The Brain Balance Achievement Center, a franchise that opened in Mequon last summer, offers a program that it contends can help children overcome attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, Asperger's syndrome, Tourette syndrome, autism and other disorders.
The 12-week program - costing $6,000, plus roughly $125 to $500 in nutritional supplements - purportedly does this by addressing an imbalance between the right and left sides of the brain that it calls "functional disconnection syndrome."
The program is based on the contention that ADHD, dyslexia, autism and other disorders all result from this syndrome.
"That functional disconnection syndrome basically states in the literature that the two sides of the brain are not communicating effectively together due to the fact that one side of the brain is actually maturing at a faster rate than the other side," said Jeremy Fritz, a chiropractor and co-owner of the franchise.
The "literature" consists of one study of children with ADHD, co-authored by the program's founder, published in an obscure journal based in Tel Aviv, Israel.
There are no studies in respected, peer-reviewed journals that contend ADHD, dyslexia, autism and other disorders stem from the development of one side of the brain faster than the other.
"None of the neuro research would even come close to suggesting that," said Mina Dulcan, a professor at Northwestern University's Feinberg School of Medicine and the head of the child and adolescent psychiatry program at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago.