12 year old Adam Liveston is helping the future of TS

Posted Tue 9th Apr 2019 at 11:49
by Adam Liveston

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Orbit Research Trial participant, Adam, reveals his success story following a 10-week program.

I started the orbit trial in November 2018. The ORBIT trial is an online 10-week program to help children like me with Tourette syndrome (or TS) to control their tics. A tic is a sudden sound or movement that is involuntary. Tics involving physical movement are called motor tics and tics involving sound are called vocal tics. It helps people like me control these at home and away using techniques that we are given.

I have now completed the orbit trial and I have learnt a lot. Firstly, I have learnt to be more open about tics, and secondly, I have learnt techniques that will never leave me that will help me control tics wherever I go: whether that be school, in public or at home.

This has helped me in exams, assemblies and in sport especially. The improvement is obvious since, in a P.E. lesson, there was a task to stay still for as long as possible and, using the techniques, I lasted to the top five which would have been impossible before!

I only had to go to see the people doing the trial once at the start, in person – the rest was via internet. Whilst on the trial, I had to work through the stages given out weekly which took about 15 minutes each time. I then needed to practice the techniques for 15 minutes every day and regularly feedback to the therapist about my progress and any questions or worries. It took commitment to stick to it but it was well worth it. Now I can suppress about half of the tics I would have done before learning this and I use the techniques several times every day. At the end of the 10 weeks, I did a final interview (by phone) on the same questions from the start, this is to allow the researchers to assess how effective the treatment has been.

Thank you for reading this blog. I would recommend the Orbit study to anyone struggling to suppress tics.

To find out more about the ORBIT research trial, please click here.

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