Dr. Jolene Ross, founder and director of Advanced Neurotherapy, in Needham, began her work in this field as a practicing psychologist and concerned mother whose daughter was struggling in school. When a teacher told Ross to put her child on Ritalin for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), she objected.

 “I then noticed that there was someone in this area doing neurofeedback,” Ross recalls. “I brought my daughter to see him and, while it took a year before we saw improvement, she began getting good grades and doing really well.”

When that practitioner left the area, Ross and her husband started training with pioneering experts in the field of electroencephalogram (EEG), also known as neurofeedback, which monitors the electrical signal that comes from the brain and rewards improved electrical patterns for better functioning. After a year, she added it to her psychology practice.

Today, Ross and her team at Advanced Neurotherapy treat adults and children with ADD, Asperger’s syn- drome and other autism spectrum disorders, as well as those with epilepsy, learning disabilities, head and brain injuries, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, depression, anxiety, developmental delays, concussions and memory problems. They also work with athletes, executives and performers that want to operate at a level of peak achievement, and anyone that wants better brain functioning.

“We work with a very wide range of people, both in terms of age and presenting problems, goals and disorders,” Ross says. “With a very good, comprehensive EEG assessment, you can figure out what the brain is trying to tell you in terms of where disruptions are, and you can then correct them with neurotherapy.”

Treatments begin with a complimentary consultation and later an extensive intake to learn about a client’s history, current functioning and challenges. An EEG assessment is then done in the office to collect data from the person’s brain in a variety of states and to see how it handles different levels of demand.

“Our job is to do the sleuth work necessary to figure out what is going on neurologically,” says Ross. “We then do the corrective care by monitoring the brain’s electrical output to reward a mix of brainwaves that, based on our assessments and the person’s goals, are expected to improve a person’s functioning. If the brain does what we like, we reward it so it repeats those patterns.”

Ross says neurotherapy can reduce or eliminate the need for medications in some conditions, and improve functioning for most people. “We’ve had parents say, ‘You’ve changed the trajectory of our daughter’s life,’ or ‘You’ve given us back our son,’” she says. “We help people with epilepsy who can now work because of the treatment, and families who can now go out to restaurants because children are no longer out of control.”

Advanced Neurotherapy is located at 145 Rosemary St., Entrance J, Needham. To learn more, call 781-444-9115 or visit RetrainYourBrain.com.