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NACD Newsletter - Volume 5, Issue 5 - May 2012
In this issue:- Making the Most of Your Summer with NACD
- Oxygen: Why Use a Pulse Oximeter?
- Magic Pills, Magic Bullets, and the Latest New Thing
- Brags I: Mom Slays Wolf, Saves Child
- Brags II: Congratulations Gabe!
- Product Highlight: NACD Speech App
- Upcoming Evaluation Dates
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Making the Most of Your Summer
with NACD
by Ellen Doman
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 As the days get longer and warmer, we are all finding ourselves looking forward to summer. As evaluators, we look forward to summer as well. This is a most wonderful opportunity to make truly exceptional gains with your child. So as you are trying to figure out how to arrange your summer, let me make some suggestions.
Increase your child's physical activity level, taking full advantage of all of the possibilities. Get out of the house. If your child stims a lot, if your child is low intensity, if your child is highly oppositional or inattentive, lots of outdoor physical activity helps awaken and reset that child's function. It improves mood, yours and theirs. It improves oxygen levels. Swimming, biking, hiking, boating, riding, game playing are just a few activities that could be a part of daily life.
You have a longer day, meaning more opportunities to add more physical activities, more outside time. It will really increase the intensity levels for the low intensity kids and provide calming to those children who are over-stimulated. For our adults on program, physical activity is key for you to do better as well. Use it to manage stress, improve sleep, and improve focus.
But that's not all--summer can be used to expand your child's knowledge and excite them to learn more. Field trips and exploration of lakes, streams, wildlife sanctuaries, new parks and museums, new towns, new landscapes--whether they be mountains, deserts or oceans--all result in learning, increased intensity, language opportunities, and wonder. The brain loves new experiences. So whether you are wading through a local creek searching for tadpoles or wading through the waters on a beautiful beach, the experience results in learning.
Water is wonderful. Whether your child is tending a garden or playing on the slip and slide, water is high intensity stuff. Use it to reinforce good work, to wake up an inattentive child, or to disrupt a stimming child. Use it with water balloons for getting a sequence right, shooting at targets for visual tracking and for dominance training. Use it to delight a child and generate speech.
Plant a garden and make a unit study, a chore, a shared project, a family achievement. Let it be used to engage a stimming child in meaningful work. Let it be used to allow a child to feel helpful and engaged. Let it be used to promote self-esteem, to keep idle minds busy, to improve vitamin D levels, improve your child's nutrition, and be a learning experience. Let it be used to create extra produce that your child can share with neighbors and family members. Let it be used for the math of how far apart to put the plants, their rate of growth, their hours of sunlight exposure, their water consumption, their rate of production, the weight of the produce produced, the cost of producing it.
The changes in temperature, the length of the day, the number of bubbles you can blow, targets you hit with your water gun, shots you made with the basketball, volleys you made at badminton, homeruns, are all math that is real and fun and functional. Don't miss these opportunities to infuse the summer activities with learning that is real and relevant. Whether you are comparing the number of cardinals to the number of blue jays in your backyard, or counting the number of blossoming dandelions versus the number of flowers you planted, math can come alive outside.
Sequencing is a part of life if you think to incorporate it. "First we will water the roses, then the tomatoes and then the lettuce. After that we need to put the hose away and pick some of the peas and put that rake away." "After we ride bikes, let's play a little badminton and then get a snack but before we go, let's change our shoes." "Don't let me forget all these great things we are going to do." "Run in and get a jar so we can go catch some tadpoles. Put on your old sneakers because we might get wet and get mine while you're in there. Afterward remind me to look up what they eat so we can feed them."
This is your opportunity to lie in the hammock and read with your child. This is your chance to make up nonsense rhymes to be repeated while jumping rope. This is your chance to do visual tracking sending that birdie sailing over the net. This is your chance to have an incredible summer producing incredible change in your child. Don't miss it.
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Oxygen: Why Use a Pulse Oximeter?
by Steve Riggs, BS, RRT-NPS
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 The use of pulse oximeters has been growing throughout acute healthcare for years but has been slow to catch on in home health and long term care. It has been even slower to catch on for the use of monitoring oxygen trends in the general and special needs populations. NACD has been a spearheading group in recognizing the importance of oxygen levels in special needs groups and people healing from many types of brain injuries and developmental delays.
The pulse oximeter is inexpensive and very easy to use as a trending tool for families at home. Since the rehabilitation and learning in the brain is heavily dependent on oxygen being available, it is crucial we do everything we can to maximize oxygen delivery to the brain. The pulse oximeter can give us information about whether we are oxygenating as well as we need to. It also easily picks up on decreases in oxygenation during our daily living activities, learning, and sleep; decreases that can alter brain and body function or create problems that need to be corrected.
What does a pulse oximeter do? It uses an infrared light source to calculate or measure how much of the hemoglobin in our red blood cells is saturated with oxygen. Our blood contains red blood cells that have what is called hemoglobin in each cell. The hemoglobin has four sites where it can retain an oxygen molecule. Using a pulse oximeter we can check how much hemoglobin is saturated with oxygen and get a number referred to as saturation percentages. Normal oxygen saturation for most of us is 98 to 100%. In healthcare we usually consider 94% and above normal. When we go to see our doctors the majority of them will check our oxygen saturation routinely now and will refer to it as our "fifth vital sign." Our doctor will determine what is normal for us and if it is in acceptable ranges. If it is not, they will determine why and establish if it is okay or else create a plan to bring our saturations to within normal ranges.
Most of us have a thermometer, blood pressure cuff, or glucometer at home to track specific health concerns. We are just learning how helpful pulse oximeters are at home. Technology can be slow and initially expensive, so the use of pulse oximeters at home is just getting started. But if we have a need for a pulse oximeter, they are now easy to obtain and reasonably priced. If you are buying one on your own, you need to look at the specifications and what it will measure. If you have a heart condition and you know your oxygen saturation is usually 85%, you don't want to get a pulse oximeter that only measures 90 to 100% accurately. A good home pulse oximeter should measure 70% and above with good accuracy.
Having a monitor at home can be important for many people. Why is this? Having your oxygen saturation taken once is like having your picture taken once and expecting that the way you look will never change. The way we look changes all the time and so do our oxygen saturations. If saturations vary within the normal range, that is typical and okay. But if, for example saturations are in the range of 94% and your child takes a brisk walk and returns short of breath with saturation readings at 86%, then we need a doctor to assess those numbers and decide if an action or treatment is necessary or if there is a problem that needs addressed medically. We can only track this over time if we have a home pulse oximeter.
In summary, using a pulse oximeter at home is a quick, easy, inexpensive way to track oxygen saturation. Because brain function depends on good oxygenation, we can use pulse oximetry as an indicator of how our bodies are using oxygen. |
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Magic Pills, Magic Bullets, and the Latest New Thing by Ellen Doman
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 Have you heard about the latest supplement that fixes autism? Have you heard about this reading program that fixes dyslexia? There is this new exercise that immediately reorganizes the brain!
Every day there are new fixes out there. With our internet access we are bombarded with new information and the latest immediate solutions. While we all wish that we could wave our magic wands and ensure a brilliant future for our children, those wands just aren't real. Worse than that, they can be a waste of time.
NACD's strategies are based on decades of experience with thousands of children. We do, quite simply, what works utilizing thousands of activities that are used or discarded based on their overall ability to produce good outcomes. In addition to that we are going to do exactly what is right for your child. There is no "one size fits all" solution that provides what your child needs. Children are unique, complex, and changing. We do not assume that one approach or one product fits all children because it will not.
We do constantly seek new strategies to improve our outcomes, your outcomes. If we are going to work this hard, we want the best and fastest results possible. We will not, however, jump on the bandwagon of every new fad product or approach that is out there. We filter through new research and new technologies to find better ways to work on your child's various areas of development. As we find what works, we pass it on to you IF it is appropriate to your child at that time.
We have learned a lot and changed a lot over the years. As a result, we have a better understanding of higher, more complex levels of thinking. We are thrilled to pass what we learn on to you. This is a journey we are making together, moving your child forward to better thinking and better learning. On this road, there is no magic and not a lot of shortcuts either. What's there is work and progress, more work and more progress. Isn't that what we always want as parents? We want to know what to do to help our child and see progress.
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Brag: Mom Slays Wolf, Saves Child
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 While there are many children on my caseload that I am very proud of, with this particular issue I want to do something a little out of the box. Rather than brag about a child, I want to share with you how incredibly proud I am of one of the mothers that I work with. Since this is actually the month that we celebrate Mother's Day, I want to share with you the celebration of Victoria Jones. Like too many of the families in our generation, the Jones family faces the struggles that come with the now 1 out of 88 children who are considered within the Autistic Spectrum. For the Jones family, though, the statistics were even crueler. Of their 3 wonderful children, two of them are traveling a very difficult road. The child that I would like to focus on is Johnny, the younger boy. Let me paint a picture of where Johnny was. To start with, his ability to focus in on the correct auditory information in his environment took considerable effort and often the environment was way over-stimulating. Because his neurological response to deep tactile was so low, his play tended to be on the rough side. Due to his auditory sequential processing delays, his ability to follow directions was lagging way behind his chronological age. His deficits with working memory caused an inability to work through things in his head and come up with good solutions or make appropriate choices. While language and conceptual thought (thinking in words) were delayed due to his processing difficulties, his visualization, in contrast, was "off to the races." The gap between the visualization and conceptualization created his tendency for frequent melt-downs. To add to all of these developmental pieces, from a physiological standpoint, this young boy was wound tight. This combination of issues led to many conflicts with siblings, other children, and adults as well. The amount of stress for mom and dad was tremendous, as the rest of the world would tend to look upon the situation without the understanding of the developmental pieces and quickly judge a "behavioral problem." Many of you can imagine these circumstances. Some of you live them.
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Brag: Congratulations Gabe!
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 You may remember Gabe from reading his story in a previous newsletter. We're happy to announce that after three years of very hard work by both mom and Gabe, today was his final evaluation at NACD, Utah chapter! He will be attending private school in the fall and is SO ready! We are very proud of Gabe and the wonderful progress he has made.
(Great work, mom!)
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UPCOMING EVALUATIONS
June 2012
Philadelphia
Los Angeles
New Jersey New Chapter!
Chicago
Orlando
Milwaukee
India
Dallas
Ogden
July 2012
Philadelphia
Phoenix
Seattle
Charlottesville
Ogden
Dallas
India
August 2012
Cincinnati
Bay Area
Atlanta
Ogden
Dallas
India
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NACD - The National Association for Child Development
549 25th Street - Ogden, UT 84401
801-621-8606
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