Tinsley House Support Thread

[IndigoBell]

An awful lot of us are now doing Tinsley House, either by going there, or by following the recommendations in The Brain Food Plan

So this is just a general support (and hopefully good news) thread.

Stage 1 of the TH therapy consists of:

1. Multivitamins

• Omega
• Zinc & Magnesium
• Multivitamin

1. Healthy eating diet

• High protein, low sugar, no artificial sweeteners, additives etc.

1. Specific exercises done 3 times a day

oh yes please purple!! and of course a place to keep our lively little lad busy!! is that bognor near there?as theres a butlins there to??

plus ive a question for whoever can answer it.....with all the info thats being given on here and robin pauc books,plus the info on his website,do you need to go there??is there enough info to go ahead and do everything yourself??

crazy If you get the brain food plan book it details the supplements and exercise regime which you can start straight away but obv for the computer based stuff ds would need to be seen at the clinic.

Crazy, it's in the New Forest near Lymington and Brockenhurst (mainline trains from Waterloo and Birmingham) Bognor's about 70 miles along the coast. Nearest city is Southampton, from London and above you take the M3 then M27 westbound

Peppa Pig World (aka Paulton's Park) is on the M27

I'd have to check but I think the nearest big chain is Premier Inn Lymington (New Forest, Hordle)

East Boldre, where TH is, is out the other side of Lymington

Lymington is a really nice market town....restaurants, nice shops etc...worth a look. Beaulieu is gorgeous...how I would love to live there

I do, well about 5 miles up the road.

Lymo's so posh, the residents association refused to let there be an Argos

It's a pound shop now, so that really worked

DD had a cookie yesterday and a muller rice and her behaviour was just awful. Do you think any slip of the healthy regime can evoke these changes or was it just a bad day?

Both are possible.

Only way to find out is to try again (not anytime soon) :)

I think if she is very sensitive to sugar, and you've practically cut it out for a few weeks, and then you re-introduce it, it could easily have a huge reaction on her.

Thanks Indigo no sugar hits today and she has been a lot better. I had given her an oat and raisen cookie yesterday thinking oats, raisens where's the harm obviously not considering the huge amounts of butter,sugar, honey and other crap that had gone into said harmless cookie
Ah well we live and learn!!

News Flash!

DS has just about finished the vision therapy. He has not been at all happy about doing it.

Just now he said to me "Oh, my vision's changed - it feels like a plastic sheet has come off in front of my eyes. I'm really enjoying my new vision"!!!!!!

:) :) :) :)

That is fantastic Indigo what exactly does the vision therapy involve?

Wow indigo that's fantastic

I'm sure DS seems calmer but I might just be imagining it...

It's a computer program you have to do for about 20 mins every day.

It has about 6 different exercises to do with eye tracking (pursuits & saccades) and convergence insufficiency (vergences, accommodation rock & jump duction).

This last one he's been struggling with has been 'jump duction' where he's had to make his eyes go cross eyed and then far apart, again and again, for 7 minutes.

I'm really thrilled. It really does make it all worth it. His vision is now improved!

Finally I've found a few minutes to post on this thread- this week has been too manic.
Really good to see all these posts of such positive progress . Indigo, the plastic sheet comment is fantastic!
We visited TH with ds (5.10, pathological demand avoidance- undx) mid jan.
Robin was great with ds, in fact so engaging that ds co-operated completely with the assessment- wow!
Apparently, ds has cerebellum dysfunction as well as convergence insufficiency (an eye teaming problem in which the eyes have a strong tendency to drift outward when reading or doing close work) and high frequency hearing loss.
The cerebellum dysfunction was no surprise to us at all but we hadn't realised ds had the vision and hearing issues.
Those latter two issues will be worked on later though. Luckily for us, ds is not at all fussy with food and so we've only had to make a few minor tweaks to his ordinary diet (increasing protein) and we were already supplementing anyway. For the moment then, we are just working on the stair exercises and spinning chair. Ds has got very good at the stairs now and can do about 8 reps quite easily. When he started doing them just three was a big challenge.
His behaviour on the whole has improved. There appeared to be good positive progress early on, but the last couple of weeks have been bad at school. However, this may be due to one of his job share teachers unexpectedly leaving and the rubbish other teacher not managing the class on a full time basis. Over half term he has had one very bad day but otherwise has been very cheerful and co-operative. His reading seems to have come on too, he's managed two pages of the BFG tonight .

Morning,
im reading all these threads and wondering how hard this diet is??
What do you do when you go out?cinema/party/friends etc?
What if your in a shop and you dc want a treat? or a biscut?
can you buy the freefrom stuff?
I can see huge battles! ds get treats and sweets on a sunday only,and he knows this,and reminds us of this,x

crazy Its been a lot easier that I thought tbh...ds1 hates any change to routine etc but he's been great. Even a small change could make a BIG difference IMO...ds1 still has oaty cookies and flapjacks (home made ones) and is fine. I think the really important things to avoid are: fizzy drinks, fruit squashes, sugary sweets, chocolate and too many carbs and to have potatoes and veg each day with dinner and a protein/cooked breakfast.

indigo Thats so amazing!!! Fantastic news. Cant wait for ds1 to start!....

Hello, I am supplementing and sort of trying the diet with my DS.

I'm not much of meat fan though, so the idea of giving him sausages every day or any other meat, for breakfast, makes me feel a bit queasy.

We have changed to porridge every day and DS seems to be fine on this. He has it made either with milk or water and we put bananas in it.

The main thing I wanted to ask though was: those of you who go to Tinsley House - do your children have squints or eye problems that have been diagnosed by opticians/eye hospitals.

DS has an alternating convergent squint. We go to Moofields at the moment. I am not sure whether to go to Tinsley House and want to find out whether anyone has had squints helped by the work done there - or if not squints then any other previously diagnosed eye conditions.

Thank you.

Skewiff - DS1 has a dx of nystagmus.

TH has lots of experience of kids with squints. The computer vision therapy is perfectly safe for all kids. Some of the exercises are acout tracking a moving object, some are about focussing near and far, and some are about going cross eyed and whatever the opposite is called.

You do this by wearing glasses with a red lense in one eye and a blue lense in the other. You can only see the square if you lookthrough both eyes equally. It starts off with the red and blueimage on top of each other, then as you can see that it moves apart. So the red and blue image are an inch apart and you have to somehow ficus your eyes so you can still see it through both eyes.

If you just look through one eye you can't see the square because it's printed half in red and half in blue.

Robin said this program has a 100% improvement rate - and a 94% success rate. The 6% who saw an improvement but not a full cure had all had surgery for squints.

For a while I thought DS wasnt going to be able to do it. And then just suddenly he was able to. And he says that yesterday his vision improved dramatically - but he has been doing it every day for about 35 days.

Anyway, I don't see anyway it could cause harm, because all you are doing is staring at a computer screen trying to see a square.

This is the software he uses.

re the squint question - ds2 had been under the Optomitrist at the hospital since he was 4 mths old for a squint - basically for the first 12 mths his left eye looked towards his nose no matter where he was looking! It improved as he got older and we were discharged last year (ds was just over 4) as according to them the squint was gone. I agreed as I hadn't noticed it for months.

Anyway when we went to TH I didn't bother mentioning it to Robin simply because it didn't occur to me.........until he asked if I realised ds had an inward turning left eye!

We are back in March so maybe we will start vision therapy then - until then we shall keep on with the exercises

Quick question - How long was it before your dcs were improving on their particular exercises? We are 2 weeks in and ds still can't stand on his left leg and brush his teeth by himself! Climbing the stairs is getting better but I still have to hold his shirt to stop him falling.

thank you for eye information (have to type with one hand, big baby on my lap)

It all sound v exciting indigo.

I want to complete RRT with hemispheres first - but do you think Tinsley House is better done sooner than later?

DS is nearly 5.

For those of you that have seen improvements after vision therapy, how is the attention/concentration of your DC? I cannot imagine my DS sitting I front of a screen for 5 minutes let alone 20.

How severe are the children treated? Over the years I have spent sooooo much money, I cannot afford it now, I am keen to find help for DS, but I am not working now so need to count my pennies.

whojamaflip- we've been doing exercises for nearly 6 weeks now. It took ds a few weeks to get the hang of the stair walking but he can manage 10 in a row now. However, his technique goes completely if he is tired or hungry. I still have to stand with my hand poised an inch or so from his back cos sometimes he tries to go down two steps at a time.
We have never really done the standing on one leg/teeth cleaning one because ds can't/won't clean his own teeth (we usually have to hold him so that we can do it for him). Instead, Robin said we could spin ds anti-clockwise on an office chair.

Skewiff - you can't do RRT at the same time as TH. My kids had already done RRT before TH - which I think maybe why they made progress so quickly.

If you're happy with hemispheres then it's reasonable to complete it first. Although start with the multivitamins now :)