Guided Tour Did your child stop progressing in reading, already in the first or second grade?    - Do the teachers have a realistic attitude concerning your child?    - have you been forced to realize, that your child gets no use out of school?    - can you do anything about it? School is often unsatisfactory and inadequate for children, who are unable to start reading.    READING? is an ability performed by the body    - just as playing ball, bicycling, roller-skating and driving a car are abilities performed by the body, so is reading.    Bodily - or corporal - abilities are not directly connected to, or dependent on, the intellect. Even the highest IQ score is useless, where bodily abilities like reading are concerned. If you must pay attention to individual movements to play ball, ride a bicycle, roller-skate, read a text or drive a car, your body will find it extremely difficult to perform the task. And you will not perform satisfactorily.    What you experience, when you play ball, bicycle, roller-skate, read, or drive a car - may, very well, be connected to your intellect and to your IQ.    IQ? IQ is actually a determination of the amount of will-powered attention.    DISABLED READING - is the opposite of reading. Disabled reading occurs, when you try - or have been forced - to use will-powered attention to comprehend written text.    IQ involves the ability to pay attention.    A disabled reader has had to use lots of will-powered attention. Therefore, disabled readers always score high, when their IQ is tested.    Those with low IQ ratings are not able to use will-powered attention, when having to read.    Disabled readers often have    DYSLEXIA Dyslexia means:    Not reader, (eventually Word Blindness.) Dyslexia is a condition, where the eye-balls are disabled from moving freely in the eye-socket.    If dyslexia leads to disabled reading, it is because the dyslectic has to use her or his will-powered attention, in order to move his/her sight along the lines of the text.    When attention is used to make the eyes move, it can not at the same time, be used to perceive the contents of the text. Attention can only be focused one place at a time.    Some dyslectics are excellent readers. They have found out how to extract the contents of a text, even if their eyes are not able to move freely and normally in the sockets.    Other dyslectics make do by:    READING BY IMPRESSING Reading by impressing is hard work. One by one, every word has to be fixed in the mind, for afterwards, to be remembered and build into sentences of the text. This is very demanding. This, forces you to pay attention to every word. To read by impressing is not at all fun. If you read by impressing, you will, most likely, derive no pleasure of reading, whether it be Garfield, Donald Duck or Soeren Kierkegaard. Although, it is easier to fix technical manuals in your mind, and master mathematics with texts. With tremendous effort, you could achieve an academic education. In fact, it is possible to end up as a leading professor in the science of language, and still have trouble reading for example, Soeren Kierkegaard and Donald Duck.    TEST Is it necessary for you to read every day in order to maintain your reading ability?    Then you are a reader by impression.    Once you have adapted yourself to reading by impression, it will be very hard for you to achieve:    NORMAL READING ABILITY    - normal reading ability? If you read by choice for your own pleasure, you possess normal reading ability.    Could you abstain from reading for - say, five years, and then, without any problem, just start reading again, as if you had never paused?    Then you are not a reader by impression.    Then you posses normal reading ability.    Then you are able to read for the fun of it.    Try. All readers by impression, and those with reading disability, have    HYPERMOBILITY Hypermobility? Steadman's Medical Dictionary states:    "Hypermobility. Increased range of movement of joints, joint laxity, occurring normally in young children or as a result of disease, e.g., Marfan's or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. H may result in degenerative joint disease."    - Fingertips of hypermobile people can, often without force, be lifted to vertical position, while the palm of the hand is pressed against the table.    - Tips of thumbs can sometimes, without force, be made to touch inner underarm. - Joints of knee will often bend slightly backwards (e.g. 10 degrees), when the hypermobile person stands. Otherwise called sable-knee.    - Hypermobile people are often flat-footed.    - Often a hypermobile, will be able to press the palms of the hands against the floor in front of the toes, while knees are straight. But it's also normal that the joints of hypermobile people, contrary to increased range of movement, have a decreased range of movement. Very often the eyes, that have reduced mobility in their sockets. Eye-motory - also called reading-motory - thereby, works poorly.    - Which is precisely how Dyslexia is defined. Here is the very connection between Hypermobility and Dyslexia. Hypermobility always influences the ability to read and write.    Always.    A majority of hypermobile schoolchildren will most likely exhibit very good reading skills indeed. A majority of hypermobile schoolchildren will commonly show poorer results in the mastering of handwriting. (Their handwriting may, very well, look like something, they have done with the toes of their left foot.) Generally they will also have difficulties in writing texts, when compared to their classmates.    Some hypermobiles perform so poorly, that even in the third or fourth grade they are unable to write their own name without assistance.    A minority of hypermobile children show serious reading disability. You could never be classified with the reading- and writing problems of the kind, that school call:    RETARDED DEVELOPMENT OF READING or    RETARDED DEVELOPMENT or    DYSLEXIA or    WORD BLINDNESS - if you do not test positive to being hypermobile.    If you have reading or writing problems, you possess a type of connective tissue with relatively, few collagen fibers and relatively many, elastic ones.    This type of connective tissue, giving hypermobility, is always inherited.    You thought that reading and writing problems stem from the brain?    Wrong.    The connective tissue is the first place to investigate. The second, being the adrenal glands.    Then - what do you do - if you want to help your child? Stop drilling reading and writing with the child.    You could do no better. Training only makes the child pay even great attention to the details.    Until now, the situation has gone from bad to worse. Now, you and your child should stop the cycle.    It doesn't matter what teachers or even psychologists continues to demand from you: You should not practice or drill reading or writing with your child.     Neither yourself or any other in the world - not even the most competent teacher or psychologist, - would be able to teach a child out of disabled reading or writing.    Nobody can.    All that is achieved is increasing the child's focus on the problem.    In fact, training reading or writing, with any child possessing literary disabilities, constitutes an offence against that child.    Violence against children! But one has to do something?    Do you really?    Then you also would practice jumping with people lacking feet and legs.    Nothing good could ever come of it.    On the other hand: If you are a parent, you should be careful not to be too headstrong in defense of your child. You can hardly help, that the school drills and rules your child. You risk confrontation with organized, social regulations and other major forces of society. Confrontations that may be disadvantageous for your child.    If you talk to grown-up, disabled readers, they very often will tell you about their school, being a veritable nightmare. They seldom will talk fondly about the special-education, they received.    The school will inform you, that nowadays they know much more about dyslexia and how it can be treated, than was known ten or twenty years ago.    They don't. Make an agreement with school, that will be good for your child. Nobody in the world, has ever satisfactorily documented, that training reading - or any other linguistic training - has ever made a disabled reader or writer, perform such skills at the level of classmates. It is not even shown, that such training is of any good at all, for children as well as, adults.    Which has good reason:    What school considers disabled reading, occurs when reading instruction is of no use.    Whoever told the schools and their teachers, that disabled readers shall be taught reading?    What the school considers disabled writing, occurs when writing instruction is of no use.    Whoever told the schools and their teachers, that disables writers shall be taught writing? If Charles has been able to read aloud, for instance, 40 per cent of a text, and then - after intensive training from a skilled teacher - reaches a performance of 80 per cent ...    - that is an important gain. Isn't it?    No it isn't.    Not at all.    What is Charles going to do with 80 per cent of a text?    If Charles needs to grasp the meaning of a written message, he must not lack 20 per cent of it.    After major, intellectual work and instruction, that often costs society as much of the annual income of a craftsman, Charles, at last, can pronounce twice as many words from a written text as he could before.    First, Charles impresses every letter in the word. Then he collects the word and says it aloud. Then Charles begins the next word. Often Charles succeeds in saying the sentence aloud.    To Charles himself, the content of the sentence is unknown, for he was forced to use his complete attention to concentrate on letters and the words, and then form the sounds of them in his mouth and pronounciate.    Charles can not afford, at the same time, to pay any attention to the meaning of the words and the sentence, for if he does, he shall fail in pronouncing the sounds of the word.    But nobody can deny, that Charles - more or less correctly - uttered a sentence that was written.    Is that development?    The teacher and the school are overwhelmingly satisfied. They believe, much has happened. It has been very demanding for Charles, and it has cost society a substantial amount of money. But the teacher and the school find it worth the expenses.    Is it?    The teachings have given Charles a bewildering impression of what reading, in fact, is about.    For Charles, reading is something imposed, that he can't understand the good of. And if Charles doesn't practice this "reading" every day, the 80 per cent, that has cost him so much effort, and society so much tax-money, shall disappear in less than a fortnight.    Has all this been of any use for Charles? What would have been of use for Charles?        - If a method or a practice makes Charles, independently, start reading the names of streets - that should be a tremendous advance.    - If a method or a practice makes Charles, independently, read subtexts aloud, as he watches TV - that would be a tremendous advance.    - If a method and a practice makes Charles claim: "I don't want to do my homework today, I would rather read Donald Duck" - that would be a tremendous advance. - Such advances are never reached, when disabled readers are taught reading. Disabled readers only reach such advances, when they are administered proper therapy, for the poor condition of their body and senses. A condition caused by the effects of their special, connective tissue: hypermobility. Why is it no use trying to teach them to read?    The reason is naturally, that reading lessons make disabled readers pay attention. The more a disabled reader pays attention to the letters and the words, the less he or she will be able to grasp the contents of the text.    Reading is performed with the body - with the eyes or with the fingertips - it can not satisfactorily be performed by focusing on linguistic details.    The exact same goes for writing.    "Learning to read" can cause a disable reader to try and hide his/her disability.    "Learning to read" is not the way to fluent reading. At most, it's the way to reading by impressing. Reading by impressing blocks normal reading ability - fluency. Do you think, the teacher ought to know something about this?    You may click:    Advice for teachers Susan corrects my English. She writes: "How should children learn to read then? And spell?    What do you suggest." Dear Susan,    When "learning to read" is administered to children, it is sometimes done as playing, sometimes as suggestions. But it may end up as forced exercise, and forced exercise harms. When the rule goes: "You simply have to learn, how to read and write," all signals of extreme danger should sound and show. Here damage will be done to a child. Reading is an ability normally performed with the eyes. Once their eyes have achieved the ability to scan a text, young children develop reading in weeks, in days, sometimes in minutes. "Learning to read" shows very little effect, before the eyes have achieved an adequate ability to, automatically, scan a text.    As soon as the eye begins scanning textlines, "learning to read" can be determined to have succeeded and should be stopped at once. In cases where "learning to read" shows no radical effect on reading ability, "learning to read" is poisonous, as it locks and inhibits the automatic scanning motory of the eyes. If a child does not respond quickly and satisfactorily to the drilling, "learning to read" should never be used. This moderation of "learning to read" is not easy to administer.    But where hypermobile children are concerned, "learning to read" very often is fatal to the automatic reading motory of the eyes. "Learning to read" in effect, rapidly changes to an effective education in "learning that you can't read." Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to administer a grave moderation of "learning to read."    Best regards, Kaare. Most disable readers or writers have a body that is in trouble. It seems that problems are caused, because signals from the senses are not transmitted in such a form, that the brain can utilize.    The disturbance of sense, that troubles most disabled readers and writers, is:    THE HEARING SENSE SUFFERS FROM PAIN, WHEN EXPOSED TO SOUNDS AT A LEVEL, MOST PEOPLE WOULD FIND COMFORTABLE AND NOT PAINFUL AT ALL A condition that, from here on, is called:    "SORE AND IRRITATED" HEARING Sore and irritated hearing? Among the schoolchildren visiting the Volfkliniken in Copenhagen, 85% of the boys and 67% of the girls suffer from sore and irritated hearing. Over a certain level, sounds will hurt everybody.    That cannon shots, engine noises and dishes smashed can for example make anyone's ears hurt, is normal.    But normal hearing should be able to tolerate - say - standing at a railway station next to a braking train, without feeling pain in the hearing organs.    A majority of the children, taken into therapy at Volfkliniken have so tender and so sensitive hearing, that even the voice of the teacher in class, hurts.    When a voice hurts, the child most often will try to avoid listening.    People with sore and irritated hearing are, in general, treated dreadfully. That goes especially for children.    They are not able to explain what is wrong with their hearing sense. Almost all of them believe, that it is normal to experience such pain.    Do you want advice?    Click:    Advice on how to constrain and embarrass young people, suffering from sore and irritated hearing. Children with sore and irritated hearing suffer, when kept inside the house. Especially, when many people are gathered. A classroom is often intolerable to their ears.    And then most of them have "slow hearing."    Slow hearing, means that you don't comprehend words and sentences, while they are being said. You comprehend them with some delay, when you have recalled the sound of them in your mind.    The inner tape-recorder, that here is identified, is a feature of hearing that othologists refer to as "short-term auditory storage."    The inner tape-recorder hardly is capable of handling more than two syllables of each word. Therefore, many children with slow hearing, can not comprehend terminations of words.    And, never mind how hard they try, and how much they pay attention, they can't be made to master terminations. Even university language scientists, on the highest academic level, may show incompetence, where termination of words is concerned.    Terminations can be taught. But they can't be learned. When you address - for instance - a child with slow hearing, the child often will answer: "What?"    A moment later, the child then first understands, what you said.    "What?" actually means "be silent for a moment, while I compute your words and their meaning."    Try listening carefully to, how the child talks. Parents, who are used to hearing their child, almost never discover, that the child talks indistinctly, and often doesn't pronounce the last syllable.    This should not be corrected, for the child has no means to change it. You should just know, that when the child talks, it reproduces the exact sounds, its ear is able to discriminate.    Please understand how difficult it is, comprehending what takes place, when hearing is that much impaired.    Children with sore and irritated hearing, often will be outdoor people, that only come in to eat and sleep. In the classroom all the sounds, represent an overwhelmingly intellectual task to analyze, for the disabled hearer, and soon will tire them out.    In addition, the impact of the sounds, that carry important information, may very well be physically painful to the ear.    The ability of a person with sore and irritated hearing, to focus on sounds, expires. The child then either develops hyperactivity, or turns inward and withdraws attention from the outside world.    To the possessor of sore and irritated hearing, existence indoors often contains no reality. Except - of course - for the physical pain, experienced in their ears.    When these children leave class and go outside, they experience what can be compared to awakening from a dream: You remember you just dreamed, but the details of the dream dissolve at once.    Nobody says, that a child with sore and irritated hearing necessarily will be a disabled reader. Many children with very tender hearing indeed, in fact, read excellently.    They should be helped with their impaired hearing, anyway.    Try a doctor of chiropractic's and also Volfair sound therapy, if Volfair sound therapy is obtainable where you live. If your child is a boy, he may posses elevator-testicle.    TESTICLES With hypermobile boys, it is quite common, that one - or both testicles is not to find in the scrotum.    Testicles, that have not descended into the scrotum, often will create disturbed children, who are not able to follow lessons in school.    A, just as common - and just as disturbing - kind of testicle-disturbance is the so-called, "elevator-testicle," which among doctors is called Intermittent descensus of Testicle.    Elevator-testicle is described like this:    Testicle is sometimes situated in its proper place in the scrotum, and sometimes it has elevated to the abdomen.     Against elevator-testicle, there is probably, no other effective cure found than the Volfair Therapeutic Records used by, for instance, the Volfkliniken. Destroyed testicle When a testicle is not situated in the scrotum at all, (the so-called retarded testicle) many doctors prefer surgical treatment.    Surgical treatment works in fifty per cent of the cases.    To persuade you to let your boy undergo surgical correction, the doctor often will inform you, that there is an increased possibility of cancer in testicles, that are not descended.    Which is true.    But the next stage of the logic: That the possibility for cancer is diminished after the operation,    - is not true.    Surgical correction does nothing beneficial for decreasing the possibility of cancer in the testicles in later life.    Unfortunately, there exists quite a great risk, that surgical correction will end up in a castrated boy. This surgical technique has not yet reached the stage, of being safely mastered. Castration is a greater disaster than a testicle not reaching the scrotum.    And there is no guarantee, that even successful operation, will secure that the testicle functions properly.    More preferable is, to just wait and hope that the testicle descends spontaneously. In half of the cases, it does. If it doesn't, try a treatment with hormones. Such treatment succeeds in half of the cases. But if it doesn't, no harm is done to the testicle.    If you try passive, sound-therapy with Volfair therapeutic records, the treatment has a fifty per cent chance of success.    Nobody can claim, that a boy with even the most problem testicles, necessarily will experience disability of reading or writing. But if a disabled reader or writer has any kind of trouble with testicles:    Don't, under any circumstances, train the child's disability!    1: You will make the disability worse.    2: You will make the testicle function worse.    DAMP/MBD Maybe your reading disabled child has been examined by a doctor, or a neurologist, a psychiatrist or a psychologist in order to find some possible shortcoming of the brain.    DAMP means Deficit in Attention, Motor control and Perception. It's identical with MBD meaning Minimal Brain Dysfunction.    If there has been reason to consider the existence of a minor brain dysfunction, the child invariably will test hypermobile.    If you doubt it - test for hypermobility, and you shall see.    Thereto, the child almost invariably posses sore and irritated hearing.    Sore and irritated hearing, and problems with location of a testicle or two, very often is mistaken for minor brain dysfunction's. Children who are suspected of having a minor brain dysfunction, normally have a well-functioning brain. Although they do posses hypermobility. Almost without exception, children considered DAMP/MBD can be seen to move clumsily. While range of joint movement is increased in some parts of the body. Other joints will often be decreased in movement. They block.    Blocking joints, here and there, is the way, the body tries to overcome hypermobility. Especially the joints, where the hip-bones of the pelvis meet the sacrum. These so-called sacro-iliac joints - are either highly blocked or, on the contrary, much too movable.    When the movements of the pelvis are disturbed, the movements of the whole body will seem clumsy, especially when walking, running or jumping.    Almost without exception, children considered DAMP/MBD suffer from disturbed sleep. You can tell by the dark circles under their eyes. The worst problem for these children is not, performing badly in school, but sleeping problems. Either they sleep much too deep, or too light.    They may suffer from insomnia.    Often they are haunted by nightmares, and are unable to sleep alone, or in darkness. It might very well be an advantage for the children with dysfunctional hypermobility, elevator-testicle, sore and irritated hearing or considered DAMP/MBD, that they also show disabilities when reading and writing. For this is how the parents really discover, that something is wrong.    They now have the opportunity to do something about it.    You may ask, what?    Find therapy. Make the situation calm down. Relax.    The most relevant thing to do, is to bring the child to a doctor of chiropractic's.    Disabled reading or writing is invariably based on bad functioning of the body and hypermobility.    And so is DAMP/MBD.    Dysfunctional hypermobility always can, to some degree, be mended. A doctor of chiropractic's can determine the degree of hypermobility, and in most cases, bring the situation under control.    To bring the situation under control and make the body of the child perform better, is much more important for your child, than performance in reading and writing.    But is reading and writing really a matter of concern? Training the hearing with Chr.A. Volf's passive sound therapy is probably the most effective means to mending disabled reading and writing, that exists. Unfortunately, it is not available in English and American-speaking countries.    But that might be altered.    In France, you have the sound therapy of Doctor Bérard, and you also have the sound therapy of Doctor Tomatis.    In the USA, you at least have the medicator Doctor Levinson, in N.Y.    For information you might write to:    The Medical Dyslexic Treatment Center    600 Northern Blvd.    Lake Success, NY 11021 The best advice is, that you should always start with a doctor of chiropractic's. Which goes for children    - who are squint-eyed (cross-eyed)    - who bite their nails    - who stammer or stutter Without exception, they are hypermobile too.    If you don't believe it - test it.    There is every reason to assume, that their bodies are in alarm and need skilled help to calm down. A teacher working with disabled readers or writers, knows that she and the pupils will have to work hard for years, without ever achieving that the pupil will read street-signs for fun, or without any effort, read texts on the TV-screen, or drop homework for the benefit of Donald Duck or Garfield.    The teacher maybe maintains the hope, that one day the disabled reader shall discover that    "it pays to learn to read" or that the pupil    "will become interested in reading" "Literacy will come," she keeps telling herself, the parents and the pupil. Sound treatments help most disabled readers, so that they, by themselves, start reading street-signs for fun, and without any effort, begin reading texts on the TV-screen, and often Donald Duck and Garfield, as well.    This takes place without any other demand on the disabled reader, than sitting down and listening to music played on a big loudspeaker-set, and afterwards, listening to Volf's sound for five minutes in earphones.    That's all there is to it.    Every Volfair sound therapist saves society considerable sums of money, earlier used for maltreatment of disabled readers and writers. Disabled readers will not start reading as long as they just are taught reading. At least not until they have left school.    Reading lessons maintain reading disability by making disabled readers pay attention to letters and to written words. After four - fifteen minute - sound treatments at the Volfkliniken in Copenhagen, thirteen year old, Niels said, with amazement:    "Now I suddenly can read English, but strange enough, I still can't read Danish. How come, I can't read Danish?"    "You went to school for six years Niels, and every day of the six years you have been taught, that you can't read Danish. Until now, nobody has taught you, that you can't read English, so of course, you can read English." For the same reason, disabled readers, more easily, read text from a computer-screen than from paper. Every day in school they have been taught, they can't read text from paper. Nobody taught them, they can't read from a screen.    dyslex@dyslex.com
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