The recent comments on Face Book present the Posit products for treating brain injuries.

Maybe you need to get a few phrases into your lexicon such as : Posit Science’s products have helped some TBI subjects reduce the level or intensity of their symptoms. This statement would also keep you clear of the FDA.

Your TBI pages imply that your products have been researched and found helpful with TBI. Most will not read any further than the Proven-in-labs/TBI page. They will not read the abstracts to see that you have not studied your products as treatment for TBI.

You continue to use anecdotal claims to validate statements that are simply beyond substantiation.

Do your products help? Yes, of course. Any effort to exercise the brain will work toward rehabbing an injured brain. I get more benefit from playing Free Cell on a Dell PDA that I get trying to use your software. In its current configuration, it is too frustrating and confusing. Your software could be easily adapted to be much more helpful to the TBI subject. It would not need changes to the core functions that were studied clinically.

Keep in mind that there are two distinctly different uses for brain training. You primary market is delaying age related decline. Think of this as maintenance work.

Then there is the repair or rebuild work needed by the TBI subject. It takes different a approach to cause the rewiring around damaged brain cells or re-awakening dormant brain cells. Ryan Reitmeyer likely did both. He re-awoke the global brain cells that were dormant from his coma. He also had to rewire around the damaged areas that were removed. I have a good understanding of the capabilities and limits of brain plasticity.

I may have visual and auditory short and immediate term memory skills and processing speed in the bottom 10 to 20 percentile but my intelligence is still in the top 10 percent with some areas above the 99th percentile.

btw, I know people who have had hemisphere-ectomies and lobe-ectomies and appear fully functional. Most observers would never guess they even have any brain dysfunction. Personally, they know what their limits are.

You say “A full recovery is never possible.” We have met dozens of people who have suffered TBIs who would disagree strongly with you on that point. With TBI or other brain conditions, each person’s situation and injury is unique, and follows its own path towards some level of recovery. Of course, there are multiple factors at play in each unique situation.

It appears that you intend to forge ahead for the TBI market without any effort to accommodate the TBI/mTBI/PCS communities needs. Ryan Reitmeyer may have had some success with your products but he had a therapist working with him at his side.
His neuro-psych’s claim that Ryan is back to 90% appears to be bogus. I would like to see the WAIS and Wechsler scores, etc that show such an achievement.
I have plenty of TBI friends with similar achievements as Ryan long before Posit Science. The key factor is family support and consistent effort on all sides.
I agree that your programs are beneficial but you are overstating their value and refuse to try to better understand the individual needs of the mTBI/PCS community.
On the TBI page under “Is There A Cure”, second paragraph, you state “The goal of cognitive rehabilitation is to help TBI patients recover to the extent possible given their specific injury. In some cases, a full recovery is possible. ”

A full recovery is never possible. The full recoveries mentioned anecdotally are ‘relative recoveries,’ not full recoveries. This one bit of misinformation causes so much stress in the mTBI/PCS community because it causes subject excessive anxiety about when they will get their old life back.

When is Dr Merzenich going to open his eyes and recognize the truth. He is grossly overstating the science.

You need to differentiate between those who recover from an extended coma with great loss of motor and cognitive function who regain some level of most or all of the lost skill sets and those with only cognitive losses who are anxious to get their old self back.

You continue to repeat that same biases most neuro-psychs say to their patients.

btw, Ryan’s injury appears to be a mainly focal injury than a diffuse injury. The recovery process is much different. The brain’s plasticity around a focal injury can achieve immense improvement. The global and diffuse injury is a different story. Much of the focal injury leading to coma is a matter of waking up dormant brain cells that went dormant to allow the brain to survive at minimal levels as a protective mode.

Please address this differential as you promote your products.

AAA of Southern New England is getting copies of the software out to the local libraries in Massachusetts. I’ll send you an email with contact information so you can get in touch with them.

Thanks,
Steven

The modifications to accommodate the PCS community are very minor. They would not alter the application of your programs as they are tied back to the original clinical research.

Focusing on the PCS community will enable you to avoid the broad variety of “TBI” conditions.

As an aside, I do not see that much differential between the TBI community and the PCS community. We both struggle with similar ADL’s. The cognitive struggles are vastly similar. The TBI community may also have motor functions defecits.

The brain injured community is desperate for anything that helps. The word of mouth promotion that will come from this community will greatly exceed the WoM promotion of the health brain community. A large segment of the brain injured community is in the educational ages. These subjects are still looking forward to completing their education but struggle with cognitive rehab.
ImPACT Testing and CNS Vital Signs are making great inroads to the school age Post Concussion Syndrome subjects. This same avenue will greatly benefit the revenue of Posit. Unfortunately, the newly concussed brain that does not spontaneously recover will struggle to use the Posit programs. This group struggles to maintain any level of complicated processes.

I am going in circles here. My own PCS brain struggles to communicate effectively sometimes. Maybe a private email dialogue would be better.

Thanks for your note (and for being a customer of Intuit … I still have a soft spot in my heart for them).

The published studies on TBI with our technology are assessments. You take one more step and tie the fact that we can improve Useful Field of View through training with our InSight and DriveSharp programs to the performance of UFOV in assessing TBI and make the conclusion that training with those products might be helpful for some people with TBI. We have customer testimonials from TBI patients, so of which you can see on our website at http://www.positscience.com/testimonials/all-stories?tid=14&field_program_value_many_to_one=All

I welcome your more specific feedback on the programs and how they could be more useful for you. As you found from your feedback to Intuit, that feedback does not always lead to changes in the program.

On your last point, I can tell you that all of the employees at Posit care deeply about the impact we have on customers. We are building a business that we are proud of, that customers tell others about and creates revenue and growth so we can invest further in research and new product development.

Thanks,
Steven

As an entrepreneur, I have always been successful when my first priority was to meet the customers needs. It appears to me that Posit Science is more focused on getting to IPO status that providing the best for their customers.

My best to you,
Mark Glines