Our skin is our largest sensory organ, followed closely by our muscles and skeleton, connected by our nervous system and governed by our brain. The sensory systems feed information from our environment, through sense receptors, and neural impulses via our nervous system, directly to the brain. The brain then organizes it, sends it back through the nervous system for use as understanding, adaptation, learning, and skill development.
When this system functions well, it allows a person to interact with their environment efficiently, developing necessary motor and language skills, and appropriate social/emotional behavior. When this system is unable to organize the information appropriately, a variety of symptoms can present; motor delays, tactile defensiveness, learning disorders, social or emotional difficulties, speech, and language deficits or attention disorders.
The Purpose and Benefit:
The DPPT has been found very beneficial to children with sensory integrative dysfunction, as outlined in the previous paragraph. This technique helps the brain and body work together more effectively. Benefits noted are:
- Can improve ability to transition between activities (calming after emotional outburst, improving tolerance levels.)
- Can help children who have a fear of discomfort in being touched (tactile defensiveness)
- Can increase self regulation, self calming.
- Can increase the ability of the nervous system to use information from the senses more effectively, i.e. speech/motor skills.
- Can improve attention and focus.
Benefits received are directly related to correct administration and consistency.
The Technique:
To use this technique with out instruction from a trained therapist could be harmful at the extreme, and at the minimum, useless.
Therapists interested in offering this technique should contact the above mentioned group to be trained at an official seminar. Families should ensure the therapist offering this technique has the most recent training available.
Pediatric Building Blocks recommends that anyone who has been shown this technique be "updated" annually and their technique checked out by a trained therapist.
The DPPT uses a specific pattern of stimulation delivered through a specific type of brush and gentle joint compression or “pushing” to send information to the brain in an organized fashion. Simply put, it primes the brain to receive and organize information in an effective and useful way. It is done approximately every two hours for a specified number of days and then according to the needs of the child. Consistency is a critical factor! However, the protocol can be administered in between scheduled sessions, to assisting with transitions between activities, reducing overwhelm reactions, and re- organizing the nervous system after emotional upset.
The brush used for this technique, is a soft plastic surgical brush. OTHER TYPES OF BRUSHES ARE NOT APPROPRIATE FOR THIS TECHNIQUE! This brush has been found to be the most effective in stimulating nerve endings in the skin. The actual brushing is done using a very firm pressure, starting at the arms and working down to the feet, avoiding the chest and stomach. Brushing these sensitive areas may cause urination, defecation or vomiting. The brushing is slow and purposeful providing “proprioception” (input through muscles and joints.) It is not ‘scrubbing’, and should never be painful, or cause damage to the skin. The joint compression is also done in a specific pattern; ten count repetition, using light pressure.
We started OT (occupational therapy) this week and have went to 3 classes. I LOVE our therapist, her name is Teresa and she is great with Olena. We have started the body brushing and joint compressions which you probably read above, while I was a bit skeptical, Olena really enjoys it. You can just watch her go completely relaxed. We are instructed to repeat it every two hours while she is awake. Being only the first week, I haven't seen any changes in her behavior, but Jason and I have been able to work with her on a different level using things that we have been learning. This seems to be helping with the way we actually handle the problem situations. I am going to bust my butt this week to get us back on the strict schedule, with summer being here, we have been lazy in keeping that in check. It helps us too, so I don't know why we fall off track so easily? But we are moving along and learning everything we can, anything that is going to make us a happy family again is worth doing, trying and learning right now!! Keep us in your prayers.
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