Brandon Franklin returns to the podcast after a very long hiatus. You'll have to go back to Session 36 to hear his first appearance as a matter of fact.

It turns out that he's been doing a lot of innovative clinical work in that time. Currently, he is the Chief Behavior Analyst for the Lee Specialty Clinic and a Behavioral Consultant at Kramer Behavioral Health. In these roles, Brandon has implemented various interventions to help individuals with intellectual disabilities access routine medical and dental care.

If you're not familiar with this topic, it might sound pretty mundane, but as you'll hear, these populations really struggle to attend and participate in routine medical appointments, which, not surprisingly, has downstream negative health consequences. As such, interventions that improve on the current statistics can truly be considered life-saving.

In this podcast, we get into the following:

Common phobias associated with medical treatments.
Brandon's personal experience with aerophobia (the fear of flying), and what he did to improve it.
The basics of desensitization strategies.
How he and his team members use these strategies to improve the rate of successful medical appointment visits.
And finally, the research on this topic that he is doing for his dissertation.

Brandon has generously compiled a list of references, which you can find here. He's passionate about this topic and is willing to talk with anyone about it, so feel free to hit him up on LinkedIn.

Here's all of Brandon's contact info.
Here's all the desensitization resources you could ask for.

This podcast is brought to you by:

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The Profound Autism Summit. The Profound Autism Summit is a two-day conference taking place on April 10th and 11th in Boston, MA. Following on the massive success of the 2024 Summit, the 2025 event brings together leaders from the areas of research, medicine, treatment, advocacy, and education to discuss the needs and support of those with Profound Autism across disciplines and throughout the lifespan.
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Improving Access to Medical Care for Individuals with Intellectual Disabilities: Session 296 with Brandon Franklin

The Behavioral Observations Podcast with Matt Cicoria