A child passes a hearing test but can't follow spoken instructions, especially with background noise.

The reframe that flips the standard workup. The child passes the audiologist's test because CN VIII, the inner-ear nerve, is fine — the failure is upstream, in the middle-ear muscles that extract the human voice from background noise. "The question should be: can the child hear the human voice in the presence of background noise? Does the child have the ability to filter out background sounds, especially low-frequency sounds?" A child who "won't listen" may literally not be receiving the message. His clinical claim, from his own cases — including patients re-evaluated as no longer autistic after treatment, a claim he himself says to handle carefully.