During a recent appointment, my chiropractor and I struck up a conversation about autism, ADD/ADHD and imbalances between the brain's right and left hemispheres.
I asked if he had heard of Dr. Robert Melillo and the Brain Balance program. "That's what I want to get into: helping children and using that method," he excitedly told me, explaining that Melillo is one of his professors.
"He's a brilliant man," my doctor said, and I agreed—a few weeks earlier I had the opportunity to interview Melillo at the Brain Balance Center in Rocklin.
Melillo, widely recognized as an expert in neurology, rehabilitation, neurobehavioral disorders and nutrition, authored the books "Disconnected Kids" and "Reconnected Kids," and founded Brain Balance Achievement Centers.
His mission to find a cure for neurobehavioral disorders began more than a decade ago, when his own 6-year-old son was diagnosed with ADHD. "It's personal. As a parent in general, this is very important to me," Melillo noted during the beginning of our conversation.
"I wanted to know: what is ADHD? What is going on in the brain? And no one could answer me," he explains. Frustrated, Melillo began researching with Dr. Ted Carrick, studying the nervous system, the body and the brain. They found patterns of brain imbalances, then developed therapies to address the imbalances.
Three 3-year-olds with autism were the first to try Melillo's program of functional therapies. He says that all three were non-verbal beforehand and all three children began speaking after completing the program. "What impacted me was the families and the parents," he says. "There was overwhelming relief and joy in them—I felt what they felt as a parent, I could relate. At that point, I knew I would do that for the rest of my life."
His groundbreaking research and discoveries led to the creation of the Brain Balance centers, which use a holistic approach—without drugs—to help children with neurobehavioral and learning difficulties.
Looking back to my own conversation with Melillo, the most poignant note isn't that there are now 54 Brain Balance centers nationwide, or even that 82 percent of children were no longer diagnosed with ADHD after completing Melillo's 12-week program in a recent study (the study was published in the "International Journal of Adolescent Medicine and Health"), but that Melillo is so passionate about teaching parents the science, helping them understand what he believes is happening in the child's brain—and he's remarkably skilled at breaking down the information, making it easy to comprehend and incredibly interesting.
The brain is divided into cerebral hemispheres—one right, one left. Social knowledge, attention, reading and facial expressions are typical right hemisphere functions. Word reading, fine motor skills and memorizing numbers are typical left hemisphere functions.
Children with autism, ADD/ADHD, OCD and neurobehavioral disorders generally perform right hemisphere tasks poorly, but excel at left hemisphere ones—Melillo says that's because their right hemisphere is underdeveloped in comparison with their left. Overtime, the brain may overcompensate for this imbalance.
In the beginning stages, "When I put all of this together, I thought that theoretically I should be able to correct this problem. There's no obvious genetic mutation, so why can't you fix it?" he says, explaining that the brain is adaptable (not stagnant), with the capacity to grow and create new pathways.
Today, the Brain Balance program addresses imbalances and functional disconnection, a miscommunication that occurs when both hemispheres are out of sync. Melillo gives this example: Think of an old computer and a new computer—they operate at different processing speeds, so they can work independently, but not together.
According to Melillo, this can be changed.
Melillo vehemently believes that we are in the midst of a massive epidemic. Autism and ADHD are rising at alarming rates. Ten years ago, one in 10,000 children were diagnosed with autism; today that number is believed to be less than one in 50. ADHD is the number one reason for that a child would be medicated today.
Based on the harrowing data, "What's being done right now is not working, so we need to do something different based on cutting edge science," he says, "and that's what we're doing."
He believes that future is bright. "There's nothing broken or damaged in brain of these children," he assures. "There's a functional disconnection—the problem is poor communication between different areas of the brain. And we know we can change that, we can improve that."
Melillo and his team have been looking at epigenetics, environmental factors, maternal stress factors and diet's affect on future generations.
"I know it's going to be controversial, but it'll get people talking and make people ask the questions that must be asked," he says, giving examples of monitoring cortisol levels in pregnant mothers or studying environmental factors that can be permanently changed to lower risks of neurodevelopmental disorders. He believes that if environmental factors are pinpointed, they may be preventable in the future.
"I'm very optimistic about the future," Melillo says. "Of course, I have to be—I'm right-brained."
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