Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Brain Balance Center?

Hmm. Seems to me that you missed the point of what she was saying.

The existence of left and right brain processing isn't relevant to this argument. My impression of the discussion is that it's about the wisdom of advertising untested ideas as valid medical treatments.

I think that the fiasco over vaccines and autism is a really good example of what can happen when bogus medical ideas take hold in the popular consciousness. A person named Andrew Wakefield published a study linking the two. It was completely and utterly bogus and it turned out that he had a significant financial conflicts of interest. The study has been retracted by most of its authors and the journal, and Wakefield lost his license to practice medicine in the UK. No link between vaccines and autism has ever been proven in spite of many attempts to do so, but millions of people chose to avoid vaccinating their kids because of what he did. Undoing the damage he did will be a lot harder than creating the problem to begin with was.

And the result is that a couple children who didn't get vaccinated because of his garbage died of measles, and more have ended up on ventilators. Plus other vaccine-preventable diseases are on the rise.

So I guess the moral of the story is to be very, very careful of unsubstantiated claims about medical treatments.

Val

I'm a neuroscientist by profession. Most of what laypeople know about left-brain/right-brain is wrong. I would be happy to give you a quick tutorial about what we do know about the specializations of the left and right hemispheres, but I don't think you're really listening.

I'm listening! I think I'm up to date as alayman but would love a few citations.

Hi aline -- happy to oblige!

The quick version is:

Both hemispheres have areas for
- visual processing
- auditory processing
- identifying familiar objects
- processing spatial locations and spatial relationships
- processing information coming in from the body
- planning body movements
- reasoning and decision-making
- and much more

The left hemisphere
- has a few areas that are specialized for language (but may be more generally for fast temporal changes)

The right hemisphere
- is more strongly involved in spatial processing
- is specialized for some "large scale" language stuff (e.g. discourse processing)

All this is just for right-handers. Left handers may be the same, reversed, or mixed.

The popular media have drastically over-exaggerated and over-simplified these issues. The whole "right brain equals logical, sequential, detail-oriented, mathematical; left brain equals intuitive, wholistic, artistic" mythology is just simply made up.

The two hemispheres are connected by a thick band of communicative fibers called the corpus callosum. The two hemispheres function together as a single system. Everyone uses both. There is no such thing as a "left-brained person" or a "right-brained person."

As for citations, well, the literature is vast. Your best bet is a good undergraduate text in cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience. My personal choice is Reisberg's text, but it's quite pricey (they all are).

Please feel free to ask me any more specific questions you may have!

Meg

Meg, what (if any) is the science on "sensory issues" or "sensory processing disorder"? This is another area where there are ostensible disorders diagnosed only by the people who claim to be able to cure them, and peer-reviewed literature seems rather scarce.

Thanks--
DeeDee

This is a very interesting conversation to follow although I've had nothing to contribute. Thank you MegMeg !

Hi DeeDee,

Argh. This label seemed to appear out of nowhere a while back. I've been ignoring it and hoping it would go away, or at least get clarified. But because you asked, I went and did a search on it.

It turns out to be a term invented by occupational therapists, and mostly promulagated by OTs and other paraprofessionals (i.e. not medical doctors or academic researchers). The PsycINFO database has 42 articles. (Which is really really few. To put it in perspective, the search term "autism" turns up 18 thousand articles.) Of those 42, there are:

- 11 books, book chapters, or book reviews (not peer reviewed)
- 6 dissertation abstracts (not peer reviewed)
- 4 articles actually about something else (e.g. schizophrenia, deafness)
- 3 case studies (not generalizable)
- 3 opinion pieces
- 2 articles about the use of terminology by professionals
- 2 duplicate entries in the database
- 1 publication in a vanity journal (authors pay to be published)
and finally,
- 10 peer reviewed journal articles about actual research

Of those 10:
- All are in obscure specialty journals, mostly in applied fields (e.g. OT, nursing), rather than venues where "basic" scientific research is published
- 2 assume the existence of SID and look for a relationship between it and something else (temperament, family environment)
- 5 look at how tests for disorders or subsets of disorders cluster together
- 3 look at treatment outcomes. One found no effect. The other two did not use appropriate control conditions.
- NONE looked at underlying causes, brain organization, or even whether this is an independent syndrome that can't be accounted for by other disorders.

Hope this helps! Cheers,

Meg

Tks Meg. I'm really interested as well because DS has been undergoing OT 2x a week and it's costing a bomb. I do see some improvement especially for gross motor issues, possibly because he's forced to practice maneuvres he'd not normally do, and also because it's part of DS' developmental schedule. Handwriting though, which is what we're really trying to improve, is not happening at all .

Meg, that's about what I thought it would be, but I'm glad to have your expert view.

I have had OTs look me in the eye and tell me things about my child that seemed like utterly unsupportable pseudoscience. But I always like to have my facts straight before I politely decline to accept their advice.

Keep teaching us about the science of these matters-- it is much appreciated.

DeeDee

I am COMPLETELY on-board the peer-reviewed, scientific evidence train. The plural of anecdote is not data. I can't even begin to tell you how strongly I agree!

However...

I think it's important to add that I'm similarly skeptical of the notion that because we don't know about something right now, it doesn't exist. I think we have to be very wary of accepting the current thinking as the ONLY POSSIBLE thinking, especially when it comes to the brain.

The fact is that we don't know it all, and if past history is any indication of the future of science, some of what we think we know isn't 100% correct yet. Science is always evolving, happily.

Lack of peer-reviewed evidence is not evidence that something doesn't exist or isn't happening. It may just mean that it hasn't yet been studied. Lack of peer-reviewed evidence isn't the same as a debunking.

With that said, I completely agree that lack of evidence of effectiveness is a *very* good reason to think twice--or 3 or 4 or 5 times!--before handing someone your money for an unproven treatment for a disorder that may not even exist.

Basically I dislike blind faith in anything, even science!