Being there for you for 20 years

For 20 years, our team has been supporting infants and children from 0-7 years of age on their way out of tube dependency, in early childhood trauma and parents after their child's time in the intensive care unit.
Me and my team have further developed the treatment of tube dependency in recent years and have been able to make it gentler for the child and the parents. We were able to successfully wean the children from the tube in 90% of the children examined in our studies. 

Our practice

Since September 2020, our practice has been located at Alfredstraße 167 in Essen Rüttenscheid. This allows us to offer you a place of therapy in a quiet and child-friendly environment. We see your child and their needs and you as parents as a therapy partner. If you are looking for the security of a therapy center, the experience from many years of practice, a flexible and lively therapy concept, then we look forward to welcoming you. 

What is tube dependency?

How can we treat something we don't know exactly what it is? Unfortunately, this is exactly what is true about tube dependency. Our knowledge of the tube dependency disorder is not as good as we would like it to be. It begins with the question: When is tube feeding no longer indicated? How do we separate psychological effects from medical ones? What behavior do children with tube dependency show? The most difficult question is: Which developmental mechanisms are behind a tube dependency? We have already investigated some of these questions and have scientifically evaluated and published the results. 

The therapy of tube dependency

Therapy for tube dependency is the area that interests most parents, therapists, and physicians. One of the most frequently asked questions is about the success rate of our therapy. At this point we can already report that our success rate is over 90%!

From the point of view of the therapist, however, further questions arise. What works in the therapy of tube dependency? Looking back on 20 years of experience and our work with tube-dependent children, this is the crucial question! We posit that tube feeding is merely a symptom of an underlying disorder, whether functional (e.g., a swallowing disorder), medical (e.g., extreme immaturity, a malformation, or metabolic disorder), or psychological (e.g., B. post-traumatic disorder, anxiety or turning off the child) nature. We want to know how children can find their way back to food and what it takes to get there. We are looking for the specific effective factors behind concepts such as therapeutic meals, parent-child therapy, parent-teacher meetings and other therapy modules, so that we can use them in a targeted approach.



Specialist publications

We are happy to pass on the knowledge that we have been able to gather during our practice. That is why our institute publishes what we have found out in our work in specialist journals and books.


Titelfoto by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

en_USEnglish