Claudie Gordon-Pomares

Claudie Gordon-Pomares, developer of Multisensory Therapy

I started implementing Multisensory Therapy in a study with typical children from three months to three years of age in a French Government daycare in 1991, Creche des Orchamps, Besançon, under the supervision of the Faculty of Medicine of Besançon. The results on the developmental patterns were so amazing that I repeated the study in a second daycare.

We observed that babies and young children exposed to very simple sensory protocols developed in a slightly different manner. They were interested in new foods and increased in appetite, they slept more and better, they had a great motor development, were empathic at a very young age, contradictory to what traditional education on child development states. Those children spoke earlier and in a more complex and independent manner.

At the same time on the second study, I started implementing Multisensory Therapy with infants in NICU and neurology unit at the Paris Hospital for Sick Children in the team of Dr Abadie PhD.

Those various studies led to crucial findings such as the essential impact of the sense of smell on development, breathing and feeding.

I also used the fragrance we now call Tantrum911, a strawberry base aroma, to help infants with brain injury and genetic defects on enteral feeding and tracheostomy to calm down when they were having severe fits. Those children cannot be cuddled , as you know, as many infants in NICU, tied up to tubes and monitors. I would bring the scent to their thracheostomy, or to their nose and they would stop crying in seconds. This simple protocol was also used to promote sucking  in very small babies.

I studied the impact of the sense of smell in infants which led to the creation of the first test of the capacity to smell in infants (and seniors having lost the capacity to speak). This has been published in the peer review Journal “Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrics”.

During this study, I discovered that the aroma of strawberry, placed by the nose of the infant less than 28 days old, some being hours old, would induce suction. All the babies started sucking motion seconds after starting to smell. We experimented with other aromas, but only the aroma of strawberry had this impact which of course is fundamental when working with very small and weak babies.

Only last year was the explanation of this amazing neurological response to the strawberry aroma explained by the work of the University of San Diego using functional MRI.

http://www.dnatube.com/video/1363/Function-MRI

Their conclusions were that smelling strawberry sets activation of the amygdala, limbic system, pre frontal cortex, besides promoting increase of production of Dopamine, as demonstrated by Leon ’(1997) Dopamine controls movement, motivation, sense of pleasure, memory, immune system.

This intense work on child development led me to write thee books in French and one in English and participate in many professional journals such as Pediatrics, Journal of Occupational Therapy, Journal of Speech Therapy, etc. I also created a school for Parents and a Training program for daycare professionals. In Canada I obtained an government-sponsored award for a course on early diagnosis of mental disorder to the attention of parents.

I am a strong advocate of intervention in the first hours of life to help the infant develop grow and feed properly. I am an advocate of parents education on early intervention and the validation of their rights and expertise when it comes to their infant.

I have made connections with scientists who published on the impact of soft touch on the production of serotonin in the brain, and the need to have an organized intervention when the infant is separated from his mother at birth.

Many research centres have published on the importance of touch for premature babies, but little has been done to make specific protocols systematic, mainly for lack of training to the nursing staff or the families.

Some hospitals are implementing touch protocols, but no hospital except the Paris Hospital for Sick Children is implementing smell protocols.

The training of families and organizations is necessary and can be done, so it must be done.

I am extremely keen on transferring as much information as possible to the parents and organizations who help them, as much of this information seems locked into Universities and scientific journals which are hard to access.

I hope this brief presentation will allow us to connect and discuss further on the future of education and implementation of multi sensory practices with premature babies.