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Pn Nh | Fbu 2009Fbu 2009 | Pn Nh
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Few first impressions could rival
a10-year-old girl ripping the glove compartment out o her amily van and throwing it directly at Peter Scire.She ollowed this act with a t o biting, clawing, spit-ting and screaming, but none o it azed Scire, whoknew her story well. Diagnosed with a severe bi-polarcondition, AD/HD and OCD, Sarah was restrained bytwo seat belts every time she sat in the car because shewould hit her mother rom behind as she was driving;Plexiglass was placed over her bedroom windowbecause she tried to jump out o their two-story house;and the door on her 4-year-old sister’s room was pad-locked so that Sarah couldn’t torment her duringthe night. By the time Sarah and Scire parted ways,months later, they were the best o riends. Now, sheis mainstream and pharmacology ree. This is howSarah’s story ends and Scire’s story begins. 
Meeting Dr. Pete
Olive-skinned and athletically built, Scire introduceshimsel as “Dr. Pete” and immediately extends ariendly smile and a gentle handshake. Around him aretwo wooden balance beams, a climbing wall, a “Dance,Dance Revolution” game and a built-in wooden ver-sion o the monkey bars. It’s not your typical ocescene but then, Scire isn’t your typical doctor.“The rst thing I always tell parents and their kidsis to check your diagnosis at the door,’” said Scire,executive director o Brain Balance Achievement Cen-ters in Atlanta. “When parents enter our program, wewant to know does your child have a let-brain delayor a right-brain delay. What we really want to measureis unction.”Scire explained that many young kids diagnosedwith autism, AD/HD, dyslexia, learning disabilitiesand other childhood neurological disorders have Func-tional Disconnection Syndrome (FDS), a term reerringto the act that the two brain hemispheres are not insync. Typically, a child with a brain imbalance hasone hemisphere that is maturing at a aster rate andprocessing at a aster speed than the other. As the childdevelops, this imbalance becomes more signicant andthe two hemispheres can never ully unction as one.That is until now.As the only one o its kind designed to assess,document and quantiy FDS by extensively testingthe areas o sensory/motor skills, academics and bio-nutrition, The Brain Balance program has all butreversed this trend. Scire simply calls it “xing thedisconnect.”“Everything we do is to increase the processingspeed o that delayed hemisphere, so that it can catchup and synchronize and we do that through exercise.Let’s say i you walk on a balance beam a certain way
[ WritteN By HeatHer KW BroWN ]
Peter Scire Is Changing Lives,One Brain at a Time,For Children With Neurological Disorders
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Pn Nh | Fbu 2009
or i you do timing and rhythmexercises a certain way, you canactivate the weak hemisphere,”Scire said, describing how therequency o colors, or instance,“roy” (red, orange, yellow) willactivate the let hemisphere whilethe right side is activated by “biv”(blues, indigos and violets).“I I put light stimulation inthe let eye, it will activate theright hemisphere and vice versa;i I play specic types o musicin the let ear with certain typeso pitch and timbering becausethe right hemisphere is tied intoemotional circuitry, it can acti-vate the other side; same ortactile stimulation like brushinga eather on one arm verses theother,” he continued.While there certainly is agreat deal o science involved,Scire’s passion is personal whenit comes to recovering childrenwho, according to the countlessexperts and specialists that havediagnosed them, are labeled andlet looking or answers.He should know. He was one o these kids.
 About a Boy 
Bruce Lee once said, “The key to immortality is rstliving a lie worth living,” and Scire has been well onhis way to living up to this motto since he was 5 yearsold. When his mom ound him sobbing on his bed oneday and asked what was wrong, he said, “I must bereally special to be adopted and some day, I have to dosomething special to thank God or that.”Mere mention o his dad, Peter, who passed awayseven years ago, and his mom, Jeanette, causes Scireto pause. Adopted rom a Catholic mission in El Sal-vador, he has an incredible amount o appreciationor what they’ve done or him. “They had the rightsto me beore I was even born. They came down to ElSalvador when I was just a ew weeks old and tookme back to Long Island, N.Y,” he said. “I wouldn’t bewhere I am today i it wasn’t or them.”As a boy, Scire suered rom skin rashes andchronic breathing issues, both o which severely aectedhis development and ound him struggling to catch upacademically. His parents and teachers knew he wasn’tdeveloping along the normal curve but couldn’t pin-point exactly why. When a young Peter said he wasgoing to go trick or treating or ‘FECINU,’ instead o UNICEF, his mom nally got the answer.Diagnosed with an audio processing disorder anddyslexia, Scire was told by doctors that he would belucky to academically get past middle school and therewas little, i anything, his parents could do to reversetheir son’s condition. Unsatised with that response,his parents consulted with various alternative thera-pists who helped ormulate motor training exercises,combined with academic tutoring and bio-nutritionalprotocols, all o which they used or both he and hisnon-biological sister, Aimee, adopted rom the samemission in El Salvador two years later.“Ironically,” Scire admitted, “the tools my momused and the exercises we did [when I was young] arethe three pillars on which Brain Balance is based andthis was in the ’80s when there was no Internet, nosupport.”When asked about those early days, Scire’s momrelates to aternoons when her little boy would throwhis bags on the foor and scream, “I hate school” and“I’m stupid because I can’t read.” It was ater one suchepisode that she sat him on the bed with an easy readercalled “Pete the Parakeet,” covered up all o the wordsand slowly revealed one word at a time, one page ata time. “We did that once, then again and again andagain. He called everyone in the amily that night totell them he could read. I still have that book here atour house,” Jeanette said.Scire went rom receiving hours o special educa-tion classes through the th grade to being a studentenrolled in enrichment classes by the end o his sixthgrade year. He continued that success through juniorhigh and high school, where he was a scholar athleteall our years.“I’d have to say that graduating rom high school
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