This summer a Life’s 4 Living Grant enabled my daughter Helen to have treatments that our Primary Care Trust refused to fund. The two treatments, Auditory Integration Training and Lightwave Stimulation have proved to be the only treatments we’ve discovered so far that really help Helen cope with the range of difficulties she experiences as an autistic person. The range includes extreme difficulty with speech and processing sounds (not deafness, but confusion over sound); oversensitive hearing, vision and touch; problems with judging depth and distance; poor sleep and appetite patterns, difficulty with balance; problems co-ordinating her body movements; obsessive behaviour and other signs of anxiety and stress. Helen’s had these treatments several times before with stunning results and I’ve paid for them privately in the past but we live on state benefits now and I just couldn’t afford the treatments this year. After being refused by our PCT, I asked Tower Hamlets Carers Centre to help me fundraise for Helen’s treatments and they put me in touch with the Life’s 4 Living Team. They were very welcoming and interested in how the treatments could help Helen and keen to support my stressful life as a carer. I soon got the go ahead and was able to book up the treatments for the start of the school summer holidays.
Helen loves going to The Sound Learning Centre for treatment and so do I. It’s as far as you can get from a clinical treatment setting and we can both relax in comfort while the light and sound work wonders on Helen. The treatments take place over a ten day period. You begin with gentle, non-invasive assessment then a daily pattern of two sessions of Lightwave Stimulation and two sessions of Auditory Integration Training.
For the Lightwave Stimulation Helen sits in front of a machine called a Lumatron. External light is blocked out and coloured filters are slotted into an illuminated window so you see only a round window of coloured light. The light is set to flicker, different people and different coloured lights need different rates of flicker. The theory behind LWS is that the brain needs a balanced spectrum of light to help it function properly. The most effective way of getting light into the brain is through the eyes (optic nerve). The flicker helps the brain to assimilate the light. This treatment is used for a wide range of problems/disorders but the most obvious benefit for Helen is the way it balances her otherwise unbalanced internal mechanisms. Her sleep patterns (usually awful) improve hugely; she is able to eat proper meals instead of constant snacking and it boosts her confidence massively. There is a strong therapeutic aspect to light/colour treatment and the different colours produce different emotional reactions. This summer Helen was able to tolerate yellow light, a colour she has always avoided in the past and that provoked a strong, but useful emotional response.
Auditory Integration Training (AIT) is a method of expanding the range of sounds a person hears and training the brain to process sound properly. We all process sound much more effectively in our brains if our hearing is dominant on the right. This means it zaps straight over to the hearing and speech processing centres on the left side of our brains. Left side hearing dominance or mixed dominance can cause problems. This is what Helen was experiencing before the treatments; she was having difficulty working out what people were saying and having to piece it all together. This was tiring and confusing for her and meant there was a delay while she worked out the most likely version. For AIT treatments you sit comfortably and listen through headphones to a variety of music. The music can be Bob Marley, Abba, Bob Dylan, jazz, or sometimes a classical piece but it’s played through a machine called an Audiokinetron. The Audiokinetron filters out aspects of the music in a random fashion so that someone like Helen, who has trained herself to filter out sounds she finds uncomfortable, cannot predict how the sound will change. This sounds like an unpleasant thing to put someone who is sound sensitive through but she actually enjoys it and understands its value. At first the sound is channelled into both ears at the same volume but halfway through the course of treatment the volume is set to play louder in the right ear than the left. This re-trains the brain into right dominance; the most effective and accurate type of hearing.
After her Auditory Integration and Lightwave treatments Helen wrote on her communication aid:
“The AIT made my ears work properly again so I can feel the sounds and work out what I need to hear to help all the speech sounds I must make. In all the visits I’ve made to The Sound Learning Centre this one got me really thinking about speech and what I need to do. I foolishly wait for lovely people to get me speaking but I know now I must really try and teach myself.
The Lightwave was really wonderful and it made me feel better in a lot of ways. I felt the yellow light was letting me feel a lot of feeling that I usually shut out and ignore, feelings of weird fears about how I’m autistic and don’t appear normal. I soon realised that I could manage those feelings and they were losing their hold over me. I feel a lot stronger now about my autism. I am a lot more comfortable about autistic feelings and behaviour. I am so relaxed now. I am autistic and wonderful. The other colours were helpful in different ways. The indigo, violet and ruby really soothed my senses. The blue washed autism away. The green made me happy. The red/orange really picked my spirits up and the yellow/green refreshed me.
I felt really good about myself after the treatments and raring to go. Perhaps this was just what I needed to get me moving forward again.”
Yet again, the treatments were hugely successful. Helen’s ability to process sound improved dramatically, after just a few days of treatment she could react to speech instantly. Her own attempts at speech have improved (and keep improving) rapidly, this is giving her the confidence to carry on. Her sleep and appetite patterns are much better and she’s getting more adventurous about trying unfamiliar foods. After years of trying she’s finally put together the sequence of movements needed to swing herself on a park swing this summer and is delighted to swing just like other girls do. All her oversensitive senses seem to be much more normal now and because her stress levels are lower, her obsessive behaviour is reduced. Helen’s a clever girl and you can see from her comments that she’s able to analyse what happens during the treatments and use that knowledge to help her change.
The timing of the treatments was very important; Helen had just left primary school where she felt comfortable and had a great circle of friends and was heading for secondary school after the holidays. Because of her difficulties this could have been a very stressful time for her but her confidence just kept growing over the summer holidays and she sailed into secondary school, made an excellent start and some fun new friends straight away. She’s very happy and we both want to say a massive thank you to Life’s 4 Living for making such a difference to us both.
- Delia Wood (Helen's Mother)
