How Much Would You Pay to Cure Your Kid’s Learning Disability?
Kylee Helmuth, 8, does a “snow angels” exercise as part of her Brain Balance program.
Photographer: Ilana Panich-Linsman for Bloomberg Businessweek
Robert Melillo, at 57, has an impressive head of mostly dark hair, a prodigious nose, a sleeve tattoo, and natural salesmanship. A chiropractor who specializes in an esoteric branch of the discipline called functional neurology, he treats patients with neurological and autoimmune disorders at his busy practice in New York City. Along with other conditions, Melillo believes he’s developed a cure for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and autism—although he wouldn’t use the word “cure.” Where establishment doctors see chronic disability, Melillo sees an imbalance in the brain, a lag in development and connectivity on one side or the other that can be, in his preferred term, “resolved.”
Melillo is the founder and guru behind the steadily expanding chain Brain Balance Achievement Centers, which allows him to share his ideas far beyond his Manhattan office. Through the centers, peppered across the country, he promises to help children who have recognized conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder, as well as harder-to-pin-down varieties of academic and social struggles, with a series of exercises he’s developed. A 12-week program of 36 hourlong sessions costs between $5,544 and $6,444, depending on the center, or from $154 to $179 per session.