Maxine Haller OTR/L
I have been an Occupational Therapist (OT) for thirty years now and it has been an incredible journey. Helping people heal through OT still gives me the biggest buzz of my life. OT is an ever expanding medical discipline. It has change, self assessment and creativity built into its DNA. This is because every person is unique, their challenges express themselves in many different ways and an OT has to work with their client to find innovative ways to help them meet these challenges. It’s this continuous push to improve, to work out new ways of doing things and, most importantly to achieve life changing results for my clients that makes my job so worthwhile. There is nothing that compares to being part of the journey that takes someone to exactly where they want to be. Along with the learning came a desire on my part to pass this knowledge on.
Our Approach
I completed training in several modalities so that I could reach more people with these extremely effective interventions. I developed a course for Lactation Consultants as a means of addressing the sensory-motor dysfunction as early as possible. I use my whole toolkit to best support therapists supporting children. To this end I have amalgamated a powerful set of the most effective body work therapies interwined with mental health interventions and made these available to therapists in a coherent form that is clinially useful.
I have a wealth of life experiences from providing developmental, perceptual training and school readiness to rural kids in South Africa to geriatric rehab in America. I had to put myself back together after superbugs (MRSE) left me in a coma days after the birth of my son, and mercury poisoning wiped out my brain function (both Wernickes and Broca's areas on the left). All of that, along with my day to day practice work has driven me to refine what I do. I can’t help it. I always have to find the most effective ways of intervening to enable people to reach their goals. Years of research on myself, my children and my clients/ patients led me to develop the Haller Method.
The Haller Method has proven to be so effective that I couldn’t keep the information to myself. Since 2014 I have lectured and taught the Haller Method across the USA and internationally. In 2017 I was invited to present my findings to a conference in Oxford, UK. See the video of the talk below.
This paper was published and can be seen here: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Foundations-for-Clinical-Neuroplasticity%3A-A-Model-Haller/84125b207a6d6d96a76e6662bed32e972a9cc03b#related-papers