Professor Dorothy Bishop of the University of Oxford’s Department of Experimental Psychology found the evidence favoring Dore Achievement Center efficacy to be wanting. Writing in an official journal of the Royal Australasian College of Physicians, Professor Bishop cautioned physicians and other clinicians not to accept inadequate evidence for the program.
Dore Achievement Centres are springing up world-wide with a mission to cure cerebellar developmental delay, thought to be the cause of dyslexia, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyspraxia and Asperger’s syndrome. Remarkable success is claimed for an exercise-based treatment that is designed to accelerate cerebellar development. Unfortunately, the published studies are seriously flawed. On measures where control data are available, there is no credible evidence of significant gains in literacy associated with this intervention. There are no published studies on efficacy with the clinical groups for whom the programme is advocated. It is important that family practitioners and paediatricians are aware that the claims made for this expensive treatment are misleading.
On LD Blog I have previously expressed doubt about the Dore program. You can read those entries: Going backwards, Dore dinged, and Dore more (the last includes a comment by Chris Tregenza, who advocates the treatment).
Bishop, D. V. (2007). Curing dyslexia and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder by training motor co-ordination: Miracle or myth? Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health, 43, 653-655.
Link to the abstract for Professor Bishop’s article.
Without access to the full comments its hard to assess how balanced Prof Bishop’s comments are.
Interestingly Prof Bishop has done work on dyslexia and the cerebellum and found a correlation. Check out [ http://www.myomancy.com/2007/09/dore-research-questioned ] for more information.
Chris