Customer Reviews

No Time for Jello: One Family's Experiences with the Doman-Delacato Pattering Program

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An honest and thoughtful account of one parent's growing disillusionment with the Doman/Delacato "patterning" therapy for her son with cerebral palsy. An effective counter-balance to the tendency of accounts of "miracle" alternative treatments to describe only the isolated "miracle cures" results and ignore with the far more common "failures", it also includes an appended summary of the scientific research on Doman's therapies which quietly and devastatingly demolishes the claims made for them.

I totally agree with the previous reviewer that this book should be compulsory reading for anyone even considering Doman's therapies, but it should also be relevant and interesting to a wider audience. Bratt examines the complex psychological issues involved in the pursuit of a 'cure" for a child with special needs - how parents are made to feel (and make themselves feel) that they are positively immoral unless they are willing to try anything that holds out even the faintest hope of a cure (at whatever cost), the costs of an exhausting and coercive treatment plan on the family as a whole, the psychological effect on a child of a treatment which implies so clearly that he's not OK as he is and needs to be "fixed", and the emotional consequences for both child and parents when such a cure fails to materialize and they finally have to accept the child's disability as a permanent part of his life. At the end of the book, her description of her acceptance of Jamie as he is, disability and all, is deeply moving.

Of course, a quiet and intelligent book like this will never win even a tenth of the readership of the sensational and mendacious books that sell the promise of miracles. All people who really care about children with special needs should regret this.

A family member has cerebral palsy from a pre-birth complication and the parents have been working with Doman's Institute. We came across this book in our continuing research. It is a must read. For the depth of personal experience and emotional turmoil, the author did a remarkable job of presenting an objective and thorough evaluation. My thanks to her as well for the extensive bibliography.

Ms. Cooper wrote "My heart goes out to the mother who wrote this book,"

Too bad she either did not finish this very short book or even read it. At the end of the book Ms. Bratt celebrates the progress and how wonderful her son is as an older child (he plays trumpet in the school band!).

At the very end of the book she also goes into the science, or lack of science behind the intensive physical therapy program pushed by Doman. It is part of her graduate school thesis, and is very enlightening to those of us who need this dose of sanity.

This book is a must read for any parent whose child has been diagnosed with any developmental condition, and who may want to try anything to "fix" the child. There are lots of people who like to cash in on the desperation of parents like us, and Ms. Bratt shines a light of reality and even a bit of hope. Especially when there are quacks out there pushing even more dangerous cures (like one pair who are advocating chemical castration!).

My heart goes out to the mother who wrote this book, but I am speaking up in defense of the Institutes. The members of the Institutes have not now, nor ever claimed they could cure every child who tried their program. I know of no therapy, surgery, or treatment anywhere that does! But for every failure, there are many, many successes. It would be a shame if parents gave up on the Institutes program before they even tried. I feel very fortunate to say that my son's improvement was dramatic after starting on the Institute's program. I am sorry for the boy in this story, however, my son has a much different story. The Institutes saved his life.

Thought that book presented a "voice of reason" in regards to alternative physiotherapeutic (if we could call them that) methods for rehabilitating children that prove to be time consuming and fairly ineffective that they leave the kid with little or no improvement and also make them feel that they weren't okay as they are. I thought Ms. or Mrs. Bratt's comparison of herself to the Iranian hostages was fairly apt, since I could also imagine that someone doing that sort of program could be a sort of hostage to it with what result? That their hopes for their kid weren't being fulfilled and that their kid was made to feel that they weren't okay as they are.