to do their best to suppress my father’s work. The doctors who had created the 21 units around the United States were now petrified that those academies would come after them. The units closed one by one. Only in Argentina and Brazil where they could not care less about what American doctors thought, did our work continue unabated. Dr. LeWinn and Dr. Thomas’s scientific articles that were accepted for publication were immediately dropped. Their new books that had also been accepted for publication were withdrawn as well. Parents on the waiting list were now told by their doctors the mistake they had made to apply to The Institutes. Families began to drop from the waiting list like flies.
Remember, my father had become a very hardened warrior during the Second World War. At this time, he was a major in the National Guard. Because of his outstanding record for heroism, he was on a path to eventually becoming a general. He understood fighting a war. But he was shocked and surprised that he would be attacked for helping children with brain injuries and well babies. It was at this time that he began to have grey hair.
Sometimes, he was asked by journalists did he want to destroy the medical industry treating children with brain injuries or the educational industry for teaching children. He always answered, absolutely not. He just wanted to get out from underneath them before they collapsed on their own. This situation affected every member of our family, it continues to do so to this day.
Written by: Douglas Doman