Dore USA have kindly allowed me to reproduce this information as some of us on the forums were wondering about retained primitive reflexes.my hthanks to Amy for posing the question in the first place.
"Your question about primitive reflexes is an interesting one.
These reflexes are elicited from the spinal cord, brain stem and midbrain levels. As you know they tend to go away very early in infant life. Some people with damage to higher level brain systems (e.g. Cerebral Palsy) can demonstrate such reflexes much later in life.
However a most important note is that you cannot get rid of these reflexes. They are always present. However they are suppressed by the increasing integrity of the function of the higher brain systems (including the cerebellum). If these systems are not fully developed then there may be varying degrees of manifestation of such reflexes.
If any normally developed person received substantial brain damage such reflexes will no longer be fully inhibited and will manifest themselves once again at any time in life.
Thus focusing on exercises which merely counteract and oppose such reflexes is not the most appropriate way of suppressing them. Dore believes that the development of higher functional integrity of cerebellar-cerebral loop systems is the only real way to develop better higher learning systems and at the same time suppress these lower level reflexes not so much by using direct opposing movements but more naturally by developing higher systems more naturally and allowing this to suppress such reflexes indirectly.
We do measure two reflexes linked to the vestibular cerebellar systems (the Moro and ATNR).
We find that in almost every child and adult who show such reflexes that they have gone by the end of the programme.
Thus I do not see any advantage in trying to identify and suppress individual reflex actions prior to using Dore and would suggest (from our research) that Dore would be just as effective whether or not such reflexes were present at the start of Dore."
1 comment:
When I've spoken to Dor on Primitive Reflexes they have always been very dismissive of them. Some of this comes from Dore's belief that only his system can work and no other can have any benefit. This is not a view I share.
After doing the Dore programme I found out about INPP and their work with Primitive Reflexes. Subsequently I've been fully assessed and was found to still have some a lot of retained reflexes. It very strange how you don't realise that these reflexes limit your movements until someone points them out.
I done various exercises to work on my retained reflexes and my range and freedom of movement has improved. I cannot say whether this has helped my language skills as these got such a boost from Dore and have continued to improve ever since.
My belief from looking at both sets of research and from doing the two different forms of training is that they are doing the same thing neurologically. INPP training focuses on activities that most children learn in the first 18 months: Moving limbs independently, flexing the back and crawling. Dore's training tackles skills normally learnt between 18 months and 4 years, e.g. balance and hand/eye coordination.
I suspect the optimum training programme would start with the INPP and move on to Dore as this mimics the natural developmental process.
Love the blog and its great to see Matthew making good progress.
Chris
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