by Ernest F. Pecci, M.D.
[From a lecture delivered at the 10th Annual Medical Symposium of the A.R.E. Clinic, Inc., held in Scottsdale, Arizona, January 1977. Reprinted by permission from the 1977 Medical Symposium Proceedings © 1978 by the Edgar Cayce Foundation.]Ernest F. Pecci, M.D., is a practicing psychiatrist in Oakland, California. He has worked extensively in the rehabilitation of mentally and emotionally disabled children, and his program using Cayce concepts in the treatment of hyperactive children was the subject of a recent report of the A.R.E. Clinic Research Department.
I’ve talked from time to time in the past about my work with handicapped children. Over the past ten years I’ve had the opportunity to be a director of a center for handicapped children. Not only could I evaluate intensively some 1500 children, but I was able to follow them every day for several years to note their progress. Also, I have working with me a staff of very highly trained professionals—psychologists, physical therapists, occupational therapists, language therapists, and so on—and gradually we developed a very sophisticated team that was able to look at these children in ways that I believe they have never been looked at before.
I’ve talked in the past about applying some of the Edgar Cayce principles to these children in terms of emotion and attitude. We don’t call our approach the Therapeutic Touch, but we do believe in the importance of their being handled with the proper sentiment, with the feeling that some energy and love is being given to these children, and we think this brought about tremendous therapeutic change in them. We have under our care children several months old; we take all ages, and some of them are the type of children that in the past were automatically relegated to state hospitals—the so-called vegetables. What we found is that if we catch them at an early age, with the proper type of consciousness having been applied to them by other people—love and some other things I’m going to mention later—the changes were so dramatic that the turnover rate has now become fantastic. Although ours is a relatively small center in terms of the number of children we can treat at once, we’ve seen a great many of them because of the turnover rate. They would actually come to life, so to speak, and they would then go on to other kinds of special schools. It’s amazing, the plasticity of the human brain!—its ability to respond to the right kind of stimulation and environment, and a loving kind of setting.
In addition to working with the very severely handicapped, the very severely mentally retarded, we also had a diagnostic center that worked with children who had school problems. These were the so-called minimally brain-damaged children, those with minimal learning problems—children that supposedly had normal or slightly below normal intelligence, but just couldn’t make it in the classroom.
I had talked, over the years, with Dr. Bill McGarey, and he recommended the use of castor oil packs. Although I had read about this in the Edgar Cayce material, I wasn’t really sold on the idea until I talked to Bill. Several years ago we began to apply castor oil packs to the right side of the child’s abdomen, and we began getting some very significant results. We used this treatment with children who were lethargic and sluggish and who had poor complexion, constipation, diarrhea, gastrointestinal problems, and so on; within a matter of days, sometimes, and certainly within weeks, we would begin to see changes. They would begin to brighten up and become more alert; they would adjust to problems and tend to become more balanced. In time we became very intrigued with the castor oil pack, and eventually we were able to get some grant money so that we could do a more detailed study of the use of this pack in combination with other, supplemental therapies that we had developed over the years. One specific area we investigated was nutrition. The feeling that I have is that the pack helps these children to assimilate and digest their food better. Perhaps the pack takes effect through helping the lymphatic flow, as Dr. McGarey postulates. We don’t really know how the castor oil pack works, but it does work better than just heating pads, which we’ve also tried. There’s something in the castor oil that in some way penetrates to and stimulates in a healing way the lymphatic system of the circulation of the body. That still would have to be the topic of another research study to find out why the packs work. But as a clinician, I’m only interested in results right now.
I want to explain now a little bit about the point of view we began to develop in looking at handicapped children. One thing I became impressed with fairly early was that the severity of the organic brain damage—which was well documented—we knew many of them had very severe brain damage—was not related to the functioning of the child. A child with severe cerebral palsy can have close to normal intelligence, as you no doubt know. On the other hand, some children with minimal types of damage were just totally spaced out—they were not amenable to learning. So something else was operating besides the physical intactness of the brain. It seemed an obvious conclusion that the brain, like any organ of the body, needs nutrients and oxygen and the proper supply of energy in order to function, and that perhaps there were some metabolic disturbances.
Now, as we were working with the very severely handicapped, it became obvious that all the conditions that led to brain damage, such as birth trauma or whatever, had associated physical illnesses in the body. These children just were not physically well; they had gastrointestinal disorders, some had cardiac disorders, they had enzyme deficiencies of various types and a number of other kinds of disorders within the body.
One of the disorders I studied more specifically than the others was hypoadrenocorticoidism. The adrenal gland sits upon the kidneys on each side of the body; it’s a small gland, and yet we could not survive without it for very long. It handles all of the nonspecific stress in the body. If the body is stressed emotionally or by any of a variety of conditions—like lack of oxygen or eating the wrong foods, which adds to the stress of the body—a good, intact adrenal gland can handle that. So whenever the adrenal gland is really healthy, you have a tremendous reserve. But when it’s low and you have this tired feeling, this exhausted feeling, all kinds of disease symptoms come out: you get hypoglycemia, allergies, colds and “flu-like” symptoms; it becomes hard to think; you have poor memory; and so on. This is the result of low adrenal activity.
Now the adrenal gland can become exhausted. Chronic stress of the adrenal gland can lead to a permanent kind of low adrenal activity. But also, many children have had from birth, because of birth trauma or the physiological predisposition of the mother, low adrenal gland activity. So I began to look at the energy level of these children. Instead of asking, “What is the brain power?” or “Where’s the brain damage per se?” I asked, “What is the energy level? How much energy does this child have to think?” We know that if we are very, very tired, or if we’ve taken a tranquilizer of some type, like a stiff martini, or if we have an illness or a cold, we are not able to think or to function mentally. If you were in this condition and someone came up to you and said, “Will you read these equations and try to translate this for me?”—or whatever mental task he might ask you to do at that time—you’d be likely to tell him to get lost; you would just not want to think. The brain takes a considerable amount of energy, as you know-40 to 50 percent of the energy in the body of a person who does a lot of thinking. It does take energy to think—a tremendous amount of energy. So I looked into the energy systems, and together with Doctor Philip Peltzman, a research man from U.C. Medical Center who did electroencephalograms (EEGs) on a research basis with the children, I began to work with children who had no discernible brain damage per se; Dr. Peltzman did detailed electrographic studies using a laser beam to analyze the results, and the data was put into computers. And he saw that the average child that is called minimally brain-damaged had absolutely no evidence of brain damage that could be found by any study we can make. Of course, the literature has shown this. In fact, what I discovered was that the term “minimal brain damage”—and this is a fact—is given specifically because there is no sign of brain damage. So they say minimal; if they could find brain damage, they’d just say brain damage. So, by definition, when you say minimal brain damage, nobody’s going to be able to detect any brain damage per se; yet these children have aphasia (in other words, they hear things and it sounds like a ratchety transistor radio; they can’t quite get it—they can’t quite synthesize it inside—they hear the words, but they can’t make sense out of them) and a number of other kinds of learning problems: they can’t perceive the sequence of things; numbers and letters jump about when they try to read; they can’t focus; they have problems with poor attention; and so on.
So I began to study the problems of these children in detail, and I got a number of terms which I’ll just briefly share with you, because they’re rather exciting, and we now train teachers to evaluate children in these terms. We found that the teachers’ evaluations of these children based upon these concepts were far more valuable than the professional kind of evaluation, a one-shot deal, that they had been getting by going to diagnostic clinics. Teacher evaluations in our terms were superior to even very detailed clinical studies, because these children change from day to day.
I just want to describe briefly some of the terms we use. We talk about attention span. These children could focus on an object when the object was emitting a flashing light. If the stimulus was in some way striking to the child, the child would be drawn to it. But as far as vigilance goes, or maintaining attention on an object that was not stimulating to them, they were very poor at that. In other words, if I gave you a sheet of paper and told you to look at it, there would be no problem; you could all look at it, right? But if you had to look at it for 30 minutes, you’d have to train yourself in the ways of meditation or whatever to really focus on it for that long. Each of you would be able to focus for a variable length of time, but it would take energy; it would be work to really look at this as if you were a lookout on a ship or a radar viewer. It does take a tremendous amount of energy just to keep vigilant.
On the other hand, if there is any stimulation coming from an object, the child becomes stimulus-bound; he can’t break his attention away from it. The tendency to stop being aware of repetitious stimuli is described by a number of terms, such as “habituation.” As an illustration, if somebody yells “Boo!” at you, you jump out of your seat; but if he keeps on yelling “Boo!” most people will stop hearing it after a while. Or, a passing train might wake you up the first time it goes by at night, but after a time you won’t hear it anymore. Changes such as these are measurable on the EEG, in that eventually the graph stops showing spikes. Now if a child with so-called minimal brain damage is exposed to repeated stimuli like these, he’s not going to habituate; he’ll become continuously tied to the stimulus, continuously stuck to it.
To understand this problem better, let’s consider what the EEG can tell us about how the brain works. As you know, the brain is like an electrical cell battery—it has electrical waves. These waves have been classified as alpha, beta, delta, theta, and so on, and they can be changed by various kinds of stimuli external to the person. If you get a strong stimulus, there’ll be a spike—an evoked potential, in other words—in the EEG. Now let’s say we get an evoked potential by sounding a bell. Then we wait a little while and ring another bell and get another potential. We can show that, after a series of these paired stimuli, conditioning occurs; because when we stop sounding the second bell, there will still be a spike in the average person’s EEG. We ring one bell, then the other bell, and there’ll be two spikes; then we do one bell and no second bell, and there’s still a second spike.
Now when children are brain damaged, they’ll continue to have that second spike much longer than children without the so-called minimal brain damage. Expressing this clinically, we say they don’t have extinction. In fact, this is the most singular feature of children who have learning problems—they don’t extinguish easily. It’s as if they’re watching a television set and still seeing the previous moment’s picture while looking at a new picture. There is difficulty in getting recent memory, long-term memory, and once they get it, they can’t be unconditioned. They are really stuck with whatever they are conditioned with—they don’t have extinction. They also have a slow latency period. In other words, the spike may take so many milliseconds to appear in their EEG, whereas in the average person’s it may be only a fraction of a millisecond; these children take twice as long before they get the spike. I suspect that this is related to metabolic problems—such as a slow thyroid—or various other kinds of physiological problems.
I’ll just mention one or two more characteristics of these children. The first involves the figure ground. To get an idea of how this works, imagine that someone is talking to you and you want to hear something else going on over there; you can sort of mentally block off the one person and hear the other sounds. But doing this takes energy. If you’re talking to someone and you want to tune in to another conversation, you can do it for a while; but it’s very exhausting, and after a while you become very nervous—probably without knowing why—because it drains your energy very rapidly; but you can do it. We tested this in our children by having a light flash at the same time sounds were being made, and having them try to focus on one or the other. And they had difficulty with this—they couldn’t separate. Their brains didn’t have the energy for this task. Or if they could do it, it was for only very brief periods of time—not for very long.
The point I want to make is that the human brain—the three-dimensional brain—can focus on only one thing at a time. That’s right, you can focus on and understand only one thing at a time. Now, you might think that you can listen to music while you study, or read something while you listen to a lecture, but what you would be doing if you were doing this, or seemed to be doing it, is rapidly shifting your attention back and forth between the two stimuli. Eventually you will find that you’re not getting either one very well—you’d probably be getting a lot of confusion. After a while, you’d become very irritable, very exhausted; you can do this for only so long, because it requires mental energy. The same is true of just memorizing rote material. Let’s say I were to put four or five numbers on the board and ask you to memorize them. After a minute I would cover them and come back with some more numbers for you to do. By the time I came to the third or fourth set, you’d all be very resistant, right? You’d probably be very irritable. Because doing this takes energy. Unless you’re energized in some way— somehow re-energized and remotivated—you are not going to use your head for thinking because it’s work. It takes a lot of energy.
We found that these difficulties are heightened in the children we’re working with. When we had the teachers use check-off scales listing these items, we found that the children had a resistance to learning after a certain period of time, because there’s a refractory period to all learning: after spending a certain interval in an intensive learning situation, a person reaches a point of diminishing returns, where he can’t learn any more—the brain shuts off and a rest is needed. Our children reached this point very rapidly; they just could not maintain their learning set for very long. And I see this as indicating a lack of total body energy. Even though there was no real evidence that they had brain damage per se, they did not have the energy to think or learn. As a matter of fact, children who we knew had brain damage, such as hydrocephalus, or abnormal EEGs were doing considerably better in some areas than our children were. So the problem had to be something other than brain damage.
Where could this energy depletion be coming from? Why didn’t these children have a normal amount of energy? Well, we looked at the mothers’ histories very carefully, and we found that invariably the mother had had some problem, such as hypoglycemia, at some time, either as a child or during pregnancy; thyroid disturbances of one type or another; allergic tendencies; and swelling or unusually severe nausea during the pregnancy. A number of these symptoms were considered routine at the time and were not really looked at as being unusual. They are the subtle kinds of things that we don’t have the laboratory tests to make exciting discoveries about at this point. But when we talked with the mothers at great length, we could see that they had not been comfortable during pregnancy—they had had swelling, edema, or some kind of allergic condition. In fact, I believe that mothers can be allergic to their own babies.
Looking over these 1500 children, we were able to describe a number of syndromes, such as the “unwanted child syndrome.” I would like to describe briefly this particular syndrome. In examining a number of adopted children and those who admittedly were unplanned and unwanted by their mothers, we have been fairly consistently able to detect a variety of subtle sensorimotor integration and learning problems that lend evidence to the idea that psychological rejection has a physiological and metabolic impact upon the fetus.
Now it’s true that with almost anything you discover in terms of pregnancy complications or health problems in children, you’ll find people who had these problems and did well. They had the stamina, they had other things going for them and could overcome the physical difficulties. This doesn’t mean that the condition did not impose a great strain upon the body. So some people can have allergies, and when they’re feeling really well the allergies are minimal, but at other times the allergies are really overwhelming to them. We found that with some mothers certain conditions tended to run in the families; there was a predisposition to having hyperactive children, children with learning disabilities of various types; there was incoordination in the other members of the family, and more than one child tended to have it. It tended to be more common in the boys than the girls, and I believe this is because females have larger adrenal glands—at least in animals they do—and I think this might have something to do with the extra X chromosome. But certainly women can stand much greater stress than men. Ashley Montague, the anthropologist, has made a great point of this in one of his recent books.
So we began asking, “What are some of the causes of these conditions?” We’d found birth trauma and poor nutrition or other complications during the pregnancy—like the mother having flu or some other illness. But what about events after the pregnancy? We discovered that these children had varying degrees of malnutrition, and this is rather subtle. Although we generally don’t expect to find much undernourishment in this country, we really don’t have very high standards for nutrition. Children would come to us and we would say, “Wow! Just look at this kid—an obvious case of malnutrition!” But nobody had really been aware of it. They’d just say, for example, that the child wasn’t unlike his friends. Also, many of them were eating junk foods—especially sugar, and sugar is poison to children, all children. Just taking children off sugar would bring about a great subjective improvement in a matter of days. It takes four or five days to get this kind of junk food out of the system.
But in addition to this, there are a lot of dead foods being eaten. Processed foods are dead foods, and people who are psychic, who have healing hands, who can feel energy around foods and people, can feel that certain foods—like the food we had on the plane coming over here—is dead food; it has no life at all—there is no nutritional value whatsoever in this food. And most of the foods we are eating now are just dead foods; there’s no nutritional value in them. But in order to make these foods alive, the producers put nitrate and nitrites in them. Or they wash them in a chelating solution to make green peas look green, and in the process they wash out the zinc. There are at least 30 states in the Union that have zinc deficiency as a common problem. Zinc deficiency is so common that if people are depressed, or losing their hair, or troubled by menopausal symptoms, or impotent, you give them zinc and often it’s almost like a miracle drug. And there are many other vitamins and minerals that the average person is missing.
Now, a rapidly growing child who is eating junk foods and sugar, has metabolic imbalances, has colic and is not digesting properly—usually he will have diarrhea and other digestive problems—is a sitting duck for having a metabolic system that’s going to provide very low energy. He’s going to be at the bottom of his reserve. You see, we normally have so much reserve that we can function on our reserve and look normal even under stress, but we tend to fluctuate between an extreme of good days and bad days when we’re on the borderline of our reserve. And these children—well, some days these kids are all right and some days they’re really bad.
We also learned that hyperactivity in children is not due to an overabundance of energy. On the contrary, when children do not get a good night’s sleep, they become hyperactive. And you who have children know that when a child goes on beyond his usual bedtime and gets overtired, he becomes hyperactive; you can’t get him to sit down and relax. Hyperactive children have low energy, and just as you can stimulate a tired horse by giving it Ritalin, amphetamine or caffeine, we give these children with low energy something to pep them up, and they become tranquilized, because they balance their energies. You may say that this is a contradiction: giving children pep pills and having them relax! But it’s not a contradiction at all; they have low, unbalanced energy, irritability, and you give them something that raises their energy level a little bit, and they are able to relax. More precisely, they now have the energy to pay attention. If you want to see if a child is really well put together, just determine whether he can sit still. It’s very hard just to sit still and listen, isn’t it? It takes a lot more energy not to be hyperactive than to be hyperactive.
Before going into the research proper, I want to mention a little more about allergies—food allergies. It is believed that about 80 percent of the population is under some kind of stress from food allergy, and most of them are not aware of it. Many people have an abnormal reaction to food; perhaps they’re absorbing the food antigens from their food and not digesting it properly. The body has to deal with that, and maybe it’s doing it automatically, so that these people are not aware of the fact that it’s draining them. But this may be causing them to have good days and bad days, depending on the foods that they eat. As early as 1898, a man named Baker described the allergic fatigue syndrome in children: when they’re allergic, they’re fatigued. And often these allergies are subtle; they don’t come out in obvious symptoms, like runny noses. The most suspect foods are cereal grains, dairy products, sugars, eggs, chocolate, potatoes and tomatoes, so we would selectively take some of these kinds of foods out of the diet. Now one characteristic of allergic reactions is that they can interfere with the maturation of tissues—in other words, growth—so a lot of children with these allergies look young, immature, for their age. Immaturity is one of the most common complaints. They often don’t mature at a normal rate.
Another characteristic of allergy is that it can cause edema and swelling, which in turn may create fogginess in the brain— the kind of edema, for example, that women who have menstrual cramps have. It is believed that some severe menstrual problems are due to an allergy to progesterone, or whatever, and the allergy causes this fogginess in thinking and irritability. It can also close off oxygen to brain tissues. What we also saw in, I’d say, over 90 percent of the children with learning disabilities is that they have very specific problems with sensorimotor integration and coordination. I want to discuss this very briefly. We had to develop new techniques for evaluating this, because these children will pass the usual neurological exam. However, they have a number of subtle kinds of things that we learned over the years to look for and spot, and if five of us were to see the same child independently we would come up with the same conclusions. So it isn’t just our imaginations. We base our findings on what may be called “soft signs,” because you can’t put your finger on them exactly. But we find that they are very significant to us. Also, allergic reactions usually result in hypothyroidism and hypoadrenocorticoidism. A lot of these children, and even many adults, are said to have low thyroid activity, and they’re given two or three grains of thyroid extract without much result. They keep raising the amount of thyroid given, and the problem is due to an allergic reaction within.
I would like to quote a paper written in 1975 by Dr. William Philpott, a psychiatrist in Oklahoma who made a life study of allergy in adults and children. He’s doing some very good work with schizophrenics and people in a variety of psychotic states. He says: “Allergic-like reactions can affect any tissue in the body. The central nervous system, the brain, may be the main organ affected, rather than the skin; this is especially true of children. You don’t usually get runny noses, watering eyes, itching skin, hives, respiratory symptoms or gastro-intestinal symptoms. Instead you get what is called minimal brain damage. A child’s brain is not working right. Moreover, even if a child does have a runny nose, allergic reactions, skin rashes and so on, as he continues to be exposed to the allergy producing substance, these common symptoms will disappear, so that you’ll begin to feel that the child has outgrown his problem. But there’ll be a chronic stress to the body, and this will lead to central nervous system symptoms.” Philpott says that the infant who is allergic to milk or corn may in later childhood frequently eat dairy or corn products under the assumption that he has outgrown his reactions to these substances, only to develop symptoms like hyperactivity, lethargy, insomnia, short attention span, poor concentration, etc. And if exposure continues, behavior problems can and often do result; these are secondary to the poor learning of social behaviors and arise because of the child’s feeling stupid or dumb in a class in which he’s not functioning very well.
As I’ve been looking into this problem I’ve discovered a number of possibilities, and I want to go into just one more of these. In the literature, it’s been fairly uniformly estimated that 15 to 20 percent of the children in our classrooms today have learning problems-15 to 20 percent. What’s going on? I mean, there’s something really very global going on, and it’s not being looked at. There’s something wrong with these children. They are getting something toxic, they’re not eating well, they’re malnourished; something is happening that we should begin to look at. The problem deserves some investigation and effort beyond what we’re now doing, which is pretty much limited to defining them as minimally brain-damaged, doing some psychological testing and putting them in special classes.
Let me just give you one of a number of things that can be considered. There’s good evidence that a nutritionally deficient state increases or creates allergic reactions. This has to do with the balancing of protein. General health can help offset allergic tendencies, allergic reactions. Researchers have done an experiment which demonstrates that pregnant rats deprived of vitamin B-6 give birth to allergic offspring. B-6 is the precursor to 50 enzymes, and in the face of deficiency of some of these enzymes, allergies develop. Now it is pretty much felt that the majority of the population is marginally deficient in B-6. In fact, it’s believed that the nausea and vomiting of pregnancy— this has been studied and pretty well documented—is often due to B-6 deficiency. B-6 can handle the symptoms of nausea and vomiting. It can be given to handle seizures in little children. Now, the contraceptive pill depletes the body of B-6. This should be known by everyone who takes the pill. You should be taking at least 100 to 200 mg. of B-6 a day if you are taking the pill. Mothers who’ve been on the pill for a prolonged period of time become B-6 deficient; when they have children, the history shows that they have excessive nausea throughout the pregnancy and they get allergic children.
If allergy runs in the family, then the child is a higher risk. In fact, I believe that if other members of the family have certain allergies and one child seems not to have it, the child probably does have it but is showing it in other ways. So what happens is that these children sometimes get a psychiatric diagnosis. When they have this allergic kind of symptom, they often have subnormal adrenal activity, low tolerance of stress, low coping ability—they seem to have low thyroid activity, but it may come out borderline normal. This is the way they present it. They have difficulty concentrating; they fatigue easily; they’re hyperirritable; they crave sweets. You know, when you have low energy you’ve got a sweet tooth, you want sweets, and the more sweets you get the more you want. These children may crave salt, which is even more diagnostic of low adrenal activity. They get frequent colds, muscular pains or various other problems or weaknesses in the muscles, incoordination and allergies. We found that the cerebellum tends to be the most susceptible target organ. Incidentally, the cerebellum won’t grow normally if you don’t get enough emotional kinds of support, too; this has been shown in monkeys. And so we see children who have poor balance and a number of coordination problems based upon a poorly developed cerebellum, which is due to allergies and/or emotional deprivation.
We wanted to study this in a little more detail, and, within the limits of our grant, we were able to focus upon a limited population. Actually, we were trying to document what we already knew clinically to be true. We got the cooperation of the Valley Elementary School in Concord, where they have several EH (Educationally Handicapped) programs, and we used three of their classrooms for our study. We divided our sample randomly; half of the children would have the castor oil packs and the vitamin regimen and a special diet, and the other half would receive no treatment whatsoever.
I want to mention briefly what the treatments were. The castor oil pack you may all be familiar with, so I’ll just go into that briefly. It’s a heated pack of flannel soaked in castor oil and placed over the right side of the child’s abdomen for one hour before bedtime. It’s used about four or five days the first week, three days the following week, and a couple of days the week after that. And the children really like it after they get used to the idea and after the mothers get over their nervousness about the mess and learn how to handle it properly. The children like it and ask for it—it’s very soothing. Another attraction of the pack is that, especially if the children get some attention while it’s being applied, they get a lot of secondary gain from having it on them. We really have not had many problems with putting this pack on children. And the parents would notice within days the soothing effect of the pack. It’s great for balancing the energies, and I think it’s balancing energies in some way within these children. Plus I think it does have the secondary effect of helping intestinal absorption, because within a day or two diarrhea and constipation are helped significantly in most of these children. It’s quite amazing.
At any rate, we then gave them a proper diet. Now, we did it in a general way; we did not specifically treat these children for a specifically diagnosable condition—we didn’t even diagnose this group. We just said, “Let’s give them a proper diet and take away the junk food.” We put them on a high-protein diet and took them off sugar, jellies, starches and so on. Primarily it was a very basic diet that would be healthful for anyone. In the beginning, certain cereal grains and milk were eliminated, with alternatives being given in their place, though they were reinstated later on. High-protein foods and natural sugars, like those in fruits, were used, and we kept the children away from fried foods, starchy foods and so on. I think starchy foods increase the acidity of the blood, which increases hyperactivity. We also put them on basic antistress vitamins. I found that vitamin C, vitamin E and vitamin B-6, as well as the good multiple vitamins, were the best vitamins to give in terms of helping the adrenal activity and overcoming stress. They were also given zinc and some other minerals such as calcium.
For the evaluation of the children we used psychological testing, but I felt that the feedback from the parents would be more important. We had a Parent Symptom Inventory, in which the parents listed the symptoms that they had noticed in their children since birth. These symptoms included sleep disturbances, colic, irritability, fevers with unknown causes, and the tendency to get infections. This helped us to pinpoint specific areas that may have been deficient in the child. We had 78 items on the Symptom Inventory. Included in it were a number of behavioral types of items, like “won’t listen,” “seems to feel no pain,” and “is overly sensitive to reprimands.” We found high correlation between parents who noted emotional problems and those who put down physical problems; there was almost a one-to-one correlation—the more physical problems they put down, the more emotional problems they listed. These children were being accused of being disobedient because they couldn’t keep themselves still, because they were oversensitive, or because they were overly rambunctious in various ways and developed some pathologic patterns in terms of control.
A lot of these children had other kinds of kinesthetic problems, which involved feeling as well as vision and hearing. For example, they seemed insensitive to deep pain—at times they didn’t seem to mind pain; and some were overly susceptible to tickling. And we made a number of these kinds of correlations, involving all of the five senses. What was apparent was that when a person’s energy is very low, he becomes oversusceptible to sounds—hearing becomes overly acute. When the adrenal glands are low the sense of smell is increased 100,000 times; so these children go around sniffing and smelling. They have increased smell and increased hearing, but it’s not always modulated properly, so they get frightened and put their hands over their ears at times. At other times they seem not to hear, because they can’t integrate the sounds.
Like the parents, the teachers were instructed to fill out a rating scale, based on the behavior they noted in the classroom. I’ll note some of those items very quickly. “Sluggish mentation”: that’s very significant; it’s as if they can get the answer, but it’s sluggish. “Sluggish thinking”: that’s metabolic, you see. “Resisting change of set”: whenever you are doing something, it takes energy to shift activities; these children didn’t want to shift—they got irritable and just couldn’t shift. And they lacked what we call “cognitive drive.” They lacked that drive of curiosity that children should have. We can get children with very severe brain damage that are very curious and want to do things; but these children lack that drive—they don’t care about learning, they’re not interested. This suggests that something is wrong with their metabolism. These children are easily mentally fatigued. They get caught up with vestibular-sensory activities, spinning and so on. They are easily confused. They’re environmentally unaware; it takes them a long while to orient themselves to situations. They have good days and bad days. Their learning is variable; that’s very significant. They are hyperactive and easily distracted. We split that type of behavior up into various categories. They are impulsive and lacking internal controls; you see, it takes energy for the ego to apply internal controls—it’s much easier to be impulsive. Some of the other items on the Symptom Inventory are: “low frustration tolerance”; “lack sensory inhibition”; “delayed extinction”; some of the other terms I’ve listed, like “poor auditory discrimination”; “emotionally labile”—the children tend to giggle a lot or are inappropriately apathetic at times; “explosive”; and “immature for their age.”
The teachers were delighted to fill out this inventory, because it seemed as if I were pinpointing their children’s problems on just one questionnaire. And, you know, this form proved more valuable to me than a neurological exam. We could pinpoint the various problem areas, and we could also evaluate changes in the children, based upon the teachers’ subjective impressions of what they were noting in the classroom.
We did a very detailed fine motor evaluation of these children. And this takes a special kind of expertise that I think can be developed only over a number of years; it takes experience to see subtle abnormalities in motor tone, for example. These children would be hyptonic—flabby of tone; or they would be dystonic—just sort of jerky, with unsteady tone; or hypertonic—their tone was tight, it wasn’t being modulated. They would hold their hands in a funny way. This indicates, to our minds, a sensorimotor problem. We developed dozens of these kinds of observations. We could watch a child for even 10 minutes, as he was reaching for a toy or performing some other everyday actions, and our pencils would be going like mad as we’d be picking up all the different deficits this child had, based upon the things we had learned to observe. We also tested them for fatigue—perhaps they could do a certain task fine, but how quickly did they get fatigued from doing it? We also differentiated between fine motor and gross motor problems. We developed techniques to evaluate these children and put them into certain categories: the dispratic kids versus the kids with sensorimotor difficulties versus the kids with right-left midline problems, and so on. I want to add again that as we put the children into these different categories, each member of the team independently would come to the same conclusion, so it was not just whimsy. There were very definite things that we were all seeing in these children.
Now I’d like to get into the results of our study. We had, as I said, the parents of both the test group and the control group fill out a Symptom Inventory, checking off, from the list of 70 items (allergy, colic, and so on), any that were applicable in their child’s medical history. We found that the two groups were pretty similar; there was no statistically significant difference in the number of items checked by the parents. We did find that out of the total number of symptoms an average of 28 items was checked off by the parents-28 different kinds of things, like sleep disturbance, colic or allergy to food. I hope you understand that there were quite a few items, and any one of you who has a perfectly healthy child would check off a few items. In fact, we found that in a good, healthy population five was the average number checked off, but no parent checked off more than eight in a really healthy-looking population—one in which we couldn’t find anything wrong. But in our test populations the average was 28, with a high of 49 and a low of 17 being checked off. So even the very lowest was double what a healthy child’s parents would check off in terms of physical problems. It starts to make some sense that there is a correlation here between medical problems and learning problems.
The items that were most commonly checked off were those related to feeding problems: “food intolerances”; “doesn’t care to eat”—isn’t hungry; “can’t stand certain foods”; “craving for sweets”; “finicky eater”; voracious eater—”eating all the time and always hungry, but not gaining weight.” The second most frequently noted category was sleep disturbances of various types, and the third was behavior disturbances due to irritability, unpredictability and a low frustration tolerance; these problems made the children resistant to discipline, negativistic, explosive and destructive of toys.
On the side, I was also interested in some other symptoms that were not recorded as often. Many of the parents—up to 50 percent of them in some cases—noted hypersensitivity to sounds and smells, bedwetting until age 8, and accident proneness. But only one of the children in the whole study had a history of seizures. And none had definable brain damage detectable by the EEG studies that Dr. Peltzman did or by any of the neurological exams that they had had previous to the beginning of the school program. Lots of laboratory studies and a great deal of psychological testing had been done within the school, and nothing at all of note had been found.
The teachers’ rating scales showed that all the children in both groups had some difficulty, and what they recorded most commonly was poor attention span, as manifested by distractibility or hyperactivity, and we differentiate between the two. We termed a child distractible if, when he was doing something and there was something going on around him, he could not resist being distracted by it—in other words, if he could not focus and keep vigilant on whatever he was doing. This is different from hyperactivity, which is being driven from within to move and push. This is a kind of inner irritability and nervousness that shows up in lability of mood and a wide variation in behavior from one day to the next. You can see a child with this problem come in, and you can say, “Oh, oh, Jimmy’s going to have a bad day today.” Hyperactivity can cause mood swings, poor memory, a tendency to become easily confused and an inability to relate well with other children.
In general, in talking with the teachers I was made aware that the children of both groups were universally seen as immature, extremely sensitive to criticism, impulsive in behavior and having a decreased refractory period to learning—in other words, they quickly reached the point where the brain turns off and they are unable to learn any more. If you try to push a child beyond that, he will become so negative toward the learning situation that it will be very difficult to engage him the next day. So, when I’m working with teachers in the classroom, I tell them that they have to evaluate that refractory period in the child and not go beyond it; but they should also be careful not to be taken in when the child whimpers or whatever. They have to know, they have to be able to judge him. Well, these children have a very brief refractory period; they can get only so much, and then they’ve had it— they can’t learn any more, and they become hyperactive and distractible.
Then we checked each child’s sensorimotor development, using our soft-sign observations. We rated them in 20 different categories, including muscle tone, muscle strength, fatigability, coordination, fine motor control, tactile sensation, kinesthesia, hyperactivity, eye tracking, balancing, sequencing and motor planning. We used a 3-point scale for each item in this evaluation: a rating of 1 indicated no abnormality, 2 showed mild abnormality, and 3 meant the child had obvious problems. Again, we had several therapists evaluate each child, and their evaluations correlated beautifully with one another. We found that all the children in both groups had significant problems in at least three or more of the categories listed above. In fact, I can say categorically that we almost never—I feel like saying never—see a child with significant learning disabilities who does not also have sensorimotor problems or coordination problems of some type.
Well, let’s go into the results. We had a nurse that worked with the parents to see that the proper regimen was adhered to—the proper diet, which the whole family could take, and the vitamins. The diet wasn’t really a hardship. Cost-wise, it was less expensive than the junk food diets they had been on. We had money from the A.R.E. that provided vitamins, castor oil packs and the time of Dr. Peltzman, so the parents did not have to pay to participate in this program. Most of the really expensive items—like the equipment, my time and the time of the professional staff—were funded by the County Medical Services. So a reasonably small grant got us a relatively good study. We are hoping we can follow this through next year with a grant that will provide a little bit more money, so that we can do a bigger study.
After four to five weeks we re-evaluated these children. I want to go through briefly some of the findings we obtained from the re-evaluations. Most of the findings were based on the parents’ subjective observations, and these were dramatic. There were no significant changes in the children that were in the control study, in terms of the parents’ subjective feelings and the teachers’ feelings about changes in the classroom. In the test group, on the other hand, all but two of the children—who had midline problems and showed relatively little change—had very dramatic subjectively measured changes. I’ll just give descriptions of a few of them. Incidentally, we took all of these children off all medication. None of them was on medication during this project.
A boy, age 12: “Sleep problems much improved, with a concomitant reduction in hyperactivity.” Again, I see sleep problems and hyperactivity improving together. Incidentally, what the parents told us made sense, so we could tell whether they were just showing the placebo effect or the effect of enthusiasm over being in the project. This, together with the fact that when something didn’t improve they admitted it, suggested that they were being honest in their observations.
A boy, age 9: “Much less hyperactivity; less excitable; he talks less; has begun putting on weight.” This boy had been eating all the time and not gaining weight. “Less easily fatigued; not tired late afternoons,” and so on.
A boy, age 11: “Sleeping pattern improved”—again. “Gaining weight; appears stronger; vision somehow appears improved.”
A girl, age 12: “Her spells of dizziness have disappeared; a decrease in her craving for sweets; bed rocking has diminished; her complexion has greatly improved.”
A girl, age 11: “Skin color has improved; calmer, less driven; she talks more relatedly.”
These children began to relate and talk to other people much better than they had before.
A boy, age 12 (This is after only four weeks of the very general regimen, a nonspecific, general regimen of just good health which every child in the country should be on—probably including the castor oil packs!): “His memory is better; frustration tolerance improved,” and so on. Other similar findings were noted, with the teachers commenting that they were very impressed that the child “can now sit still; he now listens and is less disobedient.” Things they had thought were just emotional problems began to disappear. These difficulties had arisen because the child was not able to relate in other ways, and so was reacting out of his own driven nature, his own bad feelings; he had not been feeling good, not been able to concentrate, and he was acting accordingly. As soon as he felt good and alert, he got centered and his behavior became more cooperative, because every child does want to cooperate, every child wants to please if he possibly can. When you get a child who’s not cooperative, as a general rule it’s because he’s given up hope of pleasing or he just can’t be pleasing on some expected levels.
On the sensorimotor testing we saw some very definite changes—and again, we had different therapists testing the children, and the results were very consistent. We saw significant changes in the area of tactile sensation. You see, with poor diet, allergies, food additives, toxic reactions, and so on, all of the sensory organs of the body are affected. So the vision is affected somewhat, as are the ears; the children get aphasia, and the kinesthetic sense, smell, everything is affected. So we saw that tactile sensation was much different, and we tested that in a number of ways—feeling coins, feeling feathers, tickling; we used several different tests, and there was a definite improvement. Stereognosis is a test in which you put things in a person’s hands behind his back, and you see if he can tell you what’s in his hands; these children had been very poor at this before the program, but they became very good at it afterwards.
For some reason, the two children who didn’t do so well were those whose primary difficulties were midline problems—they had an imbalance. This is a subtle problem that, incidentally, a lot of children have. People with this condition have trouble with impulses going from one half of the brain to the other. Because they can’t effectively cross the brain’s midline, the two halves of the body are not well coordinated with each other; the left hand is not really tuned in to the right, they have reading and learning problems, and so on. The two children in our study who had this trouble did not seem to have as many metabolic problems as the others, and they did not seem to benefit as much from the regimen. I felt that having a couple of children who didn’t do that well was a good indication of the validity of our study.
On the whole, the control group showed no significant changes on retesting. Incidentally, none of the people who did the testing was made aware of who was in the control group and who was not. It was difficult, perhaps, for us to do a double-blind study as far as the teachers were concerned, because the children in the test group were taking good protein sandwiches and good food to school, while those in the control group were not, so the teachers could guess who was in which group. But, although it wasn’t a completely double-blind study, no one was really told or given a list of who was in the control group and who was not.
Detailed psychological testing was done, the results of which were not significant over four weeks. One reason for this was that all of the children in both groups showed such variability. We just do not have sophisticated enough tests to show the week-by-week changes in children, and they do change dramatically week by week. At first we were all very excited, because all of the children in the test group did fantastically better on psychological retesting, but then we found that the children in the control group had also done better. Some of this could have been due to a learning experience regarding how to take these tests. At any rate, there was no significant difference between the two groups.
Let me just summarize. The current literature right now has a great deal of evidence that body chemistry is important to brain functioning. I’m glad to see this, because, you know, I had these feelings seven or eight years ago, and now the literature is starting to show that some of this makes sense. The brain, like any major organ in the body, requires a continuous supply of glucose, oxygen and the optimum amount of amino acids, along with enzymes and hormonal substances to mediate the effective use of these nutrients; this supply is essential in order to meet the energy demands of a new learning situation. So the brain is put to a tremendous stress, and it needs everything that it can possibly have going for it in order to function properly, even when it’s totally intact.
Case histories show that the preponderance of children suffering from behavioral disorders and poor school performance have digestive system complaints, sleep problems, a low tolerance of stress, and the inability to modulate their energies. Many of them have mothers who have had similar problems or problems with the pregnancy that show very subtle metabolic imbalances; many have fathers with similar problems. So there’s a predisposition, a history of it in the family.
And this study has shown that there is some evidence that a regimen of proper diet, vitamins and castor oil packs did bring about positive changes in the treatment group that were not seen in the controls. In general, there was a calming effect, with reduction in hyperactive behavior and improvement in memory and concentration. The therapy evaluations indicated that treatment improved proprioceptive and kinesthetic behavior, with secondary improvement in muscle tone and fatigability. The psychological testing produced less distinctive results, and it was felt that other tools were needed to assess mild changes in psychological performance over a brief period of time. Similarly, the electroencephalogram was not sufficiently sensitive to record the subtle changes. We hope to be doing more with that in the future, and I believe that, if the study is conducted over a six-month period instead of a four week period, we’ll start seeing electroencephalographic changes in the children in terms of the things that I’ve mentioned before.
I think that studies like this should motivate us to develop more refined biochemical measures of hormonal, enzymatic and nutritional levels in the blood and urine of children, and to try to reach a deeper understanding of the complex interplay among all of these factors. I believe we should begin to look at our children from a much more expanded point of view, one that takes into account the total person; this new perspective will include not only emotional and physical considerations, but environmental and nutritional ones as well. And this approach fits in very well with the precepts given in the Edgar Cayce readings.
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