I had a look at it and also Googled for Australia only. In Australia, doctors are not permitted to advertise personally; however, a lot of them get around this by advertising their clinics and their services in other ways.
It was very interesting to NOT find much on this in Australia. Another point - if this is a recognised modality, in Australia we can claim part of the cost back through either public or private health insurance. I'd have to make further enquiries but I'm not sure if this would be covered. I believe Dore is not covered, for example.
Looking at it in detail, it sounds like it would work really well, providing your child genuinely has the sort of problems this would address. And I can't see how an Occupational Therapist (OT) would know this. This comes under the scope of a speech and language pathologist, as far as I can determine. Without an assessment indicating that your child has a problem with clearly identifying and distinguishing certain sounds, this might be an expensive waste of money and time.
If, on the other hand, your child really does have this sort of problem and you can afford the time and effort needed and know he would be compliant, then yes, go for it.
I do worry about things like this - they could be so good, or they could be an expensive rip-off. Desperate families are ripe for exploitation. There are some really good alternative modalities which might be really helpful, except some person has patented the practice or some aspect of it, so therapy is only available to the rich. Where a service is exclusive, in that they can only take on a small number of clients perhaps because they don't want to share too much information and hence be undercut, then economic laws of supply and demand mean that the program is often priced really high, to the point where few people apply; just enough for the therapist to make bucketloads.
Sometimes a program is expensive due to the need to involve staff intensively. This of course pushes costs up which pushes price up; but again, only the wealthy can afford it.
If there were something available which you could administer yourself, such as a set of tapes which you buy and then use at home, such tapes shouldn't cost more than the latest most expensive rock albums. In fact, you should be able to download the files as MP3, perhaps with some royalties included in the pricing (as happens with all performers' popular music).
Maybe they might use the argument that a lot of professional input has gone into the tapes and the people's work has to be paid - that's where royalties come in. Or they might say, "We're a small concern, demand is low, we're not exactly in the top of the pops, economies of scale are a problem" Not so these days, where rock groups are getting their start by selling their work online only, in MP3 format. A small concern can sell for the same overheads as a big one. A recording artist just getting started can have a few people needing to be paid (including the costs of the video clip) and still sell for a reasonable price online. And if he gets discovered from there, then maybe a record company will pay to produce mass pressings of CDs.
So there should be no reason for individual tracks, in MP3, to not be available for a price no higher than buying the latest pop song from iTunes. A clinic producing 20 CDs a month should still be able to sell them for the same price as a record company, especially since most of the music they use is outside copyright (so they won't be paying royalties to artists).
Of course the cost of the program will have to increase for every hour you have to spend with a professional supervising the program. If that professional is doing nothing more than putting headphones on a child who is using equipment which could be available in any home, then someone, somewhere, is making a fast buck of the program. It could be a darn good program, but it's still a rip-off in my book if that is what is happening.
If the equipment is vastly different in a way which makes a huge difference to the program outcome, then fair enough. But if there are other, cheaper ways of getting the same result - then that should be what is done.
An example - we had a sales person approach us in the shopping centre. We also saw ads on TV and promotional packages being given away - all for a maths tutoring software package (which I won't name here, they'd sue me). We happily accepted their offer for an in-home consultation (which you have to have, before you can but the package). So after having to pay the person in the shopping centre, and pay for the TV advertising, and cover the costs of the giveaway packages on TV kids game shows, paying the teacher-consultant who came to our home is the next person needing to have their hand out.
The consultant arrived. He had his own computer (easy child). The software was installed on his computer and we let our kids loose on it. easy child was our main focus at the time - she was about to enter high school, so he tried her on the high school package. She did some maths problems and we noticed the different ways in which the computer can show you how to do the problem. We also noticed that the program was still fairly inflexible in other ways.
The package - we would have to buy a lesson package which covered half of high school and then another package to cover the later years. It came with free packages in other subjects (spelling & grammar) which frankly we didn't need. But we wouldn't be sent a software package, what happens is that the teacher-consultant comes to your home and installs the package for you. It's copy-protected. If you need to change computers it sounded like a huge problem to then have to get the consultant out again to supervise removing the package from the first computer before he could install it on the new one.
We were told that a teacher-consultant is available during business hours to talk to about any problem the kid is having. We would have to file weekly reports which the software package would download, so we could say honestly that our child was using the package sufficiently. Failure to do this voided the warranty (which was a guarantee that our child's maths ability would improve).
We talked to friends, we considered it again (and had another updated consult) when difficult child 3 was beginning home-schooling. And the word came back to us - the always-available phone tutor was almost non-existent after the first few months; trying to keep your kid working was difficult but this family we spoke to managed it; but their child still did not improve and the warranty was never honoured.
The cost in Australia was somewhere between $6,000 and $8,000. It cost even more if you bought more modules (if you wanted your other children to have access, for example).
We knocked it back. We would have had to buy a new computer just for that software, anyway - it wasn't available on Mac.
If that package had been marketed less aggressively, without paying all those teacher-consultant/sales people, it should have been cheap enough to compete in the market place. It also claimed to follow our curriculum - it didn't.
Since then, we've found an online website to which we can subscribe. It has teachers available to telephone if we need help or any other glitch and yes, they're there - we had to contact them when we had trouble with accessing the website. We have subscribed to it, it costs $99 a year. A big difference to thousands and thousands.
What I'm trying to say - if a treatment method is good and it works, there should be no need for it to cost far more than seems right. And if it does come with a hefty price tag and you can't afford it, then maybe do the research yourself and see if there is something else around that is cheaper. Alternatively, after you've taught yourself the modality and also worked out how to produce the tapes etc, develop your own program. Most computers these days can modify the frequency output of sound files. We have a neighbour who loves playing with sound files and cleans up the sound on old vinyl records. It's the same technology that can be used to produce this stuff.
Then you can share your output with your local support group.
Marg
