Mel Levine, Pediatrician and "Demystification"

NPR's Margot Adler did an interesting story about Mel Levine, M.D., director of the University of North Carolina's Clinical Center for the Study of Development and learning, and a co-founder of All Kinds of Minds, an organization that analyzes learning differences. He talks like my kind of pediatrician.

He doesn't look for root causes for learning or developmental problems, saying that's a waste of time because you'll never know for sure what the cause was and you probably can't do anything about it anyway. Instead, he uses a process he calls "demystification" to work with a child on all their strengths and weaknesses. Once you put a label on a person's weaknesses, he says, it becomes much easier to find solutions.

For example, he might take an unruly student and find that they suffer from "sequencing problems", so he'll work with him/her to show how the problem affects them and some things they can do about it.

60 MInutes did a profile of him as well.