An Interview with Mr. MEDEK Part II

The following article was published in the September issue of the Building Blocks magazine, a supplement to the Jewish Press.

Interview With MEDEK Founder Ramon Cuevas

By Perel Grossman

IS CME FOR EVERYONE?

“We have a 75% success rate,” explains Mr. Cuevas. ”This is not a miracle,” he warns, as not every child with motor issues will progress through CME. He is very forthright with parents who come to seek his help. He generally suggests an eight-week trial period with a new patient, by which time he hopes to help the child achieve three new functions. If he does not achieve these goals, he suggests that the parents seek other forms of help.

CME is not easy on the practitioner or the child. At the end of a CME session, both practitioner and child can be covered in sweat from the efforts and exertions. Yet the thrill of independence and the impact it has on the patient’s future is inestimable.

The typical program for a patient traveling to see Mr. Cuevas is a 24 session course of treatment, carried out in two weeks’ time. For the first twenty sessions, Mr. Cuevas pushes the child to the maximum of her potential at the time, and devotes the last four sessions to selecting simple therapies to teach the parents, and more difficult ones for a local therapist to carry out when they return to their homes. A video of the exercises is typically produced to help the parents in their new role. After a few months, the parents might bring the child back for more CME treatment, obtained directly from Mr. Cuevas.

While some parents travel to Chile for treatment, Mr. Cuevas does spend a few weeks each year in the New York/New Jersey area (particularly Monsey and Lakewood) and in Canada treating patients. Rumor has it that community rabbis in some of these areas had to decree that time slots be evenly apportioned, so as to meet the needs of the many frantic parents anxious to make sure their children were attended to.

SPREADING CME

Ramon has only 24 hours in his day, and can only be physically present in one location at a time. Therefore, he has embarked upon an ambitious plan to spread the practice of CME to others. He began instructing physical therapists, occupational therapists, and physicians in the implementation of his program.

In the year 2000, The Cuevas Medek Exercise Continuing Education Program was conceived to enhance the quality of CME teaching. The Cuevas Medek Exercises Therapy Continuing Education Program offers four levels of learning in four locations: New York, Montreal, Toronto, and Jerusalem.

WHAT’S HE REALLY LIKE?

You might think that someone as successful as Ramon Cuevas might consider himself to be a pretty fantastic guy- ambitious, money-hungry, and egotistical. Yet you’d be very wrong, because Mr. Cuevas believes he was inspired, and he attributes this inspiration to G-d.

He feels it is his mission to help children and that G-d gifted him with unusual dexterity and the discovery of a new method with which to achieve this goal.

He relates the following story:

On a Saturday in Antwerp, he used a copy machine in a local store and upon returning to his hotel room, discovered amongst his copies a rather strange sheet of paper. He recognized the letters as Hebrew, and asked a rabbi that he knew to interpret it for him. It turned out to be a copy of chapter 127 from Tehillim [Psalms]. He was most moved by the passage “Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of youth.”

Ramon feels that this was a message to him, depicting him as that warrior who launches his young patients like arrows, allowing them to move with new freedom and gain the mobility that they had never known before.

Not satisfied with all of the aforementioned activities that fill his life, Mr. Cuevas just produced his first English language book, a CME manual that offers an understanding of CME therapy, devoting for the first time a great deal of space to its genesis, theory, cases and exercise practice.

The author insists that the book is not a commercial effort, but written purely with the intention of promoting his techniques to benefit the children. “I have everything,” he assures me with a grateful smile, “I have a wife and four children.”

And, indeed, for Ramon Cuevas, it is all about the children.

Ramon Cuevas developed the CME approach (formerly MEDEK) in the early 1970’s. He has more than thirty five years of experience in the treatment of children with neurological and musculoskeletal dysfunction. Cuevas teaches students and professionals around the world and has participated in conferences in South America and USA. He can be reached at (56-2) 4265334, (56-2) 4329050 or by e-mail: cme@cuevasmedek.com. Visit his website at www.cuevasmedek.com