Saturday, January 17, 2009

Solving Dyslexia

By David Morgan

Curing dyslexia is usually easy if you work out what is causing it.

Being diagnosed as dyslexic just means that you have "specific learning difficulties with reading, despite normal intelligence". It does not give any information on what is causing the difficulties with reading.

So dyslexia is referring to the symptom not the cause. It is a bit like paying for a mechanic to tell you that your car has broken down. You knew that already! What you want to know is how to fix it.

In reality there are just a few causes that account for 95% of cases of dyslexia and most are easy to fix (or at least that is what we have found!).

Furthermore, 80% of dyslexia is caused by an "auditory deficit". This means that the person reading is not using their auditory brain cortex in order to read. They are using a purely visual approach, effectively viewing a word as a picture to be recognised.

The second major cause of dyslexia (affecting around 1 in 7 of the people struggling to read) is dyspraxia. Dyspraxia can make scanning lines of text very hard. But it is easily fixed with a few simple exercises.

So, don't accept a diagnosis of just dyslexia. Demand to know what is causing the dyslexia and you will then be just one step away from a cure. - 16928

About the Author:

No comments: