I’ve had AB/SD for ten years and have read this bulletin board from time to time since 2001. Every now and then, we see a post from someone who has made progress with his or her voice and who is kind enough to share information about how this was achieved. When this happens, we regularly see a response from someone who says that this person didn’t have SD, that what helped them won’t work for SD patients, and that they are creating false hopes. To the contrary, it seems to me that this point of view may be dashing real hopes.Often, the people who say they’ve made progress have been diagnosed and/or treated by reputable doctors and sometimes the same doctors that NSDA says are the best in the business. Consequently, the inferences I would draw from the improvement of these patients is different. Perhaps the person really does have SD and has stumbled upon some method that has made his or her brain operate differently to overcome or to compensate for the manifestations of SD. Given that SD is known to be brain-based and given that well-documented research on neuroplasticity evidences that the brain can learn to operate differently in many respects, why should we think that it is impossible for the brain to learn to modify its performance to alleviate some or even all of the impact of SD? There is a huge number of documented cases of people having damaged brains and recovering function that was lost or impaired. Why should we think this is impossible for us?
Rather than dismissing the people who have experienced improvement, I believe we should look to them to learn more. Can we codify what they did into a program that can help more people? Is the fact that they believed they could get better a factor in their actually getting better? Research into how well placebos work is astonishing and provides yet another example of how little we understand about the brain and how robust its performance can be.
Let’s not blow off people who have improved and let’s not assume that improvement is impossible. Our knowledge of the brain is far from complete. Maybe these people are on to something and we should be listen to and learn from them rather than dismiss them and accuse them of creating false hopes. It could be that the information these people have becomes the basis of our best hopes.
Thanks for sharing with us, SDnoMORE. I believe you give us hope that even if SD cannot be cured, perhaps it can be overcome, at least to some degree.
