Nestled into a quiet hillside in Chardon, Ohio is a terra cotta colored building surrounded by trees full of orange and yellow autumn leaves. Bubbled domes of clear plexiglass form skylights that dot the building's wide, sloping roof and water from an earlier day's rain trickles from the downspouts, providing a soothing, almost Zen-like tranquility.
This is the Dolan Center for Memory and Aging, a full-time residential care facility for patients suffering form Alzheimer's disease.
Hannah: Well, are we ready?
Peter: I'll be right there mom, I'll be right there.
Peter Pogacar's mom Johanna has been here for two years, but two weeks ago she began participating in a somewhat unconventional therapy meant to stimulate her primary senses and calm the confusion in her brain. It's a form of multi-sensory immersion that takes place in a special room full of colored lights, and an array of textures, sounds and smells.
Peter Pogacar: Mom likes the music in here but she really concentrates on this the most. (points to the bubble tower)
Johanna, who since her disease insists on being called Hannah, is staring intently at something that looks a little like a giant lava-lamp. The five-foot-tall column of colored liquid contains bubbles that rise from the bottom to the top. Hannah holds a controller on her lap with large multi-colored buttons. By pressing them she can alter the color of the lights and the speed of the bubbles.
Peter Pogacar: She's very interested in the changing colors and it seems to relax her and she just concentrates more on it and stuff.
Peter: Why don't you hit that one a couple times in a row - the orange one and see what happens.
The therapy was developed in the Netherlands in the 1970's and was given the name Snoezelen, a combination of two Dutch words Snuffelen -- to sniff or explore -- and doezelen, to relax. It's based on the idea that neuropsychiatric symptoms like anxiety and agitation may result from periods of sensory deprivation. Snoezelen was originally used for autistic children, but quickly became accepted therapy in Europe for a variety of other disabilities including brain injury and Alzheimer's dementia. And while the concept may seem a little bit goofy, Psychologist Lori Stevic-Rust says it works.
Lori Stevic-Rust: We've seen a real reduction in agitation and our use of medicines for agitation. By simply bringing people into the Snoezelen room at certain times of the day when we know they tend to be more agitated -- they tend to be more restless -- they seem to quiet an calm and we can get them back into a regular routine.
The Snoezelen room in the Dolan Center used to be a TV room with stark-white walls and generic furniture, but Dr. Stevic-Rust had the room painted blue. She covered the skylight with soft white fabric patterned with stars, and hung artificial butterflies from the ceiling that flutter in the breeze of a nearby fan.
The room has a sound system that can be used to play music or sounds of nature and a color wheel that can project images onto the walls of things like clouds, or fireworks bursting in air. It also has a potted tree full of stuffed birds that chirp, fiber-optic lights, and of course, Hannah's favorite -- the bubble tower. The one thing that all the objects have in common is that residents can explore them freely using their senses, without having to communicate verbally, and for Dr. Stevic-Rust, that's the key to the therapy's success.
Lori Stevic-Rust: If you can imagine not being able to communicate your needs, your wants, and not being able to understand what others are saying to you, you really are trapped, but when you think about our senses, that's something that we just experience, we don't really have to understand it, we don't have to make sense of it, you can just experience it. And I think that's why Snoezelen really works - it's non-threatening, it's non-verbal, and the residents can really just experience it for the relaxation component.
Snoezelen is fairly new to the United States and Stevic-Rust says the Dolan Center is one of the few facilities in the country doing research on it. Numerous papers have been published about multi-sensory therapy, but the consensus is that the studies are poorly designed, include too few patients, and as a whole, don't demonstrate any conclusive long-term benefit. Additionally, the fact that Snoezelen is a registered trademark of Rompa International, a company that sells the specialized equipment for the rooms, has generated a few skeptics. Whether Snoezelen should be considered a real therapy, or simply a relaxing activity for cognitively challenged patients remains to be seen, but to Peter Pogicar it doesn't make much difference.
Peter Pogacar: I only consider this to be an added bonus. It could only help her it can't hurt her. That's my attitude towards it. Anything that can help her fulfill her days is fine by me.
But for Dr. Stevic-Rust, research on the benefits of Snoezelen is one of her goals. She plans to collect data on agitation, and medication use in patients who use the Snoezelen room over time.
Gretchen Cuda, 90.3.