My daughter has had a regular OT eval and therapy from Children's Hospital. It was helpful in some ways but not $120 a week and 2 hours in the car helpful in my opinion. I took what I could from it and tried to continue it at home. That was several months ago and she's pretty much mastered everything we took with us to practice. Children's Hospital will require a reevaluation if we go back to them, but like I said I wasn't real excited about their program, they would never even give me a copy of my daughter's evaluation or her goals even though I asked repeatedly. There is another place we could go to, they could do an evaluation along with the SIPT (Sensory Integration Praxis Test) but wow expensive, another $400 on top of the $300 for the regular evaluation. Just wondering if anyone else has had it if it's a worthwhile thing to save up money for.
Angela, this is what I learned about the SIPT. All that does is provide a "diagnosis" for SPD. What does that do? Not much in my opinion. The problem is that the diagnosis isn't really recognized by many insurance carriers or in some schools as a legitimate, medical condition. They kind of look at it like they used to view chiropractic medicine years ago -- somewhat "quack" science (this is my view anyway). What I was told is that the standard "evaluation" which determines if there are sensory issues is really all that is required to start treatment. The first place I took my son was All Children's Sertoma in Lecanto, FL, right near my house. I was so excited because they were close, and we're in a small town, so we usually have to drive pretty far for specialized anything. Well, we got the evaluation, and we got the limited therapy approved by the insurance carrier (Therapist asked for 2-1 hours sessions per week and they approved 1 - 30 min session per week). In any case, the therapist was just out of school and although it was clear she WANTED to help, she was proven pretty ineffective. The place that I found that made a difference was called OT4Kids. What I loved was the the OT Therapist I spoke to spent a lot of time just explaining the disorder to me in a way that I could understand. I liked that she said, "we know what is wrong with your child, we treat children like him all the time, we see improvement and we can help." THAT is what anyone in this situation wants to hear. Of course, they were not covered under my insurance, so I agreed to pay out of pocket. They allowed us to set up a payment plan, it was $150 for the new evaluation (which is only good for about 6 months so our previous one was expired). Then she reduced her hourly sessions from $100 to $80 per hour. I only spent 2 hours so far in the office, soaking up everything she could teach me, and she instructed me on how to proceed at home. We bought the brushes, and saw little improvement, but not enough to get us out of our desperate situation. My son was missing too much school, and we were desperate to get him to be able to put on shoes and socks every day. The therapist indicated if we wanted to speed things up, we could purchase a Jeanie Variable Speed Massager ($165). We just had it delivered a couple days ago. Wow. The thing is very powerful and it seems to be working. She provided me with a copy of the evaluation with no questions asked, and wanted me to provide it to his school so they could help in the ways that were suggested in the report. My suggestion to you would be to not be concerned with the SIPT unless for some reason you need your child to be officially diagnosed. Most places will accept the sensory evaluation as proof that there are issues. I would also suggest that you google, break out the phone book, call every place and any place that you can find that offers OT treatment for SPD kids, and the one that stands out as they did for me and assures you they can help, offers you information and explanations you can understand -- that is where you want to take your child. Face it, if you really love what you do, you want to help people, and the ones that know what they are doing, will stand apart from the ones who may even WANT to help, but just don't have the experience to know how. I don't think book-smarts makes a good OT therapist for SPD. I think the ones who've worked with more kids and have more hands on experience, really are the ones that learn how to make a difference.