Dore Talk

Hello to anyone who knows me. I was a PS at Manchester and I know how succesful the programme has been for so many families and clients. It breaks my heart that I will no longer have the priveledge to see you again, unless a buyer can salvage the company. Please don't be angry at Wynford, I know he never set out to hurt anybody either emotionally or financially. I have no job, no pay to cover my bills/morgage etc but I still hope a solution is out there. I have been with the company from it's early days and I can honestly say that I loved my role and helping others. I don't know were I will turn or what I will do but one thing is for sure I will never regret the last 6 years and all I have seen. Please feel free to contact me but please don't attack me,as I have seen so many do on these forums. Friday tore my Heart out and I can't imagine how Wynford and his family are feeling, as not only was it his own money lost but his dream too, unless another solution is found. I understand all your worries and frustrations as you can imagine the staff have theirs too. I wish everyone that I have had the priveledge to meet and help all the best for the future and hope that there is a resolution soon so that I may get to see you all again. With love Sue

Hello Sue, thankyou for posting here. The fact that you are still supporting Wynford after what happened will hopefully show the Dore bashers what a genuine person Wynford is. This whole situation is so heartbreaking but I am holding on to the hope that Wynford will find a solution for us somehow. I hope you find another rewarding job in the future and wish you and all the other Dore staff all the best. Thankyou for all you have put into the programme, it really has changed lives.

DEBBIExx

Thanks for the responce, I know it must be hard to stay hopefull but it cant be over yet. Too much good has come from this so far, I implore past clients to post their changes so others can see it wasnt a wasted journey.

Thanks Sue for all your good work over the past years, we are hoping there will be something to salvage and clients will get some help in completing this life changing programme.

 Welcome Sue and thank you for your response I am also in agreement with Debbie and Lelly that I hope a solution will be found soon, so that Dore can carry on the work it set out to do. It has touched and changed so many lives over the years and for that reason it should be allowed to continue.

We have said that us clients who have gone through the treatment and seen what it does, what better way to show their apreciation and gratitude to Wynford and all those who work at Dore by making it be known to all who will listen how Dore has changed in their lives. Stand up and be counted will be one way to silence the critics in this, but I am sure there will still be those who will say anti dotel ?sp evidence does not count!!!!!. Ellie XXX

Susan, I've posted this on another thread, hope it is helpful:

'Staff should read this guide to getting some wages back, up to £330/week, more detailed information for employees here (pdf). Forms and how to apply are at Redundancy Payments Service. You should apply for Jobseeker's Allowance immediately, as it can't be backdated & will affect how much you can get from the RPS.'

Good luck. 

Hi Duck I was angry with some of your coments before but without your information I was just in the dark, a little like a mushroom. Please let me tell you it was a shock and heart breaking to have to tell staff they no longer had job's as well as telling client's they now lnger had a chence. You have taken over this blog for no reason? what have u lost? what have u given. I have

hey Duck I wasnt being rude half way thru what I wanted to sayt it cut me off. I do care. Tell me where you are because uk reeing and r looking looking for support which I am sure Wynford will give once he knows

Susan,

I started writing my blog 'cos I'm interested in the research, and making all the information available so people can make an informed choice about what has been shown to work. I've been trying to post what I can to help because whatever I think about the research, I don't like what's happening to the clients & those who worked with them. I have dyspraxia, many of my family have SpLDs.

Thanks,

Duck. 

Hey what can I say. I adored my job and helping others, it what got me up every day and made me believe there is more good than bad out there. The press and governments would have you all believe kids today are horrible and deliquent but I know this is not true because I have met so many wonderful children and teenagers who have been written off because people dont understand the difficulties that they are suffering due to dyslexia, dyspraxia and attention deficit disorder. I wish them them all well as well as thier families. Keep in touch. Sue

The operative word for problem children, teenagers and adults is "written off" as you say Sue, was there research into the cause of these children going into adulthood and being classed as delinquant, thick and untreatable.

Dore broke that mould by looking beyond the childs behaviour and realising that there was a root cause for the problem and more than any other treatment went out and started doing something about it. Not only are our children now missing out but so is the prison centers that were also taking part in the treatment. What of the future for them and those that will come after them.

For once Duck all the research that has been branded as the only true proof  will not now help these people, unless of course the powers that be realise that Dore did have something of benefit here and start to look into it themselves. Many will brand the research under their own name but it was Dore that started it all off and IT WAS CHANGING LIVES!!!!!!

Hopefully the research started by Dore will continue and it will become a part of every child's treatment within schools in the future. To me the old school and research belief that to deal with learning difficulties is to teach a child to manage their disablility is outdated and has no place in the 21st century. Dore has proved by ANTI-DOTAL?sp evidence that it does work. It is time for all those who hype about research put their money where their mouth is and start doing their own research!!!!!

For every child, teenager and adult that came through Dore changed for the better and are living normal lives like my daughter Leila they are living proof that it works and it would be a travesty for all future generations if it was ignored. Ellie XXX

 

The hardest thing for me is that I am a mother of a child going through the program ( whom has improved so much), and I am a PS of nearly two years standing in Australia so I know clients at all levels, just starting, nearly completed and the dreaded 3 month stage.  Of those in the 3 month stage (moods regression etc) - keep going, even on the same book. I had my little boy allergy tested at 3 months because he was off the wall.  By 4 months I did not follow up on the allergy testing because he took off (in a positive light)!!!!   He also had a regression stage on mental tasks, after the second book, we saw some behaviours return that we had not seen in months and his concentration at school went out the window.  Once again after this brief period(4 to 6 weeks for those in it now) he flew forward.  My son was very dyspraxic, this week alone we had the school sports,  out of an age group of 40 kids he came second overall in high jump (jumping his height of 136cm using scissor jump ) and came overall 4th in the 100 metre sprint.  This is a child whom used to run with his hands and arms (and legs) flapping in the breeze. It  was amazing to see considering his gross motor skills were so severly affected when we started Dore, he is hypermobile, low tone, severe pronated feet, it was hard enough socially and academically for him but the main thing I was concerned about (as all parents are - was his self esteem) but dore has helped him connect.  He reads now as much as he likes to watch tv  (because that used to be his only way to glean information as he wanted to learn but could not) he now connects with a peer group, has sleepovers and parties- basically now he has hope - something I did not have much of for him only a few years ago.  I remember turning up to his grade 1 teachers class, tears in my eyes, asking a teacher not to be so hard on him, that he isnt lazy, he genuinely cannot concentrate and that all I wanted was for him is to have the self esteem to travel through his teenage years without turning to drugs or some other way out of his life (his father, aged in his 40s still has the same problems and self esteem is his biggest problem so I do know the long term effects).  Dore has been our answer.  Please Wynford, if you read this use this as your catalyst to help those parents like myself, what you have done so far is outstanding, at a personal cost to you and your family.  Currently I am in a similar situation,at a smaller level,  finding it hard to find money for basic bills, all in all, I do not regret my son doing dore, I just regret we didnt get it out or finish all clients  that needed it.  All of the clients that attended Maroochydore, Qld, Australia, we would love to get in contact with you but cannot because our clinic is closed and we cannot access your phone numbers.  There are so many children and familys there that we absolutely loved, lived through the good times and the bad with, tried so hard, in our small way to make things better.  I am so sorry for this. UK dore, could you please at least make the link of dore talk available through the aussie website again so that aussie familys may access dore talk, we are all out in the dark down under and any information and a bit of consideration for our familys would go a long way?????  We may live accross the ocean but we do have the same concerns as everyone else, putting the link back on the UK site would be a good idea as well, if you really do have consideration for the concerns of all clients and staff at dore whom have been left in the dark at the moment.   Thanks

Miss Ellie, my undergrad project, carried out single-handed & unfunded, has tested 12 people with a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and 12 matched controls. Balsall Common only had six participants with an actual diagnosis of dyslexia, and that's all the £5M of research and many people much more qualified than me ever had published on Dore.

It's also not the case that things like processing speed, balance, & all the other areas Dore claimed to look at are ignored by 'mainstream research'. My project (supervised by Hulme, Snowling is probably going to use my data) is looking at speed of processing & working memory in dyslexia, & I've been testing people on things like reaction times & putting pegs into holes quickly. I'm putting together my bibliography this morning, & right now I'm reading a paper by Snowling which references three papers by Nicholson & Fawcett (advocates of the cerebellar deficit hypothesis, Nicholson co-authored Balsall Common), & I'll probably have referenced a few myself by the time I've finished. My course supervisor, Prof Hitch, together with Baddeley who's also at York, came up with the dominant model of how memory & processing works in 1974 and has been applying it to areas including education since then. Dore did not 'start it all off', even Wynford's book says that he came up with the ideas after reading about other people's work (Learning Breakthrough et al which have been around a lot longer).

I am 'putting my money where my mouth is and doing my own research!!!!!'. I'm very hopeful that what I'm doing now will help people, by finding out more about how dyslexia works & how to help. Some of my classmates do volunteer in prisons (I do stuff elsewhere). I'm also walking talking proof that you don't need Dore to 'live a normal life' with SpLDs, and that 'learning to cope' doesn't mean SpLDs have to hold you back.

Duck I applaud you in your research but the children who do the Dore programme don't need to "learn to cope". A huge number of them don't have learning difficulties any more. Even you must agree that the programme can't be allowed to just disappear. Good luck with your research but I only have to look at my daughter to know that the programme works. We can't lose it now.

Well said Debbie, I also applaud your efforts on the research front Duck, but you still seem to see sp LD's as not curable. What researchers have to do is not look at how children can cope with their disabilities, but what Dore have that ultimately meant that those difficulties were no longer there.

This is the angle they should be looking at but because there is the old school belief that conditions like dyslexia cannot be cured, the research angle will continue to be old hat and out dated it will not go forward.

Wynford may not have started it all as you say but he did bring it out of the closet and onto the world arena the research they have undertaken has expanded on the work done by LB and others to where Dore is today, that is the differance.  

He has set the scene now for further research to be undertaken, if the arguing would stop about whether it is a cure or not and for researchers to be open minded enough to consider the possiability that us antidotal parents are just as important evidence as the written word then we might get somewhere!!!!.

You are at the moment looking at one aspect of learning difficulties but Dore is a package rolled into one, you will not have a chance to work with Dore now in the foreseable future which is a shame because to my way of thinking, hands on research is the only way to find out whether something works or not.

I did a thesis for my nursing  attached to a university on the use of maggot therapy for sloughy wounds and it's feasability to be used within the community setting. Research I found was slim, mainly antedotal evidence presented by those that had used it. But I was aware that many patients were having weeks even months of pain and discomfort with none healing wounds. I was open minded enough to consider their feasability even though I did meet oposition from colleagues that they would not work.

So I looked at the meager research available and then used the maggots on a chosen, agreeable selection of patients, 10 years down the line they have proved their worth in treating wounds and are used regularly within the patients own homes, instead of the controlled enviroment of a hospital setting.

My point is if there is something out there that can have an affect on the quality of life for a patient with debilitating wounds or a child with LD's then it is worth using. I could have left my patients in years of discomfort with conventional means or as you say leave a child floundering as not all will learn to cope with their disabilities but why? when there are maggots and Dore out there to get rid of those problems completely.

(Sorry Wynford the Dore treatment is not in the same league as maggots I know but it shows a point) Ellie XXX

Miss Ellie,

I'm looking at a fairly small part of Dyslexia because the specific study I'm doing is basic background research on an aspect of the underlying processes, rather than looking at a treatment - a bit like doing test-tube trials in drug development. Eventually this will feed into improvements to the way dyslexia is understood & treated as a whole, but that's just not the area I'm covering now.

I completely agree that trialling new things is important. These sorts of trials, quite rightly, usually start off small, and if an interesting effect is observed, others can replicate it, larger-scale trials can be carried out, the treatment can be improved and targeted to be of most help to the people who will benefit most. What concerns me about Dore is that they haven't done the larger-scale trials necessary to justify the larger number of people being treated. If you'd tested your maggots on just six people with wounds, then rolled this out to tens or hundreds of thousands of people worldwide, without testing this against other treatments or no treatment, and then said your treatment had lots of scientific evidence to back it up, you'd be morally wrong 'cos you'd not know you were doing the best thing by thousands of people. You simply don't know whether your patients would have got better anyway, whether they would have got better faster with a different treatment, or how to make your treatment work better than it does already. If then you resorted to issuing legal threats to patients who just wanted to say 'maggots didn't work for me', some people might get a bit upset.

It's definitely worth trying new things, I'd hardly be so interested in research if it wasn't! But it's also worth checking carefully what works to make sure everyone gets the best possible treatments. If Dore was a drug treatment making the claims it does, they'd have had to run tests on thousands. One of the largest maggot trials was at York, with 600 people, at a cost of £750,000. Tens of thousands of people and millions of pounds later, Dore still only has the one trial with six diagnosed dyslexics, 2 dyspraxics, & one child with ADHD. The results and claims are not in proportion.

FWIW, my parents regard me as 'cured'. I'm doing well academically, have good friends and a LTR, compete in sport at a national level, and generally confound a lot of the low expectations other people have had of me. Some of the posts on here do talk about parents still needing to look for ways to give their children extra help even post-Dore. 'Cure' is a tricky word, and I think we've discussed it before. My research has mostly involved university-level dyslexics, all of whom were doing well here. However, careful neuropsychological testing revealed that, on average, there were still things that they did a bit differently from matched controls - but in normal life people aren't expected to do weird psychological tests designed to push their minds 'till they stop being able to cope, so it doesn't make any practical difference - they are effectively 'cured'.

I'm sure if I compared Dore to maggots people would be a bit cross! ;) 

(I'm sure if I compared Dore to maggots people would be a bit cross! ;) Proably because you haven't got an open mind then or seen the benefit. They are good little workers and do make a difference to peoples lives, just as Dore does. Don't quote me about the legal and ethical issues Duck. My life has been spent helping others within nursing and have done 7 years of training so far to get where I am today. It does not help anyone on here we are not doing PHd's just parents with antidotal evidence.

I have researched but many people haven't so I do not see why I should shove research down their throats with qoutes and links. I don't want to read them it just confuses the issues.

The sarcasm isn't lost on me Duck and for one to another, taking a leaf out of the argument from the pro research brigade " if you were considered cured then they would say you never had any Learning difficulties to start with!!!!! Ellie

Hi Sue This is Denise I was a pa & my daughter was on the program until I was made redundant last year. I can't imagine why anyone would attack you. You are one of the nicest people I have ever met & genuinely dedicated to what you do. When I was made redundant it broke my heart as I truly believed in what Dore stood for & still miss working there. I hope something can be done to resolve the situation & continue to help people. I know a lot of ex employee's are very negative & bitter, I'm not one of them. Good Luck to everyone & hopefully there will be some good news soon.

I wasn't intentionally being sarcastic, sorry - sarcasm tends to go straight over my head, especially on the Internet.

I like maggots. My brother used to hold maggot races at school fairs, and dye them different colours with food colouring. Too right, most people don't appreciate them though. 

The thing I'm finding really interesting about my current study is that it shows that people who are very, very high-functioning, getting a First in English and so on, completely 'well' by the broadest possible WHO definition of health, still have hidden difficulties if you know where to look for them. I'm coming up with statistically significant differences between the groups on tasks like non-word phoneme deletion ('take the /k/ from 'skwem', what word do you get'). This is true even for dyslexics who've done explicit phonological awareness training, though less so - if I had more people I'd do a sub-group analysis but basically I'm seeing three clusters on that test, non-dyslexics, phonological-awareness-trained dyslexics, and dyslexics who've not had explict phonics-based instruction. The groups are matched pairwise for age, gender, and education, so these are dyslexics who are doing just as well as the non-dyslexics but they still show up as different on some very specific tests. You could definitely consider most of them 'cured+++' for everyday purposes, but they still show up as subtly different if you really know where to look.

I'd actually love to try extending my study with a comparison group of dyslexics who've been through Dore, but all the commercial confidentiality stuff makes it very difficult for 'outsiders' to do that sort of research. Oh well...

(excuse rambling-ness - I'm coming up with some really cool results today & getting far too excited about it. Yep, I'm a geek).