Susan R. Johnson, MD, FAAP

I am a Behavioral and Developmental Pediatrician in private practice in Colfax, California. I completed my 3-year pediatric residency at Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago and a 3-year fellowship in behavioral and developmental Pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco in 1990. During my fellowship years, I directed the Early Childhood Clinic at UCSF and diagnosed children with Autism, PPD, Asperger Syndrome, and ADD. I had extensive rotations managing children in Behavior clinic, School-age clinic, Disability clinic and identifying learning "disabilities" during week long comperhensive learning assessments. I had rotations in numerous clinics at UCSF including genetics, neurology, developmental disabilities, audiology, endocrinology etc. I also sat in on speech and language assessments and psychoeducational assessments that were done on the children that I assessed, and I attended their IEP meetings at their school. I spent a year rotating in child psychiatry and serving on the psych-liaison service taking call with the other child psychiatric residents. I spent 3 years doing supervised family therapy, child therapy, and sand tray therapy.

After my fellowship, I continued to work at UCSF and I worked for 7 years with the San Francisco Unified School District as their Physician Director at their School Health Center seeing all the children from preschool through 8th grade that were having difficulties with behavior and learning in school.

After the birth of my son, I spent 3 years becoming a certified Waldorf Teacher and an additional year training in sensory-motor integration at Rudolf Steiner College with Ingun Schneider. I have also participated in week long workshops with Carla Hanaford, PhD (with Brain Gym), and Judith Bluestone, PhD (with the HANDLE Institute), and I completed the 9 day International Training in Non-Violent communication with Marshall Rosenberg. This is in addition to my training in Switzerland in Anthroposophical Medicine.

My experiences have taught me that children with auditory processing problems need movement therapies that strengthen their Vestibular/balance system. Children who have difficulties with visual processing/visual memory that impact reading, writing, spelling, and mathematics, need movement therapies that strengthen proprioception or their sense of movement. There are also nutritional recommendations and modifications in the home and school environments that can decrease the overstimulation of the child's sympathetic nervous system and promote integration of their neural pathways.

Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.