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Andrews/Reiter Institute
Sun, 03/29/2009 - 16:16Topic: Complementary Therapies
I stumbled across this website for the Andrews/Reiter Institute in California, where they claim an amazing success rate for stopping seizures without drugs. It almost sounds to good to be true, and I can't find anyone who has any experience with them. It seems like with a success rate that high they would be front page news in the world of Epilepsy, but none of the Dr.s , nurses, or other people in our support group has ever heard of them. If anyone reading this has any experience with them, please respond. There are alot of us out here that are extremely interested. Thanks for your help.
Comments
Re: Andrews/Reiter Institute
Submitted by Matt74 on Sun, 2010-11-07 - 00:35
I should add that I think she is right about some of her basic principles. Using my terms I would say that psychological (and physical) stress causes neurological stress which can lead to seizures. I think that your nervous system gets excited with stress and at some point this lowers your seizure threshold and you have a seizure. Learning to control this stress keeps the brain running more like it should, and you have fewer seizures. Some people can stop a seizure in progress. Some people can even keep them from happening altogether. Epilepsy with an identifiable physical cause can be helped, because, as she pointed out, you may always have a tumor, or whatever it is, but you are not always having seizures. There must be other causes. The physical condition may be a cause of the seizures, but it is not the only cause or factor. There are things you can do.
Re: Andrews/Reiter Institute
Submitted by jackson12 on Sat, 2011-02-05 - 02:46
fhh
Re: Andrews/Reiter Institute
Submitted by Matt74 on Sun, 2010-11-07 - 00:21
I visited Donna Andrews in Santa Rosa, and followed up with her for a couple months. I had very mixed feelings about the whole thing. If I remember correctly Dr. Andrews at one point suffered from very serious encephalitis, which left her with considerable brain damage, and very frequent grand mals. At this point she was basically incapable of taking care of herself, and was miserable. Over time she found ways to avoid triggers and meditation/deep breathing to eliminate her seizures. She has been seizure free for many years. She is very passionate about what she does, and invested in helping other people. She works very hard. Dr. Reiter is still working out of the same office but is in semi-retirement and no longer involved in the program per se. According to the website there is supposed to be a consultation with a neurologist, but this did not happen (I have seen plenty of doctors, however). The treatment did not seem as systematic as the website suggested to me. Dr. Andrews (Ph.D) gave me two days of psychological testing, and went over the results with me in depth. I met with her assistant (who had also stopped her seizures using the Andrews/Reiter method), for one afternoon and did a session of biofeedback with an introduction to deep breathing and visualization/meditation. She gave me a CD recorded by Dr. Andrews to listen to as an aid to guided visualization. Afterwards we spoke once a week on the phone for about two months. She has some good insights about living with epilepsy. I was not comfortable with some aspects of the meditation. It seemed like a good thing to me to focus on reducing stress, and taking a time out to let your brain reset. However some parts seemed to have more religious or spiritual content than I was comfortable with. I believed that there was merit to what she was doing, but couldn't separate out the things that concerned me from those that might help. I tried to keep an open mind, but it was difficult. I did do deep breathing without visualizations and found this to be very beneficial. My seizures reduced in frequency and severity. I did not develop a good relationship with her as a counselor. The situation made me uncomfortable and proved to be more of a stressor than a help. I think that she saw her role to be partly that of a spiritual advisor. As an Orthodox Christian this was not ok with me. On a more practical level, she was not very supportive, and was not very helpful to me in an every day sort of way, although she may be to others. In the end I just had to call it off, and am glad I did. I do feel bad it didn't work out.