Talk:Functional disconnection

There is no such thing as "functional disconnection"

Please read this article: http://www.jsonline.com/business/108047584.html
Some quotes from the article:

"The Brain Balance Achievement Center, a franchise that opened in Mequon last summer, offers a program that it contends can help children overcome attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome, Tourette syndrome, autism and other disorders.

The 12-week program - costing $6,000, plus roughly $125 to $500 in nutritional supplements - purportedly does this by addressing an imbalance between the right and left sides of the brain that it calls "functional disconnection syndrome."

The program is based on the contention that ADHD, dyslexia, autism and other disorders all result from this syndrome."

The "literature" consists of one study of children with ADHD, co-authored by the program's founder, published in an obscure journal based in Tel Aviv, Israel.

There are no studies in respected, peer-reviewed journals that contend ADHD, dyslexia, autism and other disorders stem from the development of one side of the brain faster than the other.

"None of the neuro research would even come close to suggesting that," said Mina Dulcan, a professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and the head of the child and adolescent psychiatry program at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago.

and

"There is absolutely no evidence for that and no reason to think it should be true," said Harriet Hall, a retired family physician who edits and contributes to the Science-Based Medicine website.

Hall, a former Air Force flight surgeon, wrote an article on the Brain Balance Achievement Centers for the website in September that concluded the program was based on "speculation, not credible evidence."

That, though, hasn't slowed the spread of Brain Balance.

The company behind the centers now has 27 franchises, with 11 more set to open. It was founded by Robert Melillo, a chiropractor and author of "Disconnected Kids: The Groundbreaking Brain Balance Program for Children with Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, and Other Neurological Disorders."

Fritz stressed that Brain Balance is a "supplemental learning center" and not a medical treatment.

and

That fits a familiar pattern, said Steven Novella, an assistant professor of neurology at Yale School of Medicine and editor of the Science-Based Medicine website.

"On the website, they make a lot of bold claims, but they are backed largely by anecdotes, by stories," Novella said. "Of course, stories are great for marketing. People love stories. They find them very compelling."

and

For one thing, there is no scientific evidence that attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome and Tourette syndrome are caused by "functional disconnection syndrome."

"There's no commonality," Novella said.

and

"You hit them with exactly what they want to hear," Novella said. "They have a good sales pitch. They don't have the science to back that up. But people don't care about that."

and

He acknowledged that there are no studies in peer-reviewed journals backing Brain Balance's claims.

(If this amount of copy-and-pasting isn't allowed on here, please feel free to trim what I've pasted.)
"Functional disconnection" is a term created for Brain Balance Centers by Gerald "Gerry" Leisman and Robert Melillo to promote their product (supplements) and their business. There is no diagnosis of "functional disconnection" in medicine. This Wikipedia article needs to be deleted. Eaqq (talk) 18:58, 22 November 2014 (UTC)

Response to pseudoscience tag

I am rather perplexed by the comments regarding functional disconnectivity as a pseudoscience. The fact that one group in the world seems to be making some rather strange medical claims about the concept should not detract from the exploration of functional connectivity.

To make this clearer - there is a broad hypothesis within psychiatry and experimental psychology that some conditions are associated with changes in the temporal relationship between activity in different regions of the brain, and there is an extensive literature exploring this. This is what most of the world means by functional connectivity and disconnectivity. This does not mean changes in connectivity are the cause (rather than the result) of the conditions, nor that it is rational to target any kind of treatment at connectivity, nor even that such treatment is possible (let alone a specific treatment).

It is perfectly reasonable to criticise trying to medicalise something that is not, conceptually, a medical condition, but this does not mean that the underlying idea that patterns of regional brain co-activity can become measurably different in certain disease conditions is itself pseudoscience.

I propose this article be re-written to clarify the difference between a valid scientific concept, and one group's attempt to apply the concept in a rather odd way, before removing the pseudoscience from the article as a whole. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.106.240.194 (talk) 13:36, 19 March 2015 (UTC)