Posting 700

I am not sure whether the rope was for keeping the warriors in,

or the customers out!

Stanley, Hong Kong, December 2010

I lost my Oh Dear List for January

The list is lost but this does not matter as I have already used most of the items on it at some time during the past few weeks and some of them have also appeared on other people's blogs, for example one turned up here:

http://thejadenproject.com/mauritius/?p=212

I am sure that my list will turn up again somewhere, perhaps when I get my new computer working hard for me. Or it will reappear when I sort out the material on the ten USB sticks that I carry around with me everywhere. I am going to put all the information that they store into good order on my very sleek, 500GB Netbook Friend Christmas present. I will unearth the list somewhere soon, and it can then appear in February.

Is this another Oh Dear or not?

I just received a Google alert for a newspaper report about another £45,000 trip to the USA, for a spinal operation on a very young child:

http://www.worcesternews.co.uk/news/local/8819502.Operation_could_give_our_brave_Ben_chance_to_walk/

I started this month, on January 6th to be precise, with a posting on the same operation, a dorsal spinal rhyzotomy, and received a lot of comments and emails from conductors. As I have yet to hear from Andrea Benyovszky, though, who I think has the most information on this subject, I will wait a bit longer before posting the information that I have gathered. Earlier posts on this topic, with reades comments, can be read here:

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2011/01/kasey-gray-comes-up-trumps-again.html

http://www.susie-mallett.org/2011/01/kasey-gray-comes-up-trumps-again.html

I still do not know whether the newspaper article above is another Oh Dear or not, but when I read this sentence, I did wonder:

"In the future, the operation may be available in the UK, subject to the NHS approving the procedure."

I wondered whether, before families fly off to America for this operation, the NHS makes the information available to them about why the operation has not yet been approved in the UK. From what I have read there do seem to be as many good reasons for not approving this operation as there are for approving it.

It is a very difficult decision to take, both for the NHS on whether to approve the operation and for a family as to whether or not to fly off to USA for it.

It is a decision that I would find very difficult to make. I have never been asked to advise a family who stand just before making this decision, but that does not mean the day will not come when I am asked. This is why I am trying to find out all that I can about it.

It would be nice to hear more reports from conductors who have worked with children pre- and post- the SDR op.

Posting 700

Funny title. It means that this is my 700th posting on the Conductor blog.

And don't forget that I have another blog running parallel to this one.

Susie Mallett's Conductive Upbringing and Lifestyle -

www.susie-mallett.com

Kasey Gray comes up trumps again!

Once again it is a small, small world


There were so many people at the Congress in Hong Kong who I had studied with in Budapest. Some of them I have been in contact with over the past twenty years others not.


One of these was Andrea Benyovszky who works in Grand Rapids.


Andrea gave two presentations in Hong Kong. The first I heard, it was about traditional and non-traditional cases in the conductive group. The second about selective dorsal rhizotomy I unfortunately missed because I was in a different, parallel session at the time that Andrea spoke.

Luckily for me I have some readers who are really on the ball. One of these is Kasey Gray in the USA! Just a few minutes ago she sent an email telling me: "I believe that Andrea Benyovszky at CLC in Grand Rapids, Michigan, has been keeping information on the children there and their experiences with SDR". It is lucky too that I have the book of Abstracts from the Hong Kong Congress, so I was immediately able to read what Andrea had presented there. Thank you Kasey for your prompt reply, I shall now email Andrea and see what more she has to tell me. Later I will publish all I can here.

Something that I realise already is that what I read this afternoon in the Britsh Government Reports described as a new treatment, had in fact been first reported back in 1913 and has been commonly performed in the United States since the mid-1980s. How old does something have to be not to be new any more?

I also gather from Andrea's abstract about this procedure that a selective dorsal rhizotomy has not in her experience reduced necessity for other muscle-release surgical procedures in most cases. I am still looking forward to hearing from others on this subject.

Thank you again Kasey for reading my blog and as always being a mine of information, and also to Andrea for providing such a good abstract for her Congress presentation.

More about Google alerts

Chinese Medicine store in Wan Chai, Hong Kong

But alerts to what?

In one of the postings that I wrote yesterday I congratulated Gábor Fellner. I had received a Google alert telling me that he had written an e-book. I noticed that Andrew Sutton had also picked up on this on his Facebook page.

Yesterday I soon realised that the link was not the official location for this " book" and that the material in question was already up on the Paces website, the link to which I put in yesterday's posting instead of the "unofficial location:

http://paces-school.org.uk/CONDUCTIVE%20EDUCATION.pdf

Today I received another Google alert about www.khuf.com. This is a search engine that has thousands of PDF files in its "collection". Apparently there are several about CE, which is why I receive the alerts to them.

Today's link:

http://khup.com/view/9_keyword-conductive-education/conductive-education-sink-or-swim.html

This article had no name of author, so I sent it on to Andrew Sutton suspecting that he would know! From looking at the timing of his Facebook snippets I think that he was on to the rest of the story before me, probably before I was even awake! You can read about what he found out at:

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=1540593482#%21/profile.php?id=1540593482

Thank you

I am sorry for the misleading information on my blog, but I am not sorry that the material that Gábor has written has found its way to me. I enjoyed reading it and have sent the link on to several other people. I found it to be comprehensive and hope that it will be particularly helpful to some families that I know who are just learning about conductive living.

Google alerts and what to do with them

Well I shall read them all from now on, and read them very carefully!

I have received another today. It is a link to yet another newspaper article describing yet another family's quest to raise money to take a child for treatment abroad.

Not conductive this time, not a trip to Hungary

I have been googling "selective dorsal rhizotomy" for the past hour or so and most of the newspaper headlines I found talk about a life changing operation in America.

I have been reading about the operation, about the positives and the negatives, and about some of the families who have travelled to St Louis with their children. I have noticed in photographs and video links that some of the children have been in conductive groups before and after this operation. I found no mention here, however, of Conductive Education.

Is there anyone outthere, conductors, clients, families, who can write here on my blog about their personal experiences of a selective dorsal rhizotomy operation?

I have never met a client who is considering undergoing the operation or who has undergone it.

I hope to learn more from my readers. I look forward to hearing from you.

Notes

Some of what I have been reading this afternoon

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhizotomy http://www.nice.org.uk/newsroom/pressreleases/NICEUpdatesAdviceOnCerebralPalsyOperation.jsp
http://guidance.nice.org.uk/IPG373

http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition-view.aspx?epref=Parents-4-SDR